![]() He leaves their fate ambiguous, though he leaves hints that a boring life is ahead of them, whether together or separetely. I’d always somehow assumed that “Jack And Diane” was about the couple having a kid young, losing sight of those dreams, and settling down. Jack wants to run off to “the city.” Diane isn’t so sure. The two American kids of the song are desperately horny for one another, but they’re conflicted about leaving behind their sad small-town existence. That’s a sad compromise, but the song itself still works as a nice little slice-of-life narrative. Mellencamp had a hell of a time writing “Jack And Diane.” He’s said that he initially wrote the song about an interracial couple, but when the label objected, he went ahead and changed it. (It’s a 7.) That made Mellencamp a huge star, and it set the table for “Jack And Diane.” “Hurts So Good” went straight into heavy MTV rotation, and spent four weeks in the summer of 1982 at #2 at the Hot 100. “Hurts So Good” had a vaguely masochistic lyric and a huge, shuffling mechanistic beat, with Mellencamp cranking his bray up to near-Springsteenian levels. This version of Mellencamp was a can’t-miss prospect. His hair blows in the wind, and he manages not to fall off his motorcycle. He’s got a black leather vest and a red bandana tied around his neck, like he’s a Blood or a golden retriever. ![]() In the video, Mellencamp struts and preens and shimmies. He seems young as hell, even though he was really just past 30 and only seven years away from becoming a grandfather. The clip itself is pure goofiness, full of awkwardly shuffling bikers and dominatrixes dancing on bars. If you look at the video for “Hurts So Good,” Mellencamp’s breakthrough smash, he looks like an absolute snack. But Mellencamp didn’t really catch on until he jacked his whole sound up on his fifth album, 1982’s American Fool. A couple of other songs inched their way into the top 40. A year later, “I Need A Lover” charted in the US, too, peaking at #28 and giving Mellencamp his first homeland hit. Gaff signed Mellencamp to his own Riva Records label, and Mellencamp’s sophomore album, 1978’s A Biography, yielded the single “I Need A Lover,” which randomly became a #1 hit in Australia. Mellencamp split from DeFries and moved on to Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff. Johnny Cougar’s 1976 debut album Chestnut Street Incident sold jack shit, and MCA, his label, dropped him. There, he impressed David Bowie’s manager Tony DeFries, who had the idea to change Mellencamp’s name to Johnny Cougar. When Mellencamp left Indiana to seek fame and fortune, he headed to New York City. Mellencamp was enough of a glam-rocker that he named his early band Trash, after a New York Dolls song. When his first wife’s parents finally kicked him out of the house, Mellencamp decided it was time to leave town. His father was the vice president of an electric company, but Mellencamp himself was a black-sheep-type, a teenage father and college dropout. Mellencamp really was born in a small town - Seymour, Indiana, just outside Bloomington. “Jack And Diane,” Mellencamp’s sole #1 hit, is a sharp, well-observed story-song about broke go-nowhere kids in Middle America, but it’s also a big, stomping studio-created jam, the end result of a whole lot of canny decisions. Mellencamp knew how to sell himself, and he should give himself some credit for his top-40 instincts. Mellencamp’s anti-image working-class-hero pose made for a great image, and his big hits were, by and large, gleaming pop songs. Anyone paying attention should’ve seen that Mellencamp was really the next Bruce Springsteen, or at least the closest thing that the ’80s pop universe could cough up.) He loves to talk about how the music business didn’t want his realness.īut what Mellencamp never mentions is that he was a truly great pop product, a guy who was able to cut right through the noise in the early MTV years. Mellencamp loves to complain about how his first manager made him change his name to Johnny Cougar, or how his label wanted him to be the next Neil Diamond. ![]() Johnny became a big rock ‘n’ roll staaaar by making records you could sing in your car.įor years and years, John Mellencamp has held himself up as an avatar of some sort of mythical rock ‘n’ roll authenticity, a growly working-class brawler who brought his sweaty roots music to America’s arenas when they most needed it. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Ī little blog piece about John Mellencaaaaamp, an American kid who got famous when he gave his sound a revamp.
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