CENTERSTAGE

CENTERSTAGE

SOME THINGS MATTER AND WHAT IF THEY DIDN’T?

JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP Joe Louis Arena, Detroit, MI (November 7, 1987)

by Chuck Eddy

The last stadium rock concert I saw was the first Farm Aid benefit, back two years ago in Champaign, Illinois, just a week or so after John-Boy Mellencamp’s Scarecrow came out. It rained, and the Beach Boys were awful, but JCM won me over—he only sang four or five tunes, but he sang ’em bouncing off walls like a squash-ball wired on No-Doz. He owned the Midwest that day. I’d heard the tales of cockiness and vulgar abandon that’d followed the guy around since his first Cougar shows, but what I witnessed Farm Aid afternoon must’ve been some kind of zenith.

It’s like all John’s arrogance finally had a purpose, and he knew it, and the idea of suddenly graduating into virtue (along with these once-in-a-lifetime songs he was unveiling so close to home) wound him up so tight that he didn’t know, or care, how wreckless or foolish he was coming across—it’s like the music was controlling him. I’m too young to have ever seen Iggy & The Stooges, but for sheer unleashed-emotional-energy, I’ll bet this set came closer to matching what the Stooges were like than any of the countless club and auditorium gigs I’ve watched by supposedly lg-“influenced” punk-rockers.

So, despite the undying fear of big cities and big crowds that’s kept me away from potentially OK Lynyrd Skynyrd and Alice Cooper pageants this year, I decided to check out the eighth installment of John’s Lonesome Jubilee hockey-rink tour. Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers poured from the p.a. as I walked in, and with one ominous exception (more black people in the band than in the seats), the audience was as diverse a cross-section as you’ll find in these fragmented times-yups with yuppettes in tow, dope-tokin’ assembly-liners, spikey new-wave suburbateens, Michigan State frat-rats, tattooed rednecks who emerged from the woodwork just so they could cheer when John sang the line in “Down And Out In Paradise” about hating Russians. (Guess they missed the point, John; whose fault is that?)

I was kinda bummed that my hero hadn’t covered up all the Stroh’s and Tubby Submarine ads around the arena walls with “Look For The Union Label” posters, though he supposedly made up for it around encore-time by castigating those cute “Heard It Through The Grapevine” raisins. Talk about two-faced—I’ll believe Mellencamp doesn’t want music to peddle products when he takes his songs off the radio and his videos (even that amazing “Paper In Fire” one, almost as entertaining as the California Raisin Advisory commercial) off MTV. Rock ’n’ roll and capitalism haven’t exactly been enemies all these years.

Urn, guess I should interject here that I’m apparently the only person in the world who admits that Lonesome Jubilee can’t hold a candle to Scarecrow, and as much as I oughta appreciate John’s hammer-dulcimers-of-the-gods concessions to the mountainfolk, the fact remains that Kenny Aranoff and Larry Crane were born to rock. Not that this mission worked against them at Joe Louis, y’understand.

No rundown Appalachian shacks or impoverished old plantation-hands within spotlight range, but the set-up was still pretty homey, what with Lisa Germano fiddle-strumming and John Cascella squeezebox-jamming as cool and nonchalant as if this was your living room— the band was a regular chamber orchestra, and “Jack And Diane,” with string-fills, was a revelation. Other highlights: an intense “Down And Out In Paradise” (sounds by-the-book on the LP, but gains moral weight played to a few thousand auto-workers right after a market crash), Aranoff’s troglodytic left-handed drum-fisting at the start of “Rain On The Scarecrow,” Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” done acoustic, incendiary Flying-V leads by Crane in the metal/rap/Shadows Of Knight medley of “Play Guitar” and “Gloria.” And the “Like A Rolling Stone” encore, wherein the singer kept messing up the verse about the chrome horse and the diplomat.

We heard all the big hits save “I Need A Lover,” which I imagine John’s basically disowned by now. The show started out kinda slow, but once the (now very hairy) main man’s adrenalin set in he was sprinting across the stage, kissing ladies, hugging babies, inviting a fat guy out of the front row to sing a duet, jumping and bumping and limboing and monkeying and doing James Brown squat-thrusts. (His backup chantoozies, who sounded lots more natural than on Lonesome Jubilee, did some wild ethnic dance steps of their own.) Outside of maybe David Lee Roth, John probably takes himself less seriously than any superstar out there—he seemed genuinely happy to be getting all this attention, and still awed and maybe even a little embarrassed by it. In other words, he came across like a human being. I think he even took his shoes off toward the end.

That “I think” is the problem— I couldn’t tell; I was too far away. Which sums up how I really feel about the show: even though it was more “professional” and less loose than Farm Aid ’85, it was rabblerousingly endearing enough (without trying too hard at it) that it should have knocked my sweatsocks off. But it didn’t, and the reason it didn’t is because it felt so distant—worse than TV, even. I never got the idea John Mellencamp was talking to me. Which maybe wouldn’t be the case if I visited arenas more often, and which might not matter much if John was an intentional post-technological monolith like Metallica, and which ultimately isn’t even his fault, but it’s something he oughta think about, because his kind of music (especially his new stuff) demands one-toone communication. I ain’t got n solution; all I know is that fancier sound-systems or closed-circuit monitors wouldn’t change anything. And that switching the encore to “Search And Destroy” (hey, John, you’ll never hear that one in a raisin ad) wouldn’t hurt.