Mellencamp's New Blues

The Mellencamps have a vacation home in Georgia but otherwise spend most of their time here, on the edge of the sleepy college town of Bloomington, the kind of place where the firing of an Indiana University basketball coach dominates small talk. Coastal-elite types might call it the middle of nowhere. Her glamorous past aside, Elaine is comfortable with this life, perhaps because she, too, was born in a small town, albeit in Pennsylvania. She's lived with Mellencamp in Indiana since they married in 1992, when she was 23 years old. It's John who has moments of doubt: "Sometimes I say to Elaine, to this day, 'Why the fuck do we live here?' The weather's wacky, and people are mad at us 'cause we're too liberal. I've probably got more friends in New York than I do here. But some of the people I like most live here."

The sound of motorboats cruising on the lake below occasionally intrudes on the conversation, and we hear dudes shouting, "Jooooohn! Yo, John!" They're friendly enough, but a couple of years back, there were more-hostile voices coming off the lake. With his 2003 song "To Washington," Mellencamp became one of the first singers to take on George W. Bush, and his red-state neighbors were not happy. "It wasn't like we were the only two Democrats in the entire state," says Elaine. "But I felt ostracized. When people come up in their boats and scream things at you, and leave notes on your car and scream things at your kids on the playground, it is irritating."

Mellencamp is a lifelong Democrat, as are his parents — he recently found a photo of his mother protesting at a labor rally in the Forties. But his music has broad appeal in areas of the country that haven't voted Democratic in decades. "I have known for a long time that I was at odds politically with my surroundings," Mellencamp says. "I never wrote to my base. Nobody who is a Republican in Bloomington, Indiana, is going to buy Neil Young's last record, not even going to entertain the idea. But they might buy mine."

Mellencamp has a grim view of the state of the nation. "I don't know the denotation of fascism, but it's something like, you know, when government and big business control policymaking — we're there, baby. We're there," he says. "I said it on one of the songs on Freedom's Road: You know, when you say America's free, what freedom you talkin' about?"

This year, polls suggest that Indiana might go blue, but Mellencamp doesn't expect forgiveness for his anti-Bush stance. "Before, it didn't matter to people that Mellencamp was a little left," he says, looking grim. "Because gas was only $1.85 a gallon, and, you know, nobody was really gettin' killed, and, you know, there weren't so many bad things happening. The housing market was booming. People were pissed at me. And, you know, they probably still are. My ticket sales, everything I do — I'm paying a price for that."

Earlier that day, Mellencamp and his six-piece band of bedenimed, arena-hardened pros are crammed into the garage next to his studio trying, without much luck, to find a new way to play "Pink Houses."

It looks like a place more appropriate to prep for a junior-high battle of the bands than for a national amphitheater tour. It's also loud as hell. "We've all given up on earplugs — we've already lost everything they're supposed to protect," says guitarist Mike Wanchic, sipping a protein energy drink between songs. Wanchic has managed to stay in Mellencamp's band for 32 years, even as every single other slot turned over — the rest of the current lineup joined in the Nineties or later.