![]() ![]() There ain’t nobody going to fly down to Bloomington, Indiana, to see John Mellencamp singing at a toga party and think, Hey, this guy’s really got it! So he gets in the car and drives to New York. system and playing at Alpha Chi Omega doesn’t mean nothin’. He is playing at the Beta house in Bloomington, he is playing at Alpha Chi Omega, and he knows that having a bigger P.A. This is John’s earliest memory of wanting to be a singer. John has the sideburns Scotch-taped on, and he’s upstairs with the Julie London album. His voluminous forelock drops on his eyelid. So you are”-he turns pale, no doubt from dismay-“forty years old.” “OK, let’s say”-he puckers up his lips and glances out the side of his right eye-“say, you were nineteen in 1964, so in 1974, you were twenty-nine, and in 1984, you were thirty-nine. “Well, you shouldn’t have brought that name up,” says John, tickled. “Tom Van Arsdale! Tom and Dick Van Arsdale played basketball for Indiana in 19 64!” “I was up here lots of times with Fred Schmidt, the Olympic butterflier, when I was at school here,” I say, “and Tom Van Arsdale.” “You think, Where is this guy taking me?” “See, you don’t know,” says John, happily, “if I’m driving you out here to rape you or….” We are done looking at the motorcycles and are out riding around in the hills in his wife’s BMW. ![]() “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know: ‘Fuck me go to hell.’” “So when did you go to school down here?” says John. Mellencamp, second son of Marilyn Lowe Mellencamp, a Hoosier woman of fashion, and Richard Lee Mellencamp, executive vice-president of Robbins Electric Company, was born on October 7, 1951, in Seymour, Indiana, with a tumor the size of an acorn squash on the back of his neck survived married at 17 divorced fell for a California girl rose to fame with American Fool, the best-selling album of 1982 (with “Hurts So Good” and “Jack & Diane”), Uh-Huh (with “Pink Houses” and “Authority Song”), which sold 2,200,000, and the recent Scarecrow and now he lives in Bloomington, home of Indiana University. While it is playing, I will tell you that John J. “Only problem is, I had to get older to do it.”Īt this point, you should put on a John Cougar Mellencamp song. “When I was a kid,” he says, “I didn’t want to do anything but play guitar, ride around on motorcycles, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, chase girls and act stupid.” The nice, thick, greasy flop of hair, boy’s hips, big shoulders. “No, it’s too old and fragile.” He starts to smile. Then we look at his FXRS and his wife’s ’68 441 Victor, which is the type of bike John had when he was a kid in Seymour, Indiana, before he was a rock ’n’ roll star, and his old BSA, and then we go into the other garage and look at his ’56 salmon-colored Corvette. We are looking at his ’78 custom Harley Low Rider. “It’s just like the old-fashioned kind,” says John. We are standing in the garage behind John Mellencamp’s house in Bloomington, Indiana. ![]()
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