I was visiting him and he said, “Come here, I want to show you something,” and he took me to his studio and showed me what he had on the easel and lying around, stacked against a wall. I was also one of the first people he let see his paintings, which he had started doing again in earnest in the late ‘80s, but quietly, privately, and no doubt nervously. “I must be the most boring interviewer you’ve ever had,” I replied, embarrassed. “I must be the most boring interview you’ve ever done,” he said to me, sheepishly. One of us woke up and the scraping lounge chair startled the other. At some point we both fell asleep - when I played back my cassette, there was us talking for about 10 minutes, then just birds chirping for the rest of the hour. He’d also been working all night, on The Lonesome Jubilee, and, like me, was very tired. It was a hot summer day, so he lent me a bathing suit and we sat by the pool to do the interview. He picked me up at my motel and we went to his house. I had worked all night at the magazine and taken an early flight. We met when I went to Bloomington, Indiana, where he still lives, to interview him in 1987. Mostly John’s paintings are just his, just an American’s thoughtful, sometimes anguished, sometimes celebratory view of America. His paintings sometimes echo the great German surrealist Max Beckmann, and sometimes Modigliani, and you might even think you saw the shadow of Basquiat fall over some of his pieces. No, John legitimately belongs in the Modern Art Pantheon, alongside the Rauschenbergs, Pollocks, Warhols, Hockneys and Frida Kahlos (he would be uncomfortable with that statement, but ignore that). Not a musician who also paints, God knows there are more than a few of those. He gave me an opportunity to make records, and that name put a huge chip on my shoulder and made me work a little harder, and try a little bit harder.”Īlso Read Bruce Springsteen Adds 22 North American Shows to 2023 TourĪlthough we may primarily know Mellencamp as a rock star, one of the highest-selling of all time and a Hall of Famer, he is also a great painter. “As I’ve gotten older, I realized the guy did me a favor. “For years, I really hated the fact that I signed with him and became Johnny Cougar,” he says now. For his next album, The Lonesome Jubilee, another massive hit, he dropped Cougar and that tired old albatross sank to the bottom of the sea. After a few hit singles, he broke out in 1985 with the album Scarecrow, recording under the name John Cougar Mellencamp. Reluctantly, John accepted the Faustian deal and the much ridiculed name. “I had one set of people telling me I had to give them money, and the other was going to give me money, so I decided to go with the people who were going to pay me,” he said.ĭefries got Mellencamp a record deal, no small thing in 1975, but insisted he change his name to Johnny Cougar. Art school, John discovered, was going to be expensive. Tony Defries, David Bowie’s manager at the time, liked his voice and wanted to sign him. And he had an appointment at the Art Students League of New York. He brought demo tapes of him singing in bars, because he thought all he needed was to let people hear him sing to get a recording contract. Thank you for listening and for supporting my artistic work.In his early 20s, having just graduated from Vincennes University in his home state of Indiana, John Mellencamp went to New York to pursue one of two careers, either painter or musician. I believe it may be the type of song where you can plug a number of stories into it and find relevance in how the music and words carry them. I would like to leave the song open for your interpretation though. If you'd like to learn more about the documentary, let me know and I'll send you the link. They won't leave you alone until you write them, it seems. I don't remember if I wrote the song right away, but it was definitely as soon as I was able. I had become so swept up in the story, and was overcome by that strange feeling I get when there's a song nagging to be written. I arrived home without recalling a single moment of the route. I was driving home from performing at the Edmonton airport where I frequently performed - I used to listen to CBC all the time on those drives to and from. Here is a song that I wrote in 2017 (or so) after I listened to a moving documentary on CBC.
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