Playboy Interview: John Cougar Mellencamp

As rock and roll slouches through its fourth decade, John Cougar Mellencamp remains hell-bent on riding the beast where he wants it to go, as opposed to where the entertainment conglomerates want it taken. His destination? He would call it "the main event," a heavyweight bout between his appetites and his sense of responsibility. The fact that this fight takes place in his own soul gives his songs power. The fact that he also perceives the conflict on a grander scale gives his songs political resonance. If the hero is someone who can face up to his own contradictions, Mellencamp is a true rock-and-roll hero.

It was a role for which he didn't volunteer. An academic screw-up, Mellencamp had little going for him in the beginning except bantam-rooster pugnacity. He certainly didn't know anything about music when he signed with his first manager, Tony DeFries. Once the mastermind behind David Bowie, DeFries decided he had a formula for success and Mellencamp was going to fit it. He changed Mellencamp's name to Johnny Cougar, dressed him like a glitter rocker and sent him into the studio without the benefit of a producer. The resulting album, released in 1978, was a humiliating bomb. The reviewers rightly savaged him for being an inept phony.

Figuring that things couldn't get any worse, Mellencamp decided to try being himself hitting the comeback trail at the tender age of 23. After a couple of years of poverty and a stay in England, where he was overshadowed by the punk explosion, he finally exhibited his songwriting ability with "I Need a Lover," a hit in Australia for him and a much bigger hit world-wide for Pat Benatar. But judging from his follow-up album, "Nothin' Matters and What if It Did," one could reasonably assert that he had learned neither humility from his failure nor gratitude for his success.

Next came a personal crisis. Mellencamp had fallen in love with a young Los Angeles model, Victoria Lynn Granucci, and had courted her on the sly until the affair was discovered by his wife, Priscilla. They divorced, he remarried and calmed down enough to write and record two of the greatest rock-and-roll songs of all time: "Hurts So Good," a danceable tune that showed his evolution from bitterness to balanced contradiction, and "Jack and Diane," a story of youthful passion that counsels holding on to that passion "long after the thrill of living is gone."

Among critics, Mellencamp's achievement caused a tremor that registered a nine on the cognitive-dissonance scale. "John Cougar did that? But that's good. Surely, this is a flash in the pan." John answered them by changing his name back to Mellencamp and making four multiplatinum albums--"American Fool," "Uh-Huh," "Scarecrow" and "The Lonesome Jubilee," while his latest, "Big Daddy," was shipped platinum. He reinvented folk rock with his innovative integration of acoustic guitar in a hard-rock format, created a haunting new sound by combining fiddle and accordion and did it all by getting the most out of real, live talented musicians, without the benefit of sampling or drum machines.

Mellencamp's lyrics, however, have had the most impact. Since his early failure at being a phony, he has appeared incapable of saying anything that isn't honest and straightforward. You may not agree with every point he's making, but you always know what point he's making. Your impulse after listening to him is to take him aside and discuss whatever has been weighing heavily on ol' John's mind.

Weighing most heavily for the past few years have been the farm crisis, the rapacious greed and cruelty of the Reagan era, the balancing of his personal, professional and political concerns, personality flaws that turn into tragedies over a lifetime and the meaning, if any, that it all has.

The son of an electrical contractor and a Miss Indiana runner-up, Mellencamp started life on October 7, 1951, in Seymour, Indiana, with a tumor on his neck. When the doctors took it out, they removed two of his vertebrae as well, destining him to shortness and a 4-F draft deferment. Being short, of course, is a trait strongly associated with rock stardom; if he couldn't be the biggest, he would be the loudest and the toughest. He was a terror in the classroom, barely managing a D average. He married his pregnant girlfriend at the age of 18, walked out on the S.A.T. and barely made it through Vincennes University, the only college that would take a chance on him.

Just how did this guy go from nowhere to disgrace to one-hit wonder to stardom and acclaim? We sent one of our resident rock critics, Charles M. Young, on the road with Mellencamp to seek the answers. Says Young:

"What John Cougar Mellencamp really likes to do is horseshit. In the Mellencamp lexicon, that's a verb, meaning 'to sit around with people you trust and retell old stories until the rough edges fall off and you have created the anecdotal equivalent of a pebble that's been rolling in a stream bed for several geological epochs.'

"Unfortunately, Mellencamp only half trusts journalists, because he knows that if certain pebbles reached print, he couldn't go home to Seymour again, or even to Bloomington, where he currently lives.

"Over the six days that we talked, I asked him everything I could think of for as long as we could stand it and then put away the tape recorder. The second I punched Stop/Eject, Mellencamp would relax and lay into the grotesque small-town stuff--off the record--that he won't make public until he's a hundred and twenty years old and everyone he could possibly embarrass is dead.

"If I had to describe Mellencamp's personality in a single phrase, I'd say, 'Dare to be obtuse.' The guy flunked tenth-grade English three times. To make him read a book today all the way through, you'd have to give him a choice between attacking the printed word and sticking his head into a cage with a starving weasel. Even then, he might prefer the weasel.

"One afternoon, we were riding on the tour bus and discussing Marlon Brando, who is near the top of Mellencamp's all-time-hero list for his brilliant acting and limitless capacity to be an asshole. Mellencamp handed me a recent biography, gave it a high recommendation and took a nap for an hour while I read the first two chapters. When he awoke, he picked my brain for every tidbit of information I'd gleaned. When I could remember no more, he grinned and said, 'There! That's another book I don't have to read.' I felt like I'd just painted Tom Sawyer's fence.

"Being a nonreader does not mean being an illiterate. Mellencamp can discuss the great antihero movies of the Fifties and Sixties--particularly 'Hud,' 'Cool Hand Luke' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire'--with special insight. And lately, he has taken up impressionist painting, which he knows well enough to know that his work sucks the mop.

"The down side of Mellencamp is that it would be easy for bonehead conservatives like Allan Bloom and William Safire to dismiss him as an ignorant hick with a talent for musical demagoguery. The up side is that, like most great rock-and-roll stars, he is emotionally authentic and vehemently insistent on his own experience. Therefore, he is a threat to boneheads everywhere and a tribute to what democracy we have left in this country. His fans, who come in all ages and political persuasions, seem to understand that and prize him for his frankness, if not for every point he makes. They also love his band, which he claims is the best in rock right now.

"Since Mellencamp has fought tooth and claw for his integrity after trading it for a few empty promises at the start of his career, I decided to test his resolve by opening our interview with an offer he couldn't refuse. It turned out I bid way low."

[Q] Playboy: We have a check here for a million dollars and all you have to do is change the words of We Are the People to We Are the Pepsi. Will you take it?

[A] Mellencamp: No, but make me another offer.

[Q] Playboy: Two million?

[A] Mellencamp: That's not enough yet.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Mellencamp: I just wouldn't do it. I'm not for hire. I could have made several million if I'd just sold Small Town. But give me that check unsigned. I'm going to keep that. Put it in a little frame.

[Q] Playboy: Why are you against the use of rock songs in commercials?

[A] Mellencamp: First of all, John Lennon didn't write Revolution to sell shoes. All those songs were like, "This is what I believe in, this is what I do, this is my generation." But the corporations say, "We didn't do anything to degrade that song. We just put our product in front of it." Well, that's just the point. You put your product in front of it. That's so far from the main event, it's silly.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of musicians who sell their music for commercials?

[A] Mellencamp: I have no judgment to make on those people. They're just telling us what they stand for. Of course, that's easy for me to say. I've made a lot of money in the music business, and I'm not broke. If some musicians get a minor hit, they want to make sure that they exploit it to the maximum. It's like you rock journalists; pretty soon you realize that you have to pay the bills. So I understand why some guys do it. I don't understand guys who have already made a lot of money doing it.

[Q] Playboy: You mean there's a difference between an old bluesman in a beer commercial and Michael Jackson's endorsing Pepsi?

[A] Mellencamp: Did Michael really need extra cash to buy the Elephant Man bones?

[Q] Playboy: Would you go as far as Tom Waits, who said he's waiting for all the guys who have sold their music for jingles to die, so he could piss on their graves?

[A] Mellencamp: No, I think that's a little extreme. I'm an old hippie, and I believe in live and let live. They justify it to themselves, and that's all you need in life, your own justification. For me to stand in judgment of these people is not right. They do what they have to do to get by.

[Q] Playboy: Lou Reed is another guy who took the commercial route.

[A] Mellencamp: I spoke to Lou about that in great detail. He spent three days at my house, and me and him talked about many things. It was a great pleasure for me, because he told me how he felt about his drug songs and how he'd been criticized for them. I had to ask him, "How about this motor-scooter advertisement?" And he said, "Well, my biggest problem in life is that I've never been commercial. I saw it as a way for me to get my songs to a lot of people. I didn't make that much money." So he had his reasons. I made my point and he asked me to see it from his side.

[Q] Playboy: When Reed puts out a record, he asks to be taken seriously as an artist. Isn't it reasonable for people to expect artists not to be for sale in that way?

[A] Mellencamp: Exactly. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't be writing Saturday-morning TV shows, which is what these commercials are. How can anyone take Phil Collins seriously when his biggest hit is now a jingle? He's a nice guy, but I can't figure why he would need more money. Some people make their living at commercials, and that's what they should do. They write jingles. I write songs.

[Q] Playboy: And the twain should never meet?

[A] Mellencamp: That's right. Never.

[Q] Playboy: Right now, rock and roll is in the schizophrenic position of being co-opted and trivialized by Madison Avenue, just as conservatives are trying to turn it into the great Satan. The Parents' Music Resource Center says that all it advocates is labeling, not censorship. What's wrong with providing the consumer with a little information?

[A] Mellencamp: Well, it is censorship. I don't care what anybody says. Who's to judge what's R- or PG-rated? Setting up an authority to judge that way is censorship. Thirty years ago, they were saying, "This nigger-bop music is destroying the white race." This conversation isn't even fun anymore. If rock and roll is so bad, how have we survived as a nation with all these children of rock and roll growing up?

[Q] Playboy: You and your band seem healthy enough. You're doing exactly what you want to do; you're successful at it. There are no apparent neuroses.

[A] Mellencamp: The only neurosis in this band is that we're all afraid that we made decisions as teenagers to pursue a career in rock and roll--but now we're adults. That's the only thing I wrestle with: At fourteen, I made a decision to do this, and now I'm thirty-seven and still in it. But lately, I've been feeling better even about that. I guess.

[Q] Playboy: Back to censorship. Susan Baker, the wife of the Secretary of State, wrote an essay in Billboard in which she complained about Two Live Crew, the black rap group that has the song We Want Some Pussy. She seemed particularly upset that children might hear lyrics about having "a big black dick." What would you do if your seventeen-year-old daughter, Michelle, came home with that record?

[A] Mellencamp: So what? She's not an idiot. She knows what things are and what they aren't. If she has to learn those things off a record, then she's in serious trouble. Parents who want to shield their children ought to think about preparing them for the real world. If We Want Some Pussy is as bad as it gets, then they're leading a charmed life, let me tell you. These women into censorship seem to have a lot of time on their hands, being married to politicians who aren't ever home. There are a lot of people in this country who are homeless. There are a lot of people who are starving. There are a lot of people who are out of work. Who cares if Two Live Crew wants some pussy?

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if Michelle became interested in bands such as Slayer and Venom, which make a big deal out of worshiping Satan?

[A] Mellencamp: George Green, the guy I write songs with, has a son who plays in a band that covers those kinds of songs. Nick is a funny kid: His father likes Simon and Garfunkes, so Nick likes a record only if it'll clear the room of any adults. About six months ago, it looked like Nick was going too far with the Satanism stuff, so they wanted me to talk to him. I did, and Nick just said, "John, it's an act. It's just a way to get some attention. That's all it is."

[A] I have to believe that the majority of the time, that's all it is. I've read those weird accounts of murder and stuff, and I think there's a case of a kid saying a record made him do something, made him feel like his back was to the wall and, like, he had to follow through with it. It's like that Dungeons and Dragons game. Or other games. I've played a lot of games, and never once did I really want to buy Boardwalk.

[Q] Playboy: Dungeons and Dragons is on the P.M.R.C. hit list as well.

[A] Mellencamp: It's like they're so bored that they can't see any real problems, so they make them up. When they find an oddball case who is willing to say he did something because of a song, it's headlines for them.

[Q] Playboy: When a kid dies or commits suicide, don't you think parents need to blame it on something?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah: "It couldn't be my fault, so Ozzy Osbourne must have done it." Well, I've met Ozzy, and he's about as threatening as a fart in a windstorm. These people--the P.M.R.C.--are not even worthy of conversation. They don't deserve attention.

[Q] Playboy: When Elvis Costello signed with Warner Bros., he found an anti-obscenity clause in his contract. Apparently, he was told not to worry about it; no one would take it seriously. Costello wanted to know what would happen if some right-wing wacko bought the corporation and he wanted to use the word fuck. The climate can change for the worse any time, and the corporations want all their options open.

[A] Mellencamp: Well, I may have one. I signed my contract in 1975, and at the time, I was just damn happy to have a record deal. There could be one in mine. But I've said some pretty disgusting things on record. I had an album, Nothing Matters and What if It Did, where I said, "Stick your pussy on my face." Nobody batted an eyelash. They sold half a million copies of that thing. I must admit, I did get some mail from parents who were pissed off about it.

[Q] Playboy: You've been battling censorship since you were a kid. There's a story that your mother washed out your mouth with soap for saying "fuck." After which, you said, "Fuck you, Mom." Correct?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. I didn't have much respect as a kid.

[Q] Playboy: Would you be doing what you're doing today if you'd knuckled under?

[A] Mellencamp: No. But there's a lot of kids who will say that to their parents.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there's too much acquiescence to authority figures?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah, and it goes on through our entire lives--in churches, in schools, by the Government. And I always felt that, somehow. I always figured if Mom and Dad were mad about it, it must be Ok. As long as the school thinks it's unacceptable, it's all right--because what authority figures think is important is just so far from what a teenager thinks is important. I never saw anything wrong with that.

[A] I was brought up differently from other people. My big advice from my grandpa was, "If you're going to hit a cocksucker, kill him." That's the way I was taught. If you're going to fight, fight. My daughter Michelle lets me know what she's feeling. She don't go, "Fuck you, Dad," but she lets me know in no uncertain terms that she's unhappy with a grounding I put on her. That's an interesting thing: None of my kids swear. I swear like a drunken sailor. It embarrasses my kids when I swear in front of their friends.

[A] "Dad, I've got a new boyfriend coming over here. Don't cuss."

[A] "I can't talk, then; is that what you're saying, Michelle? I know your boyfriend swears. Why can't I?"

[A] "Because it looks bad for parents to swear."

[A] "OK, I won't say a goddamn word."

[A] It's like smoking. My mom didn't smoke. My dad didn't smoke. There's five of us kids in the family and every one of us, except one, smokes. These things seem to leapfrog generations.

[Q] Playboy: What does Michelle think of your music?

[A] Mellencamp: My wife told me that she's gone into her room numerous times to see Michelle listening to my latest album. But, for some reason, it made my wife sad. I think my wife was implying that I wasn't communicating very well with Michelle.

[Q] Playboy: Do you know why?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. She skipped a class the other day, and I grounded her. I've done a lot of crazy things, but skipping school is not a good idea. It has a throw-over effect on the rest of your life. If you skip school, you might skip work and not have a job.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe in taking a job--or a school--and shoving it?

[A] Mellencamp: No, because you've got to make a living, man. That's the hard fact. I didn't want to learn, but I did learn, because they made me. And now they're paying for it. They taught me how to write, and they're paying for it.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about discipline?

[A] Mellencamp: I took my share of ass beatings from the old man for things that I did. That does not work. You hit a kid one time to get his attention, and the second hit is for you. The third hit is definitely for you. Bang--I want to talk to you. Bang, bang, bang--it's just to vent your frustration on someone who's weaker. That does not work. And that's what many schools are based on. I don't give a shit how many times older people say, "That's the way I was brought up." It does not work.

[A] I got paddled once in school when I was in sixth grade. Man, that just makes you hate so much when they do that. It made me hate that guy so much, much more than any Ozzy Osbourne record could make me hate. I wasn't doing anything. I was just trying to burn down the school.

[Q] Playboy: That's all?

[A] Mellencamp: How can you burn down a school when you're in the sixth grade? I had three kitchen matches and we were trying to set some crayons on fire. Out on the playground. The school was made of bricks. But I was accused of trying to burn it down. Got my ass beaten. But my old man rose to the occasion. He was in that guy's face. And he should have been.

[Q] Playboy: What have you told Michelle about drugs?

[A] Mellencamp: She knows all about drugs. Basically, I pointed to a few acquaintances who were drug users, and I had her sit there and watch. I said, "Just watch this guy. He's drunk and this is where it leads to. If this is what you want your life to be, go to it. If it isn't, let's have a conversation about drinking." As of yet, I've not seen her come home drunk.

[Q] Playboy: Do you drink?

[A] Mellencamp: I haven't drunk whiskey--or taken drugs--since 1971.

[Q] Playboy: What made you come to that decision?

[A] Mellencamp: Uncalled-for sarcasm, a bad temper and being out of control. It also made me sick. I was in college, smoking pot on the couch, not going to classes. I mean, what was I paying this money for? It was just a matter of taking a look at the situation and saying, "This is not for me." So I just quit.

[A] Whether this is right or wrong, I see drinking as a character flaw.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Mellencamp: Because we have the ability to control our emotions, our thoughts, our logic. Life is, in my mind, a difficult experience, and the challenge is to rise above it. If you have to take up something to do that, you've got a problem. I don't see anything wrong with a casual drink, but don't come around to have a conversation with me if you're drunk. I'll make fun of you until it's fucking embarrassing.

[Q] Playboy: There seems to be a family trait that goes back to your grandfather. The positive side of that trait is the capacity to fight for what you believe in. The negative side, which some of your relatives have in spades, is being resentful and wanting to hit someone in a bar.

[A] Mellencamp: Two different things. You fight for what you believe in because you care. You hit a guy in a bar because you're an asshole. I have enabled myself to be in the position I want to be in. Why? Because I'm lucky? No. I don't believe in luck. There's no such thing as luck. I'm here because I was determined. I didn't want so much to be a rock star as to be my own boss. I could have applied this will to something else and been just as successful. In this country, they try to sell you happiness as something cheap and easy to obtain: Get married, have a family, be happy. Well, getting married is a very hard job. For most guys, it's "Hey, baby, get me a beer." And the baby gets him a beer. And he drinks it. And he farts, and he snores. But that's not real. Particularly in the Eighties.

[A] Don't laugh, because that's what I think. I think you've got to come to the core of yourself. I think you've got to wrestle every demon there is to wrestle. And after twenty-five or thirty years, what can they do to break up that relationship? They're going to have to kill you. Because we've been through being broke, we've been through kids who hated us, we've been through payments we couldn't make. Then maybe you can say, "Baby, get me a beer," and she'll be happy to do it.

[A] You don't just get out of college and say, "Hey, bitch, bring me some food." I know. I tried. It don't work, and it's not right. I have a friend who's getting divorced after twelve years because of behavior like that. His wife figured, "That's the way he is and I've got to accept that," until she met a guy at the shopping mall who didn't behave like that. That's a pretty typical thing.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you can spend the next thirty-five years with your wife, Vicky?

[A] Mellencamp: Well, if she can stand it, I can. I'm working harder at this marriage than anything I've ever done. Because I have experienced the other side of it. I tried to act like I didn't give a shit when I really did.

[Q] Playboy: Musicians and songwriters are pretty tough on the women in their lives, aren't they?

[A] Mellencamp: It's the boredom. Vicky allowed me the space to be bored. When you have my job and you don't have an album out, the days get very tedious. That's why many rock people, especially in the early stages, are drug addicts. How do you fill your time? "Who's to say the way a man should spend his days?"--that's where that line from Paper and Fire came from.

[Q] Playboy: Would you rank monogamy as one of the traditional American virtues you believe in?

[A] Mellencamp: That's fine talk. Fine talk. But it's a demon I wrestle with a lot. It's a habit, like quitting being a junkie. It's like, "Go ahead. Take off. Take the kids and leave. I don't care. I don't need you." That's big talk. Until they're gone. And you realize, Wait a minute, I take it back. When I married Vicky, I pretty much felt that I could do anything I wanted, because she really loved me. But I couldn't. Over the past few years, all of those things I used to partake in I don't want to be around or to hear about them. If I'm exposed to them, it's "Satan, get thee behind me."

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about music. Can you describe your songwriting process?

[A] Mellencamp: Before I can create anything, I've got to be real, real bored. I'd rather do anything in the world than sit down and write songs--until I start doing it. Then I'm into it, and I write every day. But the prospect of having to sit down and write songs--I won't write one for months. And if I do, I don't take it seriously, because I'm not in a writing "head." But when I am, it's, like, nonstop. I can't be interrupted. I think, eat and drink songs.

[Q] Playboy: Was the process on Big Daddy the same as on your earlier albums?

[A] Mellencamp: No, the last two albums I wrote and rewrote. These new songs I didn't even commit to paper. I just picked up my guitar and played them. There are thirty more songs that didn't get recorded. They might be even better than the ones on the record; I just happened to remember those. Big Daddy was probably more fun to make than to listen to. We had a great time. We worked from only six until midnight, and nobody gave a shit about right or wrong, 'cause there wasn't any. It was what it was. Studio gadgetry kills the creative process, so it was mostly live in the studio.

[Q] Playboy: Despite the fun you had in the studio, it sounds as if the different aspects of your personality were at war.

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah, I guess I always feared I'd grow up to be the enemy. Like the song Pop Singer. I never wanted to be a pop singer. I wanted to be a rock singer. There's just no room in today's market. It's all pop. The questions keep coming up: Now that I've done everything, why am I such a miserable son of a bitch? What kind of world are we living in? I think those are good questions after eight years of Reagan. "Thank God he went back to California," I say in Country Gentleman. He'll be doing product endorsements; you watch.

[Q] Playboy: Do you keep a diary to help you write your songs?

[A] Mellencamp: No, not really; but if I hear a line that I like, I'll write it down. I've got lines written down that are ten years old. When I'm in a writing head, I'll look at them to see if there's anything I want to use. I've got this one line--"If God loved a liar, he'd squeeze you to death"--that I must have read a hundred thousand times. I just haven't figured out how to work it into anything yet.

[Q] Playboy: What about the song Jack and Diane from your American Fool album? The meaning of the song seems to change when you hear it live.

[A] Mellencamp: The audience made it a real song. Before, it was just another story from me that really didn't hold together that well as a song. Those people believing it, that's the difference.

[A] If you believe a song--even a dumb one like Chewy, Chewy--people will believe you. There have been a lot of bands whose material wasn't that great, but they played with such conviction that you believed them. Jack and Diane was the opposite. It had no conviction because I didn't believe it. I never wanted to release it. The guys in the band persuaded me to put it on the album. The first time I played it, in front of maybe a thousand people, in 1982, it was, like, wait a minute! It didn't make any difference what I thought the song was, because it was now something else. A song behaves only as it should.

[Q] Playboy: On The Lonesome Jubilee, your previous album, you developed that wonderful sound--the combination of accordion and fiddle.

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. Gothic. Almost a cowboy movie. Like the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It makes you feel that way.

[Q] Playboy: What inspired it?

[A] Mellencamp: Basically, we've always used accordions, but they were synthesized sounds. The way we use the accordion is almost from the gutter. That's what the instrument feels like to me. The idea probably came from those early Rod Stewart albums, those old Irish-sounding reed accordions. It's almost the same, except that Stewart could sing, and I can't.

[A] The violin was an accident, just a silly idea I had one night in the studio. I wanted to add a country fiddle, so we called up Lisa Germano. She played so well that I sail to myself, "I'm going to hire this girl." So I hired her without knowing quite what I was going to do with her.

[Q] Playboy: The songs on The Lonesome Jubilee reminded us of a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, by a sociologist named Philip Slater. His thesis is that we live in a pathological culture hell-bent on destroying the community and then selling the desire for it back to us in the form of television and other media.

[A] Mellencamp: I haven't read that book, but let me tell you a little story. In Seymour, Indiana, when I was a kid in the late Fifties, on Friday nights everybody went to town. I don't give a shit--could be rain, snow, sleet, hail--everybody went to town. And there wasn't a damn thing you wanted to buy. People stood in the streets and talked and laughed and haw-hawed and hee-heed. I saw my friends, my parents saw their friends. It was a teeny town; everybody knew everything about everybody.

[A] You go uptown Friday night now, there's a bunch of kids riding around, which is fine with me, but you will not see one adult. No local merchant is open past six. Go down to that strip with all them fuckin' corporate-food signs hanging out and you'll see a bunch of isolated individuals, depressed, bummed out, eating sandwiches. Maybe they're sitting across the table from their wives, but they aren't talking. That's what it has turned into. We pioneered it. We wanted it that way and we got it. You should hear my grandmother talk about those times, how things have changed in small communities.

[Q] Playboy: There are some fresh winds of activism blowing--the Farm Aid concerts, for instance. Will we see any more Farm Aid benefits?

[A] Mellencamp: I doubt it; the reason being that awareness can go only so far. At a certain point, the Government has to do something. Raising money was never the point for me. It wasn't the point for Willie [Nelson], either. But he made a mistake at the first press conference. They asked him how much he wanted to raise, and he said some ridiculous figure, so people started holding him to it. The reason there were three Farm Aids was that Willie set a goal in his mind. I never intended to do more than one. People needed to know there was a farm problem, and we reminded them. We did it; what's the point in repeating ourselves? The second and the third were too much, but I did it for Willie.

[Q] Playboy: If benefits aren't going to do the job, do you see yourself getting more involved in politics?

[A] Mellencamp: No, because I'm just a song-and-dance man. You are much more qualified than I am. Why don't you run?

[Q] Playboy: You have a bigger following.

[A] Mellencamp: We'll give you a guitar, man.

[Q] Playboy: You haven't heard us sing.

[A] Mellencamp: Let me ask you a question: Have you ever heard my first record? Could anything be worse?

[Q] Playboy: It was pretty terrible. And your reviews were----

[A] Mellencamp: Brutal.

[Q] Playboy: The album set the tone for the next several years, didn't it?

[A] Mellencamp: I'm still fighting it. There are still people who think that John Mellencamp should not be making records. It's unhip to accept me as a serious songwriter. My logical side tells me I can't really blame them; the album was just too silly to be believable. My emotional side says, "What's wrong with you? That was fifteen years ago. You're going to hang a guy for a half dozen mistakes he made when he was only twenty-three years old?" I don't think there's been another band that was down that far and came back.

[Q] Playboy: What's your old manager Tony DeFries doing these days?

[A] Mellencamp: He owns Riva Publishing. They own my songs.

[Q] Playboy: Everything? Including what you're writing now?

[A] Mellencamp: You bet.

[Q] Playboy: You signed away your songwriting for life?

[A] Mellencamp: I was twenty-three years old when I signed this paper. "Here's a check for fifty thousand dollars," they said. I'm thinking to myself, Fifty grand for my songs. Two weeks ago, I couldn't give them away. That's the way it's done. You sign it and you spend the rest of your life fighting like a son of a bitch to get them back. It's an old story.

[Q] Playboy: It's an old story that includes many black musicians--and, to a lesser extent, the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. Does DeFries collect all your royalties?

[A] Mellencamp: I get seventy-five percent. He gets twenty-five percent. I've negotiated over the years to get some control. He lives in the house--but he can't paint the walls unless I say it's Ok.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you apparently think the early career guidance he gave you was lousy.

[A] Mellencamp: For some reason, there are some people I just cannot be shitty with. I hate that about me. I have to admit that Tony gave me the chance to make my first record. At the same time, he fucked up my career: He gave me the name Johnny Cougar, this ridiculous image I've had to beat down for ten years, giving interviews in my name and saying stupid things I never would have said.

[Q] Playboy: We remember the parade he staged for you through Seymour.

[A] Mellencamp: Oh, God! Where was my big rebellious attitude that time? Me and [guitarist] Larry Crane was riding in the back seat of this limo through downtown Seymour, going "Ohhh," so embarrassed I was throwing up. Ask Larry. I thought I was just some dumb-ass from Indiana; I better follow the program; my manager knows what makes rock and roll. That's why these days, I have a hard time taking orders from anybody.

[Q] Playboy: Was the parade the low point?

[A] Mellencamp: No, the low point was when the record came out. I look back and it's so bad it's hilarious. I could not write a song; I was just a guy who had sung in bands and maybe written a handful of songs to entertain friends in his apartment. I produced the album myself, never having been in a studio before. We did a few originals and a bunch of pitiful covers that were selected because we happened to know the chords. Ludicrous.

[Q] Playboy: Has your attitude toward the record business changed since your song Cheapshot, in 1980, in which you described its greed and shallowness?

[A] Mellencamp: I don't think we can just narrow it down to the music business. It's big business in general. And my attitude now is the same as then: It's us against them.

[Q] Playboy: Even though you're something of a big business yourself?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah, well, guys like us, we're lucky to be doing what we want. Some people aren't that fortunate. Satisfaction doesn't come from the money but from the work. However meager your job, there has to be some reason you're in it. Even if you're only collecting minimum wage, you've got to find happiness there, because that's the dirty trick that God played on us.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that the trick the capitalist system played on us?

[A] Mellencamp: That's true; but you know, God gave us the ability to think and to make decisions for ourselves. We look on that as a blessing, but we sure made a mess of it.

[Q] Playboy: Describe the Church of the Nazarene, in which you grew up.

[A] Mellencamp: It's a bunch of people who have narrow views and they all get together and rejoice in being narrow. No dancing, no wearing make-up, no going to movies.... Those people are going to read this and get mad.... But what are they reading this magazine for, anyway? Right? If you go to that church, you got no reason to have your nose in this magazine.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you wear a crucifix?

[A] Mellencamp: My kid Tedi Jo gave it to me.

[Q] Playboy: Does she go to Sunday school?

[A] Mellencamp: Yep. One of the women who works for us goes to a Pentecostal church. On Sunday, I ask, "You kids wanna go to church with Gracie today?" They go when they want to and they don't when they don't. Right now, Tedi Jo likes it a lot. She's seven and she likes all the singing and hollering and amening. Fine with me. I don't want to push my will on anybody, as far as religion goes. Making them go wouldn't make them any more religious.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider yourself a Christian?

[A] Mellencamp: Well, no. That would be a stretch. But I would say I believe in God. You got to believe in something, don't you?

[Q] Playboy: Why is there a picture of Jesus on your bass drum, then?

[A] Mellencamp: We need all the help we can get up there [laughs]. I just thought it was funny to show the picture on the back of the album cover--the painting of Jesus over the jukebox. You know, Jerry Lee Lewis thinks God does not sing Great Balls of Fire, but I'm sure that He does. I don't know what makes me do that shit. It's not really rebellion. It's just something I do.

[Q] Playboy: One of the songs you've done as an encore is Plastic Jesus, the tune Paul Newman sang in Cool Hand Luke.

[A] Mellencamp: [As Luke] "Stop feeding off me!"

[Q] Playboy: [As George Kennedy] "My boy Luke says he can eat fifty eggs, he can eat fifty eggs."

[A] Mellencamp: What did George call that girl who was washing the car? "Anything that looks so innocent and built like that just gotta be named ..." uh, "Lucille!" That's it. One of the greatest movies ever made! When it came to Seymour, I sat in that audience at the Vondee Theater twelve nights in a row. And I've watched it a zillion times since.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think you responded to that movie so strongly?

[A] Mellencamp: Because Luke was doing everything I wanted to do. I wanted to stand there and say, "Come and get me, big man." I wanted to have those conversations, I wanted to know things were real. I'm also thinking of the movie Hud now. I wanted people to know I was alive.... Now I don't care so much. Now I have more feeling for other people. But then it was me, me, me all the time. I wanted to scream the loudest, be the first one there and the last to leave. That was my goal in life.

[Q] Playboy: Mellowed or not, you still seem to have some of Luke's spirit. In that basketball game with the stagehands you played the other day, you committed murder.

[A] Mellencamp: Sure. I was mad. It goes way beyond caring whether I win or lose. It's life and death. It's war. I'm not mature enough to say, "Fuck it, it's just a basketball game." I just hate defeat.

[Q] Playboy: What is that on your arm?

[A] Mellencamp: A tattoo of my wife. Sad to say, I owned a tattoo parlor for a while. Big mistake. Big mistake. All of us got tattoos now, and none of us want them. You get around people who are doing it, it seems like a good idea. A work of art, right there on your body. Then you think if one is good, two is better. The whole world becomes a tattoo. I got three of the fuckers now. My wife has two. Even my aunt Toots got a tattoo, and she's fifty-seven years old. She got a tattoo on her leg that says Hurts So Good. Swear to God!

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned the movie Hud. Hasn't that been the inspiration for a number of your songs?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. The line "It's a lonely ol' night" I got from a conversation between Hud and the boy when they're driving into town. There's a speech the grandfather gives about ideals and principles. Hud asks him, "Why don't you like me?" and the grandfather says, "'Cause you don't respect nothin'. You keep no check on your appetites." That's in the last verse of Paper and Fire.

[Q] Playboy: Your regret over not keeping a check on your appetites seems an odd sentiment. After all, Hud was the rock-and-roll star in that movie, not the grandfather.

[A] Mellencamp: But it's true, and amen to that. I burned up my first marriage and was approaching burning up my second marriage until about two years ago. I had to assess my lifestyle and say, "That's it." When you've behaved in a certain way for thirty years, it's like a junkie getting off the stuff. But my family and kids were more important to me than anything. There's two John Mellencamps--there's this monster like Hud and the family man like the grandfather. I don't like being on the road because of the monster I can become. I just hope now I can maintain my dignity. I used to think you had to be a miserable motherfucker to be successful as a writer. I don't think so anymore. I've actually been happy the past couple of years, and I don't want to blow it.

[Q] Playboy: From the stories we've heard about your uncle Joe, he sounds a lot like Hud.

[A] Mellencamp: When Hud says, "All right, I'll bite. What turned ya sour on me?--not that I give a damn," that was Joe. He didn't give a damn. He didn't respect nobody. He just cared about himself. As long as he could follow his dick around and impose his will on people, he was happy. He could charm the pants right off you, if he wanted to, but he rarely wanted to. He would try to humiliate you if he could. He had huge arms, and he loved to show his power to you, just get them arms in your face. Very interesting person. But the most interesting thing was when Grandpa died. Joe was like a new person. Suddenly, it was himself. He didn't have any kids or family. He had a wife and an illegitimate kid from some girl but not a real family. The day he turned to me and asked me if I wanted a Coke, I thought he'd flipped out. It was an eye opener to see a man realize what his life had been and be strong enough to come to me and apologize for twenty years of being a prick. Suddenly, everything was all right. And he did that with everyone in the family. He and my dad hadn't spoke for twenty-three years, since they had a fistfight in their twenties. Then they were best friends again. Look at me [points to his eyes]. This guy Joe was an asshole to me my entire life, but I still get tears thinking about him. I'm so bummed that he's dead. I hate that he's dead. He lived life the way he wanted to. He paid for it. Like I said in that song Minutes to Memories: "I do things my way and I pay a high price." That was Joe Mellencamp. No matter how painful his life was, he was an artist.

[Q] Playboy: What did he die of?

[A] Mellencamp: Liver cancer. I visited him the day before he died. He looked at me and in a low voice, he said, "John, can you think of a way to get me out of this?"

[A] I said, "No, I don't think so, Joe."

[A] The end of the Joe Mellencamp story is that his wife, Rose, who was married to him since they were kids, still sleeps with his clothes. He's been gone a year and a half now, and she can still smell Joe. He had a distinct odor. He never used a deodorant. But he didn't have a bad smell. He just smelled like Joe. His tobacco is still sitting there. His El Camino is still sitting there. When I'm in Seymour, I go over there just to look at his El Camino.

[Q] Playboy: The lines "My whole life, I've done what I'm supposed to do / Now I'd like to maybe do something for myself," from The Real Life, sound like something out of your notebook.

[A] Mellencamp: They were. My other uncle, Jay, said those exact words to me. He's my dad's brother, too. There's Joe, Dad and Jay. And Jay's about forty-five years old now. Got married when he was seventeen. And he behaved accordingly. They had kids, they fought a lot and just recently got divorced. Shocked everybody, because they'd been married so long. I about died.

[A] So Jay came over to Bloomington one afternoon and we were talking. I said, "What are you going to do?" He didn't have a job or anything. He didn't even have a house, because his wife had that. He said, "I'm gonna do what the hell I wanna do." That whole conversation with Jackson Jackson in that song, that's just me being a reporter. You can't get any more real than that talk we had. I wrote it on a napkin and took it home.

[Q] Playboy: A lot of your songs are about finding joy in everyday life, doing your duty. But didn't your uncle Jay want to find his meaning somewhere else?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. He never found happiness in those small things. But in my songs, I want to show that you can find happiness there. The success of paying your phone bill, making the last payment on your car, raising two daughters who are nice girls was not success for Jay. He had to sacrifice his happiness for his kids, and it's a real victory that they turned out so great. But I do understand what he was saying. He was saying. "OK, goddamn it, I've done all that. My kids are grown, I'm getting divorced--I'm gonna find out what I wanna do."

[Q] Playboy: Did he find out?

[A] Mellencamp: Yeah. He went back to pouring concrete. That's what he'd done all his life.

[Q] Playboy: He worked with your uncle Joe?

[A] Mellencamp: They were partners. He got out there and discovered that job hunting was very degrading after he'd been self-employed for twenty-seven years. The first thing they wanted to know was why he wasn't pouring concrete anymore. With Jay, it was "Fuck. I don't wanna talk about that anymore. Are you gonna give me the job or not?" He went through a couple of those experiences and decided he could make more money pouring concrete.

[Q] Playboy: What about the third brother in that triumvirate, your dad?

[A] Mellencamp: I hate to say it, but I think he was a lot like me. I'm aggressive, he was aggressive. We had only one fistfight. and I lost. I thought, Ok, I never should have done that. He was under a lot of strain and pressure at his job. He'd go to work twelve hours a day, and he'd come home, and the last thing he wanted to hear was that I had screwed up somewhere. It was like, "We got five kids in this family. Why don't you act like you got some sense?"

[A] In my family, we were all Mellencamps. Which at times was a troubling situation. If I had something to say, I had to say it loud, because I had two brothers and two sisters who wanted to say something and a father who didn't want to hear any of it. We all thought we could show up first, stay longer, scream louder. I wouldn't want to come home to that.

[A] If you care about your job and you have all these emotions during the day, you have to sit in front of the TV for two hours to mellow out. That's your punishment for doing a good job. You sit there and quake for two hours.

[A] It amazes me about guys who care. Not to feel sorry for myself, but I was always criticized for throwing shit off the stage and wheeling my arms around and yelling at people, but I didn't do it to get attention; I did it to make a point about the quality of the sound system. If I don't care, who will?

[Q] Playboy: In your search for quality, we understand you've discovered painting. How did a hardheaded Hoosier like yourself decide on impressionism?

[A] Mellencamp: Oh, I just started painting and someone said, "That's an impressionistic-type painting." So, not knowing what the hell it was, I started looking around and discovered Degas and Renoir and all those fuckin' guys--the big guys, the Bob Dylans of impressionism, who knew what they were doing. I fell in love with the stuff. It's amazing to me that those guys could capture a moment on canvas that would last forever. I connect to Renoir's On the Terrace as much as I do to Like a Rolling Stone or A Streetcar Named Desire. Almost makes me cry to look at it.

[Q] Playboy: What started you painting?

[A] Mellencamp: My wife wanted to spend fifteen thousand dollars on a painting I hadn't seen. I said. "You want to spend fifteen thousand dollars for a fuckin' picture? No way. Show me this picture and I'll paint it and save myself fifteen thousand dollars." So she showed me the picture. And being an asshole. I painted it. And it didn't look that bad. But fuck how it looked; I had fun doing it. At first, I was doing one painting every few months, then three or four paintings a day. Now I've got a whole bunch of paintings and one good one. If you squint your eyes, it looks pretty good. Actually, the clown's sleeve looks good. And the best thing is. I don't have to sell it. I don't have to learn this in public, like I did with songwriting.

[Q] Playboy: What's going on with your movie script?

[A] Mellencamp: Nothing. Just a lot of talk. That's how movies are made. You talk for several years and then suddenly it's on HBO. Larry McMurtry rewrote the script two or three times.

[Q] Playboy: Have you taken acting lessons?

[A] Mellencamp: No. Nobody taught me how to sing. I got to pay some respect to what I read about guys like Jackie Gleason and W. C. Fields. Their smartass remarks make a lot of sense sometimes. "Practice is for suckers"--that's what Fields said about rehearsing. Gleason never practiced, never had an acting class.

[Q] Playboy: What's the script about?

[A] Mellencamp: It's about what all McMurtry's stuff is about, really. It's about a man coming to terms with what is real in his life and what he thought was real. And it's about coming to the end of yourself. McMurtry wrote Hud, remember. Not the screenplay but the book, which was his college thesis for literature. The thing about Hud was that he never came to the end of himself. He just said, "This is how I am, and this is how I'm going to stay." Today, they would never make a movie like that, because his character is not sympathetic. That's a big word in Hollywood: sympathetic. They think you got to like the guy. Well, you don't. You got to identify with him. Identifying is not always liking. You know, I see the worst of myself in my kids, but I still love them.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think people in Hollywood are dense, stupid?

[A] Mellencamp: It's not that they're stupid, it's that they're protecting their jobs. It's very easy to say no in Hollywood. The minute you say yes, you're saying yes to a minimum of seven or eight million dollars. They see a blockbuster like Rocky with a sympathetic hero, they want more sympathetic heroes. I could have made this movie three years ago with a major studio, but they wanted concert footage.

[A] We finally found a film company that understands that my character is not sympathetic. They're willing to take a chance with that. But with me not being an actor, they're having a problem with the money. The budget is seven to ten million dollars, and this is a small company. We've worked for a year with these people, and they may still say no. Whatever they do, we'll just keep pushing on it. That's the way movies are made. Terms of Endearment took nine years.

[Q] Playboy: So you may have to go to Hollywood after all?

[A] Mellencamp: Look: A lot of rock guys, when they make a movie, they get in there and say, "OK, I'm an actor. Shove me around." I'm not going to do that. I have learned my lesson. They aren't going to shove me around. I'm going to do it my way, and then if it's fucked, I'll take the blame for it. "Sorry you wasted your money and I wasted my time." And that's the way it's going to be, or it ain't going to be.

[A] Nobody taught me how to sing, and nobody's going to teach me how to act. I don't know that the movie will be any good. It may turn out like my first album. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I'm going to go back and make records. Because that's what I do. I make records. I tell this to all those people, and for some reason, it scares them.

"How can anyone take Phil Collins seriously when his biggest hit is now a jingle? He's a nice guy, but I can't figure why he would need more money."