“If you see some guy who’s happy all the time, there’s something fucking wrong with him. “Well, happy is not a normal way to be,” Mellencamp offers. He hates being a nobody, he hates being world famous, and he hates being forgotten. Nor is Mellencamp the man ever satisfied. It’s one thing to be demanding in the pursuance of artistic excellence in art, another when you’re physically assaulting your own band members in the studio or regularly belittling them in front of others. In these pages, John Mellencamp is alternately rude, difficult, argumentative, angry, temperamental, aggressive, vainglorious, insulting and bossy beyond belief. And there’s plenty of interview subjects here to back him up, some of whom worked with the performer for decades.Īnd that’s consistent behavior whether the artist was a struggling neophyte or world-famous troubadour. It’s a fascinating twist to Rees’ work that he’s so brutally honest in the book about what a, well, jerk his subject is. Many of his songs chronicle blue collar, working class life and dreams. Rees also discusses Mellencamp’s “side gigs” as a painter, visual artist, screenwriter, actor and a driving force behind the long-running Farm Aid shows and organization.

When record company advisers said there’s no way that would get played on the radio, Mellencamp rewrote, taking out any racial references.Īlso, the young lovers were originally suckin’ on cigarettes outside the Tastee-Freez instead of chili dogs. Interestingly, “Jack and Diane” was originally written as “Jack and Jenny” – and as an interracial couple with Jack being Black. It’s easy to forgot how many hits there are, among them “Hurts So Good,” “Jack and Diane,” “Pink Houses,” “Lonely Ol’ Night,” “Rain On the Scarecrow,” “Cherry Bomb,” “Check It Out,” “Authority Song,” “Crumblin’ Down,” “Small Town,” “Paper in Fire,” “R.O.C.K. Mellencamp first came briefly into consciousness with 1978’s self-penned single “I Need a Lover” (released under the management-driven name “Johnny Cougar”), and then hit big success starting with 1982’s American Fool album. Mellencamp (out September 14) is the first major biography on the pride of Seymour and Bloomington, Indiana. Though if you invited them all to a dinner party, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out which one would want to start a fight, even with the host.Īuthor and music journo Paul Rees has penned books on Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the Who’s John Entwistle, while ghostwriting the memoirs of Toto’s Steve Lukather and UFO’s Pete Way. Book cover His tough-as-nails/loud-as-a-motorcyle-engine persona and songs have helped define an image and put him on the same shelf as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger and Tom Petty.

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