Mellencamp - Hardcover

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Paul Rees has written about music for over twenty years. In that time, he has interviewed everyone from Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna to Bono and AC/DC. Rees is the author of Robert Plant: A Life, and served as Editor of two of the United Kingdom’s most successful and long-standing music publications, Q and Kerrang!. He lives in Scotland.

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Chapter One: Small Town

CHAPTER ONE Small Town

Well, I got heart disease from my dad’s side and diabetes from my mom’s side. I got my temper from both sides.

—John Mellencamp

John was always a troublemaker. He got us into trouble a lot.

—Joe Mellencamp, John’s half brother

It was an 1800 Land Act from the government in Washington that created Indiana Territory, and from the middle of that century, the new state began to be widely populated. Pioneers ranged up south to north, from Kentucky and the Appalachians, across the Ohio River. From the north, they trekked downcountry from New England, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. From the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, they arrived from southern and eastern Europe, but mostly from Germany. Around this time, Johan Herman Friedrich Mollenkamp left his hometown of Anger, a suburb of Hanover, and pitched up in the rural south of Indiana, meaning to farm the land.

Germans soon made up more than half the foreign-born population of Indiana. Statewide, they quickly established German-language newspapers, German schools, and German social clubs. Yet Johan Mollenkamp married outside of this tight community, taking for his bride a Native American girl, Anna. Johan couldn’t speak English, Anna knew not a word of German, but somehow they managed. Together they built up a farmstead outside of Seymour which passed to their eldest son, born to them in 1855 and also named Johan. With his wife, Carrie, the next Johan Mollenkamp had ten children and to each they gave a more Americanized surname: Mellencamp. Among their brood was a son born November 4, 1903, and named Harry Perry, “Speck” to all who got to know him; this was John Mellencamp’s grandfather.

The southern Indiana land was tough to work, back- and soul-breaking. Speck’s father didn’t see sixty, dead of a gallbladder attack in 1924. Young Speck wed nineteen-year-old Laura Nancy Nobliott the same year, and they set up home in Seymour. He worked as a carpenter; he had left school in second grade to help keep money coming into the family. The newlyweds also got a hard, unforgiving start to their lives together. Six children were born to them: four boys, James, Jerry, Joe, and Richard; and two girls, Mary and Shirley. By the time the youngest boy, Richard, came into the world in the summer of 1931, the Great Depression had hit rural American families like a wrecking ball. When Richard was ten, a drunk driver ran over and killed his fifteen-year-old eldest brother, James.

After World War II, Speck, who’d barely had the time to learn to read or write, but was as enterprising as he was unyielding, set up his own construction company. He prospered in the building boom that followed through into the next decade, although the terrible, suffocating weight of all the loss and hurt inflicted upon him and his kin left him bitter, resentful. Ever after, Speck Mellencamp seethed and raged. He had a hair-trigger temper, volcanic and fearful to behold.

This much Speck passed on to his two youngest boys. Both Joe and Richard grew up rough and wild, one just as fearsomely competitive as the other. Joe, big, broad, and muscle-bound, excelled at boxing and football, and he was star running back at Seymour High and then Indiana University. Richard, known by “Dutch” within the family circle, was slighter, the junior by two years, but made up the difference with relentless determination. Together, they were hell to pay. On a hot, sticky afternoon in 1950, like so many others before, they set themselves to brawling. Earlier that day, Richard had got jumped by four local toughs and had taken a pounding. Joe didn’t need persuading to join him for a revenge beating.

Two cops arrived on the scene as they were in the act of administering their brand of justice. The brothers ran off down the street, cops in pursuit, Richard headlong into a local beauty, Marilyn Lowe, knocking her off her feet. Six months after dumping her on the sidewalk, Richard married Marilyn. She hailed from Austin, twenty miles south of Seymour, where her father, Joe, ran a restaurant. According to local gossip, the place served as a front for his bootlegging, gambling, and other nefarious activities. Marilyn was three years older than Richard. She was a runner-up in the 1946 Miss Indiana pageant, a divorcée, and mother to a three-year-old boy, Joe, who lived with her parents. Marilyn soon fell pregnant again and, on October 7, 1951, bore a second son. Richard and Marilyn named the boy John, after his paternal great-grandfather, and in the knowledge he’d likely not live long.

He was born with a growth the size of a fist on the back of his head. The child’s fetal vertebrae hadn’t fused, doctors told his stricken parents, causing a buildup of fluid on his spine. They called the condition spina bifida, and at the time, it was usually terminal. John’s parents were, though, given a chink of hope. A young neurosurgeon based at Indiana University Medical Center, Dr. Robert Heimburger, was just then pioneering a surgical treatment for infants afflicted with spina bifida. At six weeks old, little John Mellencamp was one of three children operated on by Heimburger and a fellow physician, Dr. John Russell. One child died on the operating table. Another, a baby girl, survived to be a young teenager, but was confined to a wheelchair. Baby John’s procedure alone was wholly successful.

Grandma Laura, who doted on him from his first breath, never failed afterward to tell him he was the luckiest boy alive, “and don’t you forget it.” Laura was a devout, God-fearing woman and it surely seemed to her as if the very devil himself had been chased off, and a curse lifted from the family, at least for a while.

“My grandmother really was the biggest influence on me, and my grandfather, too,” John says.

“They were from a whole different generation than my parents. They were Depression people, World War One people. Every day of my life my grandmother told me how lucky I was. You get told that enough and you believe it. I just never thought I wasn’t. What that did to me was it gave me great confidence in anything I tried to do.”

The Mellencamps’ peace was short-lived. The previous summer, US forces had begun shipping out to Asia to go fight the Korean War. With the conflict escalating, Joe Mellencamp enlisted in the army, where he served as a corporal. Richard was drafted into the air force for two years. Upon his discharge, he enrolled at college in Indianapolis to study electrical engineering for four more years. A second son, Ted, came along and Richard moved his growing family into a new house at 714 West 5th Street, in Seymour. In time, two more children were born to Richard and Marilyn, daughters Janet and Laura.

Their home was small and cozy: two bedrooms, a living and dining room, a little kitchen, and a porch out back. Marilyn kept hog-fat grease to make gravy right from the stove. In whatever spare time she had to herself, Marilyn painted in oils, still life canvases of flowers and landscapes. She fancied herself something of an intellectual, an activist. She had a photograph taken of herself on a picket line, protesting workers’ rights at a canning factory in Austin back in 1945. Richard, like his father before, was quick to temper. A stickler for discipline, he was strict, unwavering, and ever ready to wield his belt. After graduating college, he took a job with a...