Over the years, there have been plenty of clues that Mellencamp wasn’t your typical self-obsessed rock star. He was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and, 50 years later, chooses to live there still. The title of his greatest-hits album contains neither the word “greatest” nor “hits”: it’s called The Best That I Could Do.
When we start talking about Bloom- ington’s other great songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael, Mellencamp takes the modest route again. “The thing about Hoagy that I really related to was he always felt like the little brother, because also from Indiana is, er...” Mellencamp racks his brain. “Oh, come on, I’m drawing a blank now. I only have room for five names in my head. Hold on, I need my wife.” He wanders through his house, searching for help. “Hey, Elaine? Who was the guy from Peru, Indiana, who was the great songwriter? Oh, I’m ashamed.”
It was Cole Porter that Carmichael felt he was playing second string to. And Mellencamp relates to this? “Oh, sure. See, if someone like Elvis Costello writes a good song, nobody’s surprised, but if John Mellencamp writes a good song, it’s like: Jesus Christ, how’d that happen? If you hear a good song by me, you know I had to work my ass off.”
Mellencamp built his reputation as a heartland rocker, singing songs of Midwest kids gazing into a promising future or resigning themselves to a less happy reality. In recent years, however, he has been more of a musical innovator, collaborating with the DJ Junior Vasquez, soul singer India Arie and rapper Chuck D — the last-named on the title track of the album Cuttin’ Heads. A song from that album, Peaceful World, became a staple of America’s post-9/11 mourning.
Only Mellencamp’s innate modesty can explain why, after Cuttin’ Heads, he was thinking of never making another record. His contract was up, and he felt no great urge to renew it. Then his label bosses saw him perform Robert Johnson’s Stones in my Passway live, and asked him if he would make a whole album of blues songs.
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“I said, ‘Let’s take this on a let’s-see basis,’” he says. “‘I can play this one song pretty good, but who knows if I can play any more of them?’” Sony’s Legacy division began sending Mellencamp old blues and folk songs. “You know, I thought I knew about American music,” he says, “but you open up that door and there’s so much material out there. It was a history lesson.”
The result is Trouble No More (due out on August 18 on Columbia), an album that encompasses songs written by Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Willie Dixon and Memphis Minnie, and that old workhorse, Traditional. While blues and folk form the backbone of the album, Mellencamp rings the changes by including a Lucinda Williams track, the Tin Pan Alley standard The End of the World and a radio-friendly romp through the 1950s jukebox hit Teardrops Will Fall — as well as a song by Carmichael.
These days, a singer who opts to cover old blues or folk songs is making a deliberate departure from the norm, but Mellencamp points out that it would once have been par for the course: “Those first couple of Dylan albums, that’s what he was doing there. And the early Rolling Stones records are full of old blues covers.”
Mellencamp says that the secret to making the album work was to treat it as a performance, not a record. He makes the point in a typically self-mocking way. “It’s a humbling situation when you realise you could look like a real idiot if you screw up. I don’t mind looking like an idiot. I’ve done that many times in my career. But I’d look like a real idiot this time. So this record was performed hundreds of times in rehearsal before we walked into the studio.”
Mellencamp praises the contribution of his guitar player, Andy York. Legend has it that Johnson sold his soul to the devil in return for his astonishing guitar technique. York had to learn how to emulate Johnson while retaining his soul. “Basically, what he does is impossible,” says Mellencamp. “We were rehearsing a song for a Willie Nelson TV show, and Eric Clapton stuck his head in the room and just said: ‘Wow.’ Andy was real pumped up about that.”
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While Trouble No More has given Mellencamp a reason to continue making albums, he hopes that it will also help to keep people in touch with a musical heritage they are in danger of losing. “It’s just astonishing that we have such a wealth of music that is going to go unheard,” he says. “And that nobody seems to mind.” Trouble No More proves that we all should.
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