John Mellencamp

12.14.2007 -- Review by: C. Eric Banister

The last book written about Mellencamp was in 1986 when Martin Torgoff released American Fool: The Roots and Improbably Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp, which he wrote with Mellencamp’s cooperation in 1984-85. The book ends just as Scarecrow was being released and covers mainly his recording of American Fool and Uh-huh. To me, Torgoff, the New Yorker, cast the Midwest as backward and a place holding no reason why anyone would want to stay for any length of time. So the book, although well written and fairly informative, never set well with me.

I read about Born In A Small Town and looked up the author, Heather Johnson, to find she was born in Ohio and attended college in Illinois. A little closer to home, my hopes rose.

But they shouldn’t have.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is an awful book, it’s just not the book I, and I think many Mellencamp fans, has hoped for. If you are a new fan, this book will probably be a good and informative read. The book starts with Mellencamp’s childhood and brings us to the early stages of recording for Freedom’s Road. There is a lot of good information on the coming and going of band members and how some songs came to be. In other words, it is a standard biography.

But maybe that was Ms. Johnson’s goal. Maybe this is exactly the book she set out to write.

But it wasn’t the book that needed to be written. John Mellencamp, as of March 10, 2008 a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, is a complex person and that is the story I want to read. Ms. Johnson touches on this several times in the book, but it is merely a glance and off to the next subject. She talks about how Mellencamp craves tension in the studio, even going so far as to threaten firing the band. The reasons for this are never explored and perhaps it was beyond the scope of the book.

There are several fascinating themes that run through the life and work of Mellencamp such as his often times dismissive attitudes toward religion while the theme and imagery still pop up in his songs throughout the years or the rough relationship he shared with his father and how that was passed along to Mellencamps’ own daughters before he chose to break the cycle with his two sons. These are not easy themes, but they are hardly scratched at in Born In A Small Town.

Ms. Johnson’s draws from many sources and interviews, but she was not granted access to Mellencamp himself, which might be part of the reason that the biography doesn’t go any deeper than it does.

I did find myself wishing she had checked a few of her facts a bit more stringently, from misspelled small town names (it’s Elletsville, not Elotsville) to larger chunks of info (for example, the “Pink Houses” video was shot in Austin, Ind., not Austin, Texas and Harvey Gooden is not, nor has he ever been, the Mayor of Austin, which elected its first Mayor this year).

While this is a good start, my hope is that some day the biography of John Mellencamp will be written that will help us understand the complex person he is while still giving us information on his creative and deep catalog of work.