In the trenches with John Mellencamp
After 40 years performing together, John Mellencamp and his mainstay guitarist Mike Wanchic know the drill — play the new stuff to show you can still cut it, but don’t dare ignore the old stuff.
Even if they’re beyond sick and tired of trotting out “Small
Town” and “Jack & Diane” again, they aren’t just songs to many in the audience. They’re pages from their lives.
“We play things we think are really cool, but at the same time, we’re never not going to play a string of hits that are so nostalgic to people, and important to people’s lives,” says Wanchic. “I mean, some of this s—t is important to people.
“I remember a guy walking up to me one time after a show and going, ‘You know, I had a gun to my head and then ‘Minutes to Memories’ came on … and I put the gun down.’ Music holds a very important place in people’s hearts, and it can’t be overlooked.”
So expect plenty of Mellencamp’s classics when he makes a rare Niagara appearance at Meridian Centre in St. Catharines on Sunday. Songs that put him in the same league as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty in the mid ’80s, and have endured even as the venues get smaller and his
commercial peak is decades old.
Mellencamp’s longevity can’t be measured in hit singles, says Wanchic. He’s a legacy artist that still has plenty to say, with fans that have stuck by him through several highs and lows.
With a new album out in November (“Other People’s
Songs”), Wanchic says the 66year-old Mellencamp has never been a better writer than he is right now.
“There’s such age discrimination in this world,” he says, “that you’re past the age of 40, you are no longer creative or vital. And that’s bulls—t. That’s just when people start figuring this stuff out and really understand themselves.
“Understand why they’re doing this, what they have to say, and being more concise. Finding the beauty in songwriting, not just chasing the hit. You know, ‘June, spoon, tune’ nonsense. Real songwriting that is meant to stick around for ages, not three weeks.”
After meeting Mellencamp in the mid ’70s at an Indiana recording studio, Wanchic has been part of every album since. Including the first four that went nowhere. The mind set while recording the fifth — 1982’s “American Fool” — was that it was “our last record,” he recalls.
As if tensions weren’t bad enough. Wanchic says a record company executive heard the first batch of tunes Mellencamp wrote, including “Jack & Diane,” and suggested some changes.
“He looked at John, and he wanted us to add horns to one of the songs,” he recalls. “John grabbed him by the collar, opened the back door of the studio and shoved him onto the street.
“That was the last time we saw a record company person in our session.”
It was also the last time Mellencamp — then known as John Cougar — would be a struggling singer from the heartland. “American Fool” would top the album charts for nine weeks in 1982, and “Jack & Diane” would be a No. 1 single.
“It just grew so slowly that when ‘American Fool’ hit, all of a sudden these people who were writing really nasty things about us now love us. My thought about those guys was ‘F--- you! I know who you are, I know what you used to think, and I know you’re just jumping on this thing now because we’re just doing the same damn thing we always did.’”
Mellencamp made a string of roots rock classics including “Uh Huh” (1983), “Scarecrow” (1985) and “The Lonesome Jubilee” (1987) before his career cooled in the ’90s (as it did for most singer/ songwriters from the ’80s). But his stature as an American heartland artist has grown again the past decade, starting with his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2008 up to his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame earlier this year.
As Wanchic describes it, Mellencamp was always in it for the long haul, despite all those ’80s hits.
“He just refused to keep making the same product over and over,” he says. “No. 1 — that’s art, and No. 2 — it’s your ticket to a long career.
“It could piss off the fans and it could end your career, but at the same time, you make the same record three times in a row and your career’s over anyway.”
John.Law@niagaradailies.com 905-225-1644 | @JohnLawMedia