There is a great documentary on Netflix about the legendary record producer Clive Davis. One of the more interesting moments in the film is when Davis describes some of the fine artists he didn’t sign to his label, either because someone else beat him to punch or because he thought the artist in question just didn’t fit in with his catalog.
One example he gives of the latter is John Mellencamp, who, despite being saddled with the dumb, management-invented stage-name of John Cougar, hit the airwaves like a thunderbolt in the early 1980s. Mellencamp, Davis lamented, seemed too similar to another of Davis’s great artists, Bruce Springsteen, in that they both played soaring, electrified dirges about working class America (i.e., so-called “Heartland Rock,” even though Springsteen is famously from New Jersey). So, to his later regret, Davis passed.
Too bad for him. Mellencamp sold a bazillion records over the years, while gradually ditching the John Couger moniker and returning to his own, real name. As he did so, I gradually came to like him more and more. His early hits like “Jack and Diane” didn’t speak to me, perhaps because I was in high school at the time (just like Jack and Diane), and while the song was a paeon to lost youth and spirit, I was miserable in high school. (Later, I would realize that I probably would have liked high school a lot better if I had gone to Mellencamp’s, nestled somewhere in small-town America, full of cool, down-to-earth, nice kids instead of the jocks and preppies I was used to. And, yes, I eventually fell in love with and married a girl named Diane.)
But my opinion of Mellencamp’s music changed when his “Authority Song” came out. Not only is it one of the most danceable songs of the 80’s, it’s also one of rock music’s most defiant and rebellious rejections of… well…authority.
I’ve liked Mellencamp ever since. In fact, I think he’s a bit of genius.
Rock on…
Ash Clifton, Writer 