![]() The trials and tribulations that got Mellencamp where he is have left him unsentimental about his catalog. I didn’t have any fuckin’ money, I didn’t have a dime in my pocket.” By then he’d split from Tony DeFries, but his former manager released The Kid Inside, the album that had been recorded and shelved in 1977, to capitalize on his newfound fame. “In 1982, I had the number one album in America and the number one single and the number two single. But even when blockbuster success came with 1982’s American Fool, money was slow to follow. When “I Need A Lover” became a surprise hit in Australia, it was included on his next album and finally given an American release, giving him a foothold on the charts. The second album he recorded was shelved, and the third was only released in the U.K. ![]() Mellencamp’s early years in the music industry were full of trial and error. “There was a whole bunch of fuckin’ guys droppin’ off tapes, they all looked like David Bowie, all had that same hair, but I didn’t look that way. The receptionist was also from Indiana, and made sure DeFries gave him a chance. Some of his earliest recordings, now featured as bonus tracks on his 1976 debut Chestnut Street Incident, were covers of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” and the Stooges’ “I Need Somebody.” But Mellencamp never really tried for the glam rock look, and it was his Midwestern roots that got his foot in the door when he took his demo to the New York offices of DeFries’s company MainMan. “I was a singer in a bar band, and we were doing Iggy & The Stooges cover songs,” he says another early band was named Trash, after the New York Dolls song. His old friend Bruce Springsteen flew out to Indiana to work on three songs on the album, including the single “Wasted Days.” And though Springsteen’s voice has also been weathered by time, he sounds smoother and softer in comparison to Mellencamp’s craggy tone.Īlthough Mellencamp would eventually become synonymous with the concept of “heartland rock,” thanks to songs about small town life like “Pink Houses,” glam rock and proto punk were in the air when his career got started. “I always thought as a young man that my voice was too high,” Mellencamp shrugs, over the phone from his home in Indiana a few days after the album’s release. It’s a far cry from the bright, anthemic songs like “Hurts So Good” that made him one of the biggest stars of the ‘80s, but that’s clearly fine with him. It’s gotten glowing notices from critics, but it’s almost certainly the first time Tom Waits has been name-dropped in many of Mellencamp’s reviews. Strictly a One-Eyed Jack is Mellencamp’s 25 th studio album, starkly minimalist and full of downbeat songs like “I Am a Man That Worries” that make excellent use of the newfound gravitas in his voice. And he’d comment on it, ‘How much of this growl do you want on the track?’ And I would always just smile and go, ‘Well, the cigarette smoking’s starting to pay off I guess.’” “He takes care of my voice on the records. But as he was recording his new album, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, he and his engineer noticed how much more leathery that familiar voice had become. There’s always been a slight rasp in John Mellencamp’s singing. “And I go, ‘Me?’ They go, ‘No, it’s Louis Armstrong.” ![]() Then they played something else that sounded similar, and asked him what it was. A year or two back, John Mellencamp walked into his Indiana studio one morning, and his engineer, the same one he’s worked with since the ‘80s, asked him, “You wanna hear something fuckin’ wild?” The engineer and one of his band members played back an isolated vocal from one of Mellencamp’s new songs.
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