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Salon.com: “I’m A Blue Guy In A Red State”: John Mellencamp And The Search For An American Soul
06.17.2017 - “I’m a blue guy in a red state”: John Mellencamp and the search for an
American soul
As night comes to America, I visit John Mellencamp in his Indiana studio, where
the art of tragedy and triumph rule
BY DAVID MASCIOTRA -
Salon
"I'm a blue guy in a red state": John Mellencamp and the search for an
American soul
John Mellencamp (Credit: Marc Houser)
If you take the exit for the right rural route in Indiana, you will drive
through hills of lush green on narrow backwoods roads. You and your vehicle will
fall on the mercy of the wilderness. The cell phone will have no signal, and the
road will be too narrow to accommodate two automobiles. You will pass miniature
white churches, including one that proudly advertises itself as a home for
Pentecostals. Just one hundred yards of dirt, grass and gravel separate speaking
in tongues from the “Barn Dance” — a massive red edifice where country music
blasts through the speakers every weekend, and the locals scuff the floors and
wear down the heels of their cowboy boots. You will see a lawnmower repair shop
with Coca-Cola machines propped against the wall near the front door. Then, with
the correct navigation, you will find an unassuming, small green house where one
of America’s greatest songwriters has created a life’s work of music — music to
accompany the search for an American soul — since 1983.
“I have this studio, because I used to get into fights with other musicians
when we worked out of the big studios in New York or LA,” John Mellencamp told
me with a sardonic laugh.
When my own amusement prompted him to elaborate, he said, “Oh yeah — one of
the guys from the Cars. I got into a bad one with another guy from Man-O-War.
What was his name? He’s dead now.”
Mellencamp once attributed his uncanny ability to capture the reality of
America’s triumphant and tragic struggle to achieve the beauty of democratic and
egalitarian promise in the midst of painful, even fatal failures to simply
looking out his window. “Small Town,” a magnificent celebration of communal
bonds of solidarity and empathy with an alt-country meets rock ‘n’ roll rhythm,
is such an act of musical observation, but so is “Ghost Towns Along the
Highway,” a 2007 lament of funereal rock for villages like the one of
Mellencamp’s origin — Seymour, Indiana — that were once prosperous but now hang
over the edge of oblivion. “I just looked out my window, and wrote what I saw,”
he said.
Outside the window of Mellencamp’s Nashville recording studio — that’s
Nashville, Indiana — you will see the majesty and rarity of undeveloped America,
and you will also see people who, for those who have spent their lives in nearby
Indianapolis or Chicago, exist only on the large screens of movie theaters or in
the dusty pages of novels. When I was less than two miles from Mellencamp’s
recording studio, and driving slow through the twists and turns of the Indiana
forest, I passed a ramshackle home with a large, bearded man sitting on the
front porch reading the Bible. He waved to me. I waved back, and just a moment
later found myself pulling into the driveway of the Belmont Mall, where I could
hear one of the world’s best bands running through a fiery rendition of “Rain on
the Scarecrow,” Mellencamp’s enraged and mournful reaction to the corporate
pulverization of the family farmer.
Unsure where to go or what to do, I wandered around the driveway. The band
could see me from the window of the rehearsal space, which is little more than a
finely renovated and converted garage. After 40 years in music — making hits and
selling out arenas — Mellencamp still has a garage band. My presence did not
matter, as the musicians, without Mellencamp, had surrendered themselves
entirely to the energy of their performance. A beautiful woman with thick brown
hair splashed with streaks of grey, wearing black leggings and tennis shoes,
emerged out of the garage to welcome me to the property. She introduced herself,
unaware that I recognized her at first glance.
“Hi, I’m Carlene. Can I help you?”
It was Carlene Carter, the prolific songwriter and tender singer who grew up
with her mother, June Carter, and Johnny Cash. Carter plays such a prominent and
powerful role on Mellencamp’s new record, “Sad Clowns and Hillbillies,” that
across its front cover, underneath a painting by Mellencamp’s own hand, the text
reads, “John Mellencamp featuring Carlene Carter.”
The new record continues Mellencamp’s unfathomable and largely
underappreciated sequence of great albums. “Sad Clowns and Hillbillies,” with
its combination of spooky blues, rollicking gospel, ribald rock ‘n’ roll, and
country as melancholic as it is melodic, addresses subjects ranging from
romantic love to Black Lives Matter; from stolen moments of joy to self-hatred.
“It all came together in about 90 seconds,” Carter told me as we waited for
Mellencamp, who was making the short drive to the recording studio from his home
in neighboring Bloomington. “We were on tour together, and while his band played
an instrumental break, he leaned over and said, ‘Let’s make a record together.’
I said, ‘yes,’ and the next day we started writing.”
When I complimented “Indigo Sunset,” a stunningly beautiful tribute to lost
love, Carter laughed. “I had that in my back pocket for years, but I knew it
needed one big change. John did it in two minutes.” Her bond with Mellencamp —
both as creative collaborators and friends — was instant, and so reminiscent of
the mysterious chemistry of human connection, that Carter confesses it makes her
think about the possibility of “divine order.” She asked if I was thirsty,
handed me a cold can of root beer, and then went outside to check if “John is
here.”
Mellencamp’s workspace is full of art books, hardback collections of prints
with pencil-sketched notes in the margins. A framed photo of the Beatles hangs
on the wall, while on an easel next to a large glass ashtray is a framed,
handwritten letter from Barack Obama. In the bathroom, a poster from a Bridge
School Benefit show featuring Mellencamp as co-headliner bears the signature of
Neil Young. As I studied various souvenirs of excellence, artistry and
accomplishment, I thought back to when I was a 13-year-old boy and I first heard
the song “Hurts So Good” playing from a cassette boombox belonging to my
friend’s older brother. In that moment, my lifelong love affair with rock ‘n’
roll began, but more important, I also made an entrance into the world of
creativity, ideas and writing. The hormonally raging adolescent, even for all of
his naïveté and idealism, would not have imagined sitting in Mellencamp’s studio
sipping root beer with Carlene Carter, while listening to “American Fool” or
“Scarecrow” and following along with the lyrics in the liner notes. The dialogic
power of art, much like the magic of friendship, is a process of mysterious
origin and effect.
“John, this is David. David, this is John,” Carter said when they walked into
the room together. Mellencamp appeared just as I imagined he would — cigarette
burning between his tattooed fingers, hair coiffed into an impossible pompadour
like Elvis’. “It’s a good book,” Mellencamp said casually. I assumed he meant
the book I wrote about his music, and before I could finish expressing how much
such a simple compliment is an honor to me, Mellencamp started walking toward
the soundboard. “Let’s do it over here.”
“What do you got, 20 minutes?” he asked while he crushed his cigarette. “How
ever long you want,” I answered back. “Oh, good, we’re done then.” He laughed as
he explained that he “hates interviews” — “I’m bored talking about myself.”
“Well, I’ll try not to make it feel too much like torture.”
“Don’t worry about it. I bitch about everything.”
Mellencamp’s cantankerous character has earned him a reputation. Once he
admitted that he has two moods: “OK and pissed off.” When he sat across from me
at the soundboard of his studio, he seemed to oscillate between the two states
of mind. His visible irritation with much of what he discussed and derided never
seemed like bitterness. He gives the impression that he is at ease with himself
and at peace with his life, but that even at the age of 65, he maintains the
anger that animated his chart-topping confession, “I fight authority / Authority
always wins.”
The less romantic line of that lyric assumes perpetual defeat for the rebel.
While Mellencamp is still as pugilistic as a heavyweight with his eyes on the
prize, he seems resigned to the limits American culture places on authentic and
artistic expression.
“I think we’ve gone through a cultural change,” Mellencamp observed. “What I
do, and especially guys and gals around my age — we like to think it has some
importance, but it probably does not. Rock music and folk music no longer seem
to have much value or influence. That’s why I laugh when I hear musicians talk
about playing for their legacy. What the fuck are you talking about? There’s no
legacy. None of us will be remembered. Maybe people will remember Frank Sinatra,
Elvis, Chuck Berry, maybe even Dylan. That’s about it.”
He then shared with me a recent text message he sent to his 35-year-old
daughter with a jocular reference to Roy Rogers. She had no familiarity with the
legendary singer and actor. “You look at people who have died in music, and you
see how the family and the record company partner to sell everything off for the
maximum amount of money. They don’t give a shit about it. They just want the
money,” Mellencamp explained, and as “distasteful” as he finds it, he does view
the liquidation of the music business and traditional radio as part of the
steady erosion of cultural infrastructure in the United States.
One musical innovation for which Mellencamp receives insufficient credit is
the use of traditional instrumentation in rock ‘n’ roll to create a hybrid of
folk, country, gospel and rock. In the late 1980s, Mellencamp scored major hits
with songs featuring violin, banjo, accordion and dobro — long before Americana
became as popular a genre as it is now. When I asked him if he feels he should
garner more praise for his influence, he shrugged the question off. “Maybe,
maybe not.”
“For me, it was the most natural thing in the world. I was singing in bar
bands since I was 15, and playing soul music and rock music, but also, around
the same time, I started singing folk songs, and with just my guitar I’d play
some hotel or lounge. Back then, you could turn on the radio, and on the same
station you could hear a rock song, a soul song, a folk song. So, for me it’s
all always just been music.”
There is an unbreachable distance between the organic process of creativity
Mellencamp describes, whether in his youth listening to the diversity of
American music on the radio and trying to replicate it on a small Indiana stage,
or now spending nine hours in his painting studio, and the hawking, marketing
and packaging of the product. Mellencamp finds “liberating” the recognition that
legacy is an illusion and that importance is elusive.
“I don’t even think about it any longer,” Mellencamp said. “Unless someone
like you asks me a question, it doesn’t even occur to me. It doesn’t concern me
how I’ll be remembered, because I’ll be dead.”
“That’s why in the ’90s,” Mellencamp continued, “I began working less. I
found myself becoming the guy I always despised. I was competitive, and driven
by the wrong ideas — ‘Did we sell 30,000 tickets?’ ‘Why isn’t my new single
charting higher?’ — I had to break out of that mindset, even though it is a
really American mindset.”
Emancipated from the careerist cell of his own mind’s making, and liberated
to live permanently on the emotional edge of invention, Mellencamp’s motivation
is now much simpler. “I try to live the life of an artist, which means that I
work on creating something every day. Today, before I came here, I was painting.
There is a certain magic that happens some nights on stage, but I’d rather be
home painting than in some fucking shed.”
“Would you still write songs?” I ask, and without hesitation, Mellencamp
answers in the affirmative. “Writing songs is the best part of the musical
process, and because I have the studio, I can record them. To put them out, now,
is different. I think of my records simply as postcards. Unless you’re Adele or
some pop phenomenon, the idea that you are going to sell records is laughable.
But the postcards tell people, ‘I’m not sitting on my spine worrying about
playing ‘Hand to Hold Onto” or ‘Hurts So Good.’”
The difference between the brash, young and green John Cougar who wrote those
hits in the early 1980s, and John Mellencamp, who compiles musical postcards, is
the difference between obligation and inspiration. “It was hard for me then,
because it had never dawned on me that I would write songs. I knew I would sing
songs, but I never thought about writing them. I don’t even have an approach
now. I’m very lucky. The songs just come to me. I’m open creatively to ideas
about paintings and songs. When you have that communication with creation, shit
comes to you. I cannot explain it, but it happens. There is a song on the new
record, ‘Easy Target,’ that I could not write fast enough. It presented itself
to me in full form.”
“Black lives matter / Who we trying to kid?” Mellencamp sings in his
chilled-to-the-bone ballad of American exploitation, “Easy Target.” “Don’t
matter / Never did / Crosses burning / Such a long time ago / 400 years and we
still don’t let it go.”
Rare for most white men in their 60s, Mellencamp has spent a lifetime
chronicling the violence of racism and white supremacy. “Easy Target,” like an
additional chapter in a trauma narrative, perfectly complements the Mellencamp
songs, “Pink Houses,” “Peaceful World” and “Jim Crow.”
“My great-great grandmother was black,” Mellencamp said. “When I was a
teenager I was in an integrated band called Crepe Soul. We played the Salem
Speedway, and in bars throughout Indiana. I was not naïve about the race
problems, but it was shocking for me to see, as a kid, how in one second the
audience was singing along and cheering on our black singer, and then 20 minutes
later they were calling him names and getting into fist fights.”
Performing at small racetracks in Indiana, and continuing to live in a
provincial village in the Midwest, not only provides Mellencamp with a treasure
trove of material for his muse to inspect before she knocks on the walls of
mind, but it also places him in the center of what many conservative
commentators have mythologized as the “real America.” Success and failure; good
and evil stand side by side on the rural route, just as Mellencamp has
artistically illustrated throughout his career. It is the home of kindhearted,
hospitable people who seek only quiet lives of stability and family, but it is
also the shadowed center of bigotry, social recrimination, and political
regression — the place where the black singer of a soul and blues cover band
barely makes it out of the venue alive. The rural route, as no shortage of
analysts have explained, has also become Trump territory.
Mellencamp often self-identifies as one of the few voices who does not
exclusively broadcast to his base. “I’m a blue guy in a red state,” he says.
What insight does he gain into the celebration of Trump from his neighbors?
“Through its lack of creativity, slowly but surely this country changes by
the men we admire,” Mellencamp said. “It is not difficult for people to be
snookered, particularly when the most successful movies deal with superheroes —
Batman, Spider-Man. These are the big franchise movies that make money. Not just
with kids, but adults. So, because of lack of imagination, maturity — many
people in this country wanted a superhero. And then this TV guy comes along and
says what? Only I can fix it . . . Only I can do this . . . ”
Mellencamp lights another cigarette and scratches his forehead, his voice
growing louder as he extends his argument. “Maybe people will catch onto it, but
sometimes, whether people listen or not, it takes the artist to demonstrate the
truth of the matter. I remember one year at Farm Aid, Bush had announced that
the war in Iraq would last for only three weeks, but he asked for an obscene
amount of money. I said, ‘Bush claims that the war will last only three weeks,
and he’s just asked for all of this money. Does anyone really believe that?’
They booed me.” He shouted in disbelief: “At Farm Aid, and I’m one of the
fucking founders of it.”
“But, I’ve always said,” Mellencamp added with a grin, “If you are in the
public eye, and you haven’t been booed off stage at least once, you haven’t done
anything worth shit.”
“The World Don’t Bother Me None,” is the name and declaration of one of
Mellencamp’s best songs — an obscure anthem for the documentary “America’s Heart
and Soul.” The movie gives glimpses into the lives of unknown artists,
entrepreneurs, inventors, and social activists around the country. No matter how
divergent their work — whether it is woolmaking in the hills of Kentucky or jazz
composition in the neon reflection of New York — all of the unsung heroes of
American creativity and diversity pursue their passions, even while their
culture and country intervenes with the impediments of financial pressure,
communal ostracization or political obstruction.
Much of America’s cultural drift has occurred due to the winds of apathy.
Mellencamp believes that individual and institutional improvement would result
if people would seek to activate their own agency, rather than settling for
passive consumption and commentary. “It takes some courage to go out and do
something — whether it is write songs or write books or organize a march,”
Mellencamp said, contrasting the spirit of individuality and initiative in “The
World Don’t Bother Me None” with the mediocre tedium of passivity. “It is much
easier to sit back and be an armchair judge, jury and hangman. It doesn’t take
much of a man, or much of a woman, to lean against the back wall and heckle.”
Songs might appear for Mellencamp at the bottom of a bolt of inspiration, but
in his early years, his arrangements required exhaustive “on the job training.”
“Believe it or not, we recorded over one hundred takes of ‘Hurts So Good,’
and that song is so simple,” he said. “But it was hard for us. Those early takes
were terrible. Now, we do three or four takes.”
In the 1990s, it was his own deficit of energy and avidity that resulted in
him making music he now sees as below his standard of excellence. “Are you
unhappy with those songs?” I asked.
“No, I’m not unhappy. I just don’t like them.” Mellencamp said that after he
had married his now ex-wife, Elaine Irwin, had two sons, and then suffered a
heart attack, his “heart was not in the process of making records.”
“Sad Clowns and Hillbillies,” his 23rd studio album, offers an entirely
different experience to the listener. It is an emotional triathlon; a trek
through the varied topography of American music. If it were a postcard, it would
arrive through the U.S. mail on a gigantic canvas. There is the blind whimsy in
a waltz when Mellencamp’s character sings of loving a woman he knows does not
love him back, but freely falling for all her charms and tricks in “You Are
Blind.” “Damascus Road” is a dark, gospel and rock blend of a man in spiritual
crisis as he approaches the hour of his death. In the plaintive and painful folk
ballad “What Kind of Man Am I?”, Mellencamp sings of a loner whose weakness and
self-delusion have turned his life into a city of ruins. “My Soul’s Got Wings,”
written by Carlene Carter, is a gospel celebration fit for a roadside tent
revival in the Deep South summer heat. “Grandview,” the album’s lone tune of
rock ‘n’ roll purity, most reminiscent of Mellencamp’s ’80s records, “Uh-Huh”
and “Scarecrow,” sounds like an escapist tribute to the libido, but underneath
the surface there is a raw account of the low expectations people have for their
lives when they cannot envision an exit out of poverty.
“When you start dealing with the general public, you really have to dumb it
down,” Mellencamp told me. “That’s why my songs like ‘Hurts So Good’ were such
big hits. There was nothing to think about.”
He starts to laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, I was on the top of my game at the
time.”
There is nothing remotely dumb on “Sad Clowns and Hillbillies.” The record
emerges as yet another mark to measure the growth of Mellencamp from what he
once called “a macho twit” into a seasoned songwriter whose music has the
potential to challenge the intellect, pull at the heart and shake the spirit,
just as much as it has the capacity to entertain.
Entertainment, however, is what Mellencamp fears most people exclusively
desire. “John Prine said it best,” he remembered. “He told me, ‘You’d think
after one hundred years of doing this, one fucking person would take the time to
think about what I actually said in a song.”
“The best example is Crumblin’ Down,” Mellencamp said before breaking into
its first few lines. Mellencamp’s unexpected vocal performance electrified the
atmosphere of the room.
Well, some people ain’t no damn good
You can’t trust them, you can’t love them
No good deed goes unpunished
And I don’t mind being their whipping boy
Hell, I’ve had that pleasure for years and years
His last few words trailed off. “People think of it as some party anthem. It
is a song about the challenges of being a young guy in the Midwest during the
Reagan years, and how the walls will only come crumbling down if it is exposed
that the king has no clothes.”
“Well, some people say I’m obnoxious and lazy / I’m uneducated…” he began to
sing again before immediately adding, “You know, I have kids who haven’t even
listened to all of my music. One of them called me up on the phone two weeks ago
because he heard one of my old songs on the radio for the first time.”
“Does that bother you?” I ask.
“No. Why should it? People have different interests.”
There is not a summer that passes without a Fourth of July festival blasting
“Pink Houses” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” just before the
fireworks display. “Those songs are anything but patriotic celebrations,” I told
Mellencamp, as if he was unaware. “Well, they’ve made them into that,” he shot
back. “Those songs are subtle enough, and there’s enough going on in between the
lines, that people can ignore their true meaning. I’ve never wanted to write or
even listen to songs that are on the nose, though. That’s the problem with
contemporary country music. Most of contemporary country songs are so on the
nose that they are really for people who don’t want to put any thought into what
they are hearing.”
The subject of commercialization and shallow entertainment values provoked
Mellencamp to circle back to his earlier topic of the decline in American
storytelling — a field, as far as he observes, no longer in the control of men
and women like one his favorite artists, Tennessee Williams, but the CGI
specialists of comic book movies. “Hollywood and the record companies have
turned the entire country into a cartoon,” he said.
The true brilliance and greatness of American art rests in its potential to
wrestle with what Mellencamp called the “dimension of tragedy.” Now under the
suffocation of sanitization, commercial art, like national politics in its
adoption of a delinquent criteria to choose men fit for admiration, successively
fails to live up to its potential. Its promise perishes quietly and without
ceremony, much like the fish in the classic novella from one of the writers
Mellencamp most admires, Ernest Hemingway. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” the
elderly fisherman Santiago nearly destroys his body to angle a giant marlin.
Before he can bring the aquatic beast to shore, sharks have devoured its flesh,
leaving only a skeleton to represent what was once majestic and beautiful.
Death has often acted as inspiration for Mellencamp. “Scarecrow” had
Mellencamp examining mortality and disappointment after his grandfather’s death,
while “The Lonesome Jubilee” emerged out of the conflicted mourning he felt
after his bitter and resentful uncle’s passing. I asked him about this
predilection for death.
“It is because I grew up listening to American songwriting,” Mellencamp said.
“American songwriting is fraught with tragedy. If you listen to Jimmie Rodgers,
if you listen to Hank Williams, if you listen to Woody Guthrie, if you listen to
Robert Johnson, all of those songs are fraught with fucking tragedy. The 1990s
were really the last gasp of music wrestling with tragedy. The further we
drifted from the original, great songwriters, the worse it got.”
When I asked why the tragic element of human life has disappeared from
American entertainment, Mellencamp offered a simple but profound conclusion:
“People don’t want to know about it.”
Carlene Carter stood in the driveway when we left the recording studio, and
Mellencamp joined his band to run through a frenetic and fiery rendition of
“Paper in Fire,” an Americana collision with rock that summons all of his early
influences, along with his own sense of primal abandon in musical expression, to
narrate a story of people’s individual and collective impulses toward
self-destruction.
There’s a good life
Right across this green field
And each generation
Stares at it from afar
But we keep no check
On our appetites
So the green fields turn to brown
Like paper in fire
As the band crashed through the closing notes, I thought of the lyrical
change Carter told me Mellencamp made to her song. He changed her original line,
“I close my eyes and I see you,” to the elegiac, “I see the sun setting on you.”
While the sun sets on an America once ambitious enough to earn its own
elegance and excellence, and while the night darkens throughout an America that
aspires to discover the truth of its imagination, one can only hope for the
dawn. John Mellencamp, in an act of subtle subversion, will continue to inject
the element of tragedy into his songs of life, death, love and freedom, working
out of a small house in a small town in Indiana.
Mellencamp’s music depicts a ride that is full of triumph and tragedy — dark
roads with potholes and breathtaking coastal highways. “Happiness and sadness
walk hand in hand,” Mellencamp said. “I don’t think about, ‘Am I happy? or Am I
sad?’”
“I just am,” he said softly and then repeated it, again, barely audible under
his breath, “I just am.”
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