Mellencamp's New Blues

And right now, Mellencamp is fixated on Wanchic's 12-string guitar, which is supposed to be giving this version of "Pink Houses" a fresh vibe. He has Wanchic play the song's signature ringing riff over and over, while the rest of the band looks on. "It just doesn't sound like a 12-string to me," Mellencamp says, glaring at the offending instrument over the plastic-frame reading glasses he's wearing to decipher his lyric sheets. "We need that color, or else it's pointless." The band starts the song from the beginning for the umpteenth time, and Mellencamp turns to face it, folding his arms across his chest, staring down his employees. His face is sour. It's not the old days, when Mellencamp was known for mike-stand-throwing tantrums, but it doesn't seem like much fun, either. "Our rehearsal sessions are like a young man going to Parris Island after he joins the Marine Corps," says Wanchic. "It's not for the meek. A great band cannot be run by democracy. You need a benevolent dictator — and John supplies that very, very well."

This is the smallest band Mellencamp has had in two decades. His backup singers and percussionists are gone, replaced by a leaner sound. "When I had that big band," he says, "I needed all those people to re-create the record. I don't care — I don't do that anymore. Now when we play 'Paper in Fire,' it doesn't sound anything like the record. I'm not a general-public man anymore."

Mellencamp has an uneasy relationship with his hits, in part because he has so many of them — no fewer than 17 Top 40 singles in the Eighties, which is more than, say, Bruce Springsteen, and nearly as many as Michael Jackson. "There's a danger in having too many hit records," he says — meaning that with each hit comes the expectation for more. But as he sees it, he had to aim for the charts. "I had to take the path that I took because when you start out with such ridiculous, humble beginnings as Johnny Cougar, there's not any rock critics or anybody that's ever going to take you seriously. We were tainted by the late Seventies," he says, lapsing into a rock-royalty We. "We had to be so successful that nobody could really tell us what to do. That was the only way that we were going to ever gain any control over anything in the music business, our own career, even our name."

Mellencamp was shaped by his time in bar bands, cranking out endless cover songs — and he argues that rockers who skip that training are missing out. "The shows lasted forever," he says. "Four or five sets a night. Lots of covers: 'Can't Get Enough of Your Love,' 'Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting),' 'Gimme Shelter.' You're not going to get the kind of longevity today that you see from guys my age, because they don't have that type of background. You have to go where Tom Petty started out, or where I started out, or Billy Joel started out, or Springsteen started out. All of us started in the same bar; the difference is, me and Seger were in the Midwest. 'Cause, you know, some nights you walk in there and you're playin' for guys who got more tattoos than teeth."

Back at the house, Mellencamp hops into a small utility vehicle and drives us a few yards to the steel-paneled building that serves as his art studio. Mellencamp has been serious about his art for 20 years, and there are paintings everywhere, including an unfinished, abstract work-in-progress on the floor. There are dozens more stacked in closets downstairs — Mellencamp doesn't like seeing them after they're done, though he does project them onto video screens at his shows. He is convinced that he has more innate talent as a painter than as a musician.

The paintings don't seem like the work of the guy who wrote "Jack and Diane." They're dominated by dark colors — purples, blacks, browns — and darker imagery: Many of the human figures in them are twisted, grotesque. As far as T Bone Burnett is concerned, the new album is the closest Mellencamp has come to these paintings. "His art is raw and tough, and these songs are real like that," Burnett says. "They're sort of the underside of the Midwest."

Mellencamp's original version of Life Death, Love and Freedom was missing its most buoyant and hopeful track, "My Sweet Love," which he felt was too light, too poppy. Elaine helped convince him to put it as the second track on the album, arguing that it was one of the only songs to emphasize the life and love parts of the equation.

For all of his faith in his new music, Mellencamp isn't sure it will get a chance. "There's a lot of people who have bad ears on for John Mellencamp," he says. In his more hopeful moments, though, he takes inspiration from a friend: "In the mid-Eighties, Bob Dylan couldn't do a right thing. The critics hated him. But all of a sudden, he made one great record, and all is forgiven." Mellencamp offers a rare smile and says, "That's the great thing about music, isn't it? All you gotta do is make magic one time."

[From Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008]

• More From Issue 1059
• John Mellencamp: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide