John Cougar Mellencamp

Scarecrow Deluxe

MERCURY/UME How the Little Bastard got serious.

Scarecrow was a statement record for Mellencamp. In 1982, when still trading as John Cougar, he’d marked out his territory in a line from his breakthrough hit single Jack & Diane – ‘two American kids growing up in the heartland’. A year later he delivered a stinging protest song in Pink Houses.

But it was with 1995’s Scarecrow that he made his reputation as a major artist with a powerful voice. New York Times critic Jon Pareles said it was “an album about America”, in which Mellencamp “wants to pay tribute to the heartland’s workers, to stick up for the unglamorous life”.

Its opening track, Rain On The Scarecrow, went hand in hand with Mellencamp’s leading role in Farm Aid. The titles of Small Town and Justice And Independence ’85 spoke volumes. And if these were, in spirit, modern folk songs, Mellencamp was always a rock’n’roller at heart, kicking ass on Lonely O’ Night and R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.

This new Deluxe edition adds a bunch of demos, and cover versions of two 60s classics:

The Drifters’ Under The Boardwalk played sweetly, and James Brown’s Cold Sweat

banged out in a manner that the Godfather of Soul would surely have endorsed.