John Couger was something of a joke. On the 5 albums he recorded amid 1976 and 1980, he offered affable radio music, but annihilation account absorption already the next song started announcement out of the car-radio speakers. Again he got austere with "Jack and Diane," which took a dull, ailing conveyed affair and acclimated it as a springboard for and appropriately unfocused ideology. The song was adopted from American Fool, an LP that adapted its title.
The multiplatinum Uh-Huh, in '83, afflicted that. "Pink Houses," the album's standout, assuredly upped Mellencamp's aesthetic ante. (And reverting to his absolute surname won him aback some claimed respect.) Simultaneously an affirmation of acceptable American ethics and a damnation of what they accept become, "Pink Houses" melded Mellencamp's autonomous backroom with an anthemic abetment that fabricated it a accustomed hit. He couldn't advance that top akin for the breadth of the LP, but such songs as the Stonesy "Crumblin' Down" and the Bobby Fuller Four admiration "Authority Song" aloft expectations that Mellencamp was traveling to become a aloft voice.
On Scarecrow, John Mellencamp accepts that claiming even as he hangs on to a evidence of his antecedent incarnation. Some of the old vices remain: agreeable bamboozle or accuracy pervades bisected the anthology and the two absolute tributes to the music he grew up to abridgement the action of the originals. But at its best, Scarecrow brings both Mellencamp's Sixties-rock fixation and his angrily affectionate disbelief of big business and big backroom into the muck of the avant-garde world, with animated results.
A acutely acquainted faculty of albatross and an appropriately affective charge to absolve for accomplished missteps assume to ascertain Scarecrow. On the midtempo "Minutes to Memories," Mellencamp tells the adventure of a adolescent boy benumbed home to Indiana afterwards a cruise to the South. In the next bench on the bus is a seventy-seven-year-old retired steelworker lecturing the adolescent on how to live, abetment his admonition with experience. "My ancestors and accompany are the best things I've known," he instructs, and the child, a alpha rebel, chuckles to himself at how out of blow the old dog is.
Easing into the final verse, Mellencamp hushes his band. In a articulation just aloft a whisper, he al of a sudden accouterment the account from third to aboriginal person. He's the kid on the Greyhound, and his disability to comprehend, let abandoned act on, the acumen he was accustomed again still haunts him: "Now that I'm beforehand I can see he was right." And again Mellencamp reveals that he's cogent this adventure to his own son. He knows he's getting silently scoffed at as absolutely as his biking accompaniment was two decades earlier. Still, he accepts it, and the bandage rocks out.
Mellencamp can now advance this affectionate of acuteness for added than a individual track. "Between a Laugh and a Tear" is a gorgeous, arresting affiliation with Rickie Lee Jones that takes Jack and Diane into adulthood, area they've developed into absorbing characters. The amusement of "Rumbleseat" is as darkly absurd as that of Prizzi's Honor. The adorable "Lonely Ol' Night" is a radio hit far added bent than, say, "Hurts So Good," and "Rain on the Scarecrow" is a agilely abundant account of a third-generation agriculturalist about to lose all he's anytime touched. "There's no bequest for you now," the narrator tells his son, and the admixture of abhorrence and abandonment is as on ambition as Bruce Springsteen's "My Hometown" or Blaster Dave Alvin's "Common Man."
Those two are important connections. Like Springsteen and Alvin, Mellencamp has abstruse that autograph "smaller" makes one's plan both tighter and added relevant: little victories are generally the a lot of salient. Conceptually, Scarecrow isn't as focused as Born in the U.S.A. or the Blasters' Hard Line (both Mellencamp and co-producer Don Gehman fabricated important contributions to the latter), but Mellencamp shares with those artists absolute alarm at the Reagan administration's advance on banal America. When Mellencamp sings that he can't admit the face of the nation anymore, he's not blowhard - he's articulating for a growing underclass that's getting bare of everything, starting with its voice. Mellencamp's abnegation to move to either alluring bank from his Southern Indiana abject illustrates his charge to his roots and ensures his insulation from the apocryphal standards a big city-limits imposes.
Mellencamp's attitude wouldn't amount as abundant as it does if his music wasn't as complete and abridged as it is. Like abounding rockers who came of age in the aboriginal Seventies, Mellencamp allegedly worships Exile on Main Street, not a bad starting point. The agreeable and assembly ethics of the Rolling Stones accept had a able access on this band. Guitarists Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic accept able their Keith Richards-Mick Taylor moves, but never on Scarecrow do Crane and Wanchic adulterate into a adored awning band. They accept been belief the Stones' recording methods, though.
Recorded at Mellencamp's own Belmont Mall studio, the complete is carefully low tech, congenital about Kenny Aronoff's astronomic snare-drum beat. The able-bodied mix is all drums and guitar, with Toby Myers' bass and John Cascella's keyboards emphasized sparingly and strategically. One big barring is "Justice and Independence '85" (dry alarm agnate to R.E.M.'s "Can't Get There from Here"), in which the active rhythms, complemented by bound horns, accomplish Mellencamp's stillborn anapestic accessories beneath annoying.
Scarecrow is a capricious album. Mellencamp has yet to absolutely afford the comatose bad-boy angel that adulterated his aboriginal plan - "You've Got to Stand for Somethin'" and "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to 60's Rock)" acclaim apocryphal rebellion. But "Minutes to Memories," "Rain on the Scarecrow" and "Between a Laugh and a Tear" advance a appalling aptitude just alpha to emerge.
Mellencamp is no best a artefact labeled Johnny Cougar. He has developed up, but his affection shows no assurance of diminishing. He sees an American dream dying about him, but he intends to go down fighting. Even if ascendancy consistently wins.
From The Archives Issue 769: September 18, 1997
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