John Mellencamp

An authentic "blue-collar rock hero" of provincial America (Indiana, to be precise), John "Cougar" Mellencamp fused the image of James Dean, the rebel without a cause, with the mythology of rural lower-middle-class youth, turning out gritty radio hits marked by a masculine, danceable rhythm and blues. In doing so, he coined a language that is a hybrid of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, aimed directly at a younger audience.

Born in 1951 into a large, poor but deeply religious family, Mellencamp began playing rhythm and blues at the age of seventeen, and before finishing high school he had to flee to Kentucky to marry the underage girl he had made pregnant. At university he began writing his own songs, and a trip to New York earned him his first recording contract.

Chestnut Street Incident (MCA, 1976) and Kid Inside (never released) were largely contractual obligations. His career truly began with A Biography (Riva, 1978). It was I Need A Lover, reissued on John Coughar (Riva, 1979), that opened the doors of the charts for him. Ain't Even Done With The Night and This Time, the singles taken from Nothin' Matters And What If It Did (1980), were still weak and uncertain. Mellencamp found his true vocation in the "teen anthems" of the subsequent American Fool (Mercury, 1982), particularly Jack And Diane and Hurts So Good, gutsy, swaggering songs played by a tight band with the attitude of the most proletarian rock and roll, yet at the same time thoughtful and mature. The trick lay in making the most of his roots, the milieu of small-town life and the lower middle class.

Not only do the stories of Uh-Huh (Mercury, 1983) remain anchored to that human landscape, but the music itself reflects the rhythms and anxieties of those rural communities. The tone became more epic and apocalyptic, particularly in Crumblin' Down, Pink Houses and Authority Song (destined to remain his most famous signature tune). Mellencamp was more than a simple troubadour; he embodied the spirit of all those kids trapped on a dead-end road. In a sense, he was the equivalent of a prison bluesman. He sang about himself, but he sang for everyone, not just for himself.

Faithful to that spirit of camaraderie, he dedicated Scarecrow (Mercury, 1985) to the farmers whom rock music had forgotten. The result was "Dylanesque" ballads about modern-day outcasts, moving elegies such as Small Town and Lonely Ol' Night. Towering above them all is Rain On The Scarecrow, a powerful vision of a hopeless condition of life. Yet even at his lowest point of depression, Mellencamp finds the strength to shout his anger in what is perhaps his quintessential "anthem", R.O.C.K. In The USA (with a flute riff echoing the historic one from Wild Thing). If the hits from Uh-Huh had made him an international star, the hits from Scarecrow made him the sincere spokesman of rural communities. At the same time they pushed an entire generation of young rockers to rummage through the ruins of that world.

At that point Mellencamp felt the need to improve as a musician and decided to abandon the spartan arrangements that had distinguished him, adding violin, accordion and dulcimer to the basic rock-and-roll trio. The dramatic tableaux of Lonesome Jubilee (Mercury, 1987) therefore boast a fitting array of sonic events, making them even more impassioned. A heartfelt lament of shattered hopes such as Paper In Fire gains even greater power. The album is rich in spiritual spices (Check It Out), tex-mex (Rooty Toot Toot), and cajun (Cherry Bomb). By thoroughly reassessing the raw, elementary sound of English bands such as Rolling Stones, Troggs and Animals, while at the same time increasingly stripping it down toward an abrasive, alienating folk contaminated by archaic popular forms, Cougar found the ideal expressive form for his social commentary in a blues that is at times urban, at times rural, driven by the cadence and grit of the working class.

Big Daddy (Mercury, 1989), featuring Pop Singer, and Whenever We Wanted (Mercury, 1991), featuring Get A Leg Up, are instead minor works, the first excessively introspective (something like his Nebraska) and the second excessively derivative of himself. Human Wheels (Mercury, 1993) reaffirmed his stature as a rock-and-roll philosopher (When Jesus Left Birmingham) and the mini-album Dance Naked (Mercury, 1994) reaffirmed his gifts as a musician (Wild Night and Dance Naked).

A heart attack caused a significant slowdown in his career. Mr Happy Go Lucky (Mercury, 1996) picks up where Scarecrow had left off, parading lush arrangements for Mellencamp's acoustic folk. Key West Intermezzo and Just Another Day are the radio tracks. But his health did not allow him to continue along that path. The Best That I Could Do is a career anthology.

From enfant terrible to advocate of farmers, from headstrong rocker to nostalgic ethnologist (capable of naturally employing fiddle, dulcimer, dobro, accordion and mandolin, and of invoking archaic Appalachian folk, black church call-and-response, or jubilee marching bands), Mellencamp demonstrated a unique ability to stage and musically "choreograph" his reportages. Cougar effectively combines firsthand experience of Midwestern rural life with a particular gift for the "mental association" of quotations from popular music (rock or folk), derived from having grown up in that milieu. His songs, whether aggressive rock and roll or subdued laments, are fueled by the same existential fire, a fire in which an epic and an apocalyptic sense of the human condition interpenetrate.

Mellencamp's artistic decline was rapid. The albums that followed the heart attack were pale relatives of his classics: Mr Happy Go-Lucky (1996), with Key West Intermezzo, John Mellencamp (Columbia, 1998), Rough Harvest (Columbia, 1999), a collection of unreleased material, Cuttin' Heads (2001), with Peaceful World, Trouble No More (2003), a collection of covers, Freedom's Road (2007). that ends with the only decent song, Heaven Is A Lonely Place. The atmospheric Life Death Love and Freedom (2008) was the first album in a long time that was worth listening to, although the credit might go more to producer T Bone Burnett than to lyricist John Mellencamp.

Mellencamp went for naked truths on No Better Than This (2010), recorded live in mono with no overdubs, both in terms of spartan arrangements (guitarist Marc Ribot, drummer Jay Bellerose and stand-up bassist David Roe) and in terms of timeless themes (mostly death). Just like on the cover album, here Mellencamp reimagined vintage music of the era of rockabilly. A bit of his youthful verve is still dripping through the cracks of Coming Down the Road and No Better Than This.