He did so again on his full-artistic breakthrough album, August 1985's Scarecrow, before dropping the Cougar moniker entirely when the '90s rolled around.
Scarecrow is the LP that catapulted Mellencamp from being known as a brash hitmaker showing flashes of brilliance into the echelon of insightful, observational songwriters to be reckoned with, on par with the best scribes of the rock era-the likes of Robbie Robertson, John Fogerty, and, yes, Bob Dylan. If you paid attention to the Cougar mythos beyond all the MTV-era "Little Bastard" noise, you'd have already picked up the scent in pre-Scarecrow songs like 1979's "Great Mid-West" (from the self-titled John Cougar), the bridge section of American Fool's chart-topping 1982 hit "Jack & Diane," and the defiant slant of Uh-Huh's "Crumblin' Down" coupled with the melancholic, wistful verses of "Pink Houses."
My initial copy of Scarecrow was the 1985 Riva/PolyGram cassette-it was the height of the Sony Walkman era, mind you. The first time I cued up the ostensible title track, "Rain on the Scarecrow," I felt immediately attuned to a world I was learning about firsthand while attending college in a Midwestern city. I was surrounded by the very farmlands and personal hardships Mellencamp was describing. I'm forever transported to the feelings garnered during that firstimpression experience whenever I subsequently played the 1985 Riva/Mercury LP, 1994 Mobile Fidelity UDCD, and 2005 Mercury/ Island CD.
This story is from the February - March 2023 edition of Sound & Vision.
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This story is from the February - March 2023 edition of Sound & Vision.
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