Never wanted to be no pop singer / Never wanted to write no pop songs, John Mellencamp insisted on his 1989 single “Pop Singer.” By that time, he really needn’t have worried about those early days of playing the pop game, because he essentially left them behind with his Scarecrow album.
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Released in 1985, the album found Mellencamp concentrating on writing his best-yet batch of songs and recording them in no-frills but affecting fashion. The direct approach paid off in one of the best albums of the decade.
Classic “R.O.C.K.“
Before they headed into the studio to record the album that would become Scarecrow, John Mellencamp gave his backing band a homework assignment. He handed them a list of classic rock and roll and R&B songs from his youth and told the band to learn them cold.
Mellencamp wasn’t doing this so he could record a covers album. But he wanted the band to have a frame of reference of the sounds he envisioned for the new record. This was crucial, because he wanted the album to be independent of the pop sounds of the day. After all, he had been there, done that with pop music, and he wasn’t planning on going back.
Remember this was a guy who was labeled Johnny Cougar by his record company when he first bopped onto the scene in the late ’70s. Although the moniker and the radio-friendly songs that adorned his first few records certainly helped Mellencamp get a foot in the door, neither the identity nor the recording style ever sat well with him.
Mellencamp’s big breakthrough came with the 1982 album American Fool and the smash single “Jack and Diane.” But even that tale of a small-town couple came adorned with a significant synthesizer part and white-noise percussion that helped it to stand out on radio.
His 1983 album Uh-Huh was the first where Mellencamp added his surname to the credits. (He was John Cougar Mellencamp for a few more albums before finally losing the “Cougar” on the 1991 album Whenever We Wanted.) Uh-Huh included songs like “Authority Song” and “Pink Houses” that seem now like dry runs for what Scarecrow would be: A collection of songs about the triumphs and trials of small-town types, rendered in music alternately invigorating and moving, but never synthetic.
Revisiting Scarecrow
Scarecrow grabs your attention as something different right from the opening notes, as some stinging electric guitar juts out at askew angles from a stomping beat, heralding the blistering treatise on the diminution of the American farmer, “Rain on the Scarecrow.” It was a song both fierce in its critique of the conditions the farmers were enduring and tender in its sympathy toward them. And it set the tone for the wonderful songs to follow.
The singles from Scarecrow displayed Mellencamp’s versatility as a songwriter and artist. “Lonely Ol’ Night” seems like a straightforward song of seduction, until you intuit the loneliness at the heart of it: And it’s a sad, sad, sad, sad feelin’ / When you’re livin’ on those in-betweens, Mellencamp sings. “Small Town” romanticizes the subject without whitewashing it. Meanwhile, Mellencamp had to be convinced by his label into including “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to ’60s Rock),” but it’s the perfect good-time closer.
As you dig deeper into the album, you can hear what a songwriting peak Mellencamp reached, because there’s just no letup in the quality throughout the entirety. Whether writing slices of life (“Rumbleseat”) or outsized story songs (“Justice and Independence ’85”), Mellencamp leads with authenticity and trusts everything else will be fall into place.
Mellencamp was often lumped in with Bruce Springsteen around that time as purveyors of heartland rock. But it’s interesting that The Boss needed to embrace the synths and snapping drum sounds of the era to make his splash on the charts with Born in the U.S.A., while Mellencamp triumphed by backing away from them. Scarecrow ended the era of Johnny Cougar for good, and it propelled John Mellencamp to his proper place in the “R.O.C.K.” pantheon.
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Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns
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