“I mean, hundreds and hundreds of rejections came in, and I had worked that tape in all different manners for like a year.” John Mellencamp turned Johnny Cougar in 1976. “I sent that tape out to different managers and record companies, and it was rejected worldwide,” he says, without a hint of exaggeration. Success wasn’t sitting around waiting for this small town boy to make his mark on the music world. Of course, this was real life and not some Hollywood movie. “So I took every cent I had, sold a bunch of stuff, sold a lot of my record collection, sold a lot of equipment that I had gathered up over the years and raised a couple of thousand bucks and made a demo tape.” (Interview by Steven P. “You had to go out and seek them, they weren’t going to come and seek you out. Playing by the usual rules of the music business in those days, Mellencamp played the game that the booming industry had established by the Seventies: “I had been in bands for a long time, singing in bars and fraternities, but I remembered thinking at the time that being ‘discovered’ was kind of a joke,” said the longtime heartland resident. Hell, I never planned anything in my life.” Whatever It Takes I didn’t really have any illusions of grandeur or any dream about what I should become or what I shouldn’t become. “And as far as following any kind of rock & roll dream, initially, I just wanted to make a record. “I don’t feel like I matured any quicker or any slower than anybody else,” he said in response to my question about the impact of marriage and fatherhood at such a young age. in the U.S.A.”: “Pipe dreams in their heads and very little money in their hands.” Or as he would later write in his 1985 hit single “R.O.C.K. In those days he was no different than millions of other musicians trying to get noticed while balancing the realities of life. Teenage Husband & Fatherīack in the mid-Seventies, a young John Mellencamp had visions of making it as a recording artist in the music industry, which was no easy feat for a teenage husband and father working odd jobs in the wilds of Indiana.
And there were some traces of that reputation that seeped through during our lengthy conversation. But the road to notoriety was a long one indeed for the often ornery artist, whose own pseudonym for his producer duties was tellingly Little Bastard.
Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, John Mellencamp would establish himself as one of rock’s most prominent and often controversial voices. And John Mellencamp was at the forefront of this changing tide. Not to mention a sea of concerts for various causes, including Live Aid and Farm Aid (which Mellencamp started with friends Willie Nelson and Neil Young after an off-the-cuff onstage comment from Bob Dylan at the previous Live Aid). But more on that later…įor many rock fans like myself, the Eighties were a time of transition from radio to a new visual outlet called MTV. So I dusted off my old tape of my interview with the man who we first knew as Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp (with 1983’s brilliant Uh-Huh album), before finally leaving the “Cougar” behind for good in 1991 with the platinum hit album, Whenever We Wanted.
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