The Beat Patrol

Steve Pond’s June 1, 1989 Rolling Stone review of Big Daddy, which remains my favorite JM album…

It doesn’t seem right, using a word like mature to refer to a guy who used to bill himself as Little Bastard – but these days, the word is just about inescapable when you talk about John Mellencamp. For somebody whose work has always suggested a morbid fear of aging, he’s slipping into rock & roll’s version of middle age pretty damn gracefully: His tenth album – his fourth since he shocked a lot of people by getting good – isn’t a big leap forward the way 1983’s Uh-Huh and 1985’s Scarecrow were, and it doesn’t break new musical ground the way 1987’s Lonesome Jubilee did, and on the first few listenings it doesn’t have any singles as bracing as “Rain on the Scarecrow” or as irresistible as “Cherry Bomb.” Instead, it’s an assured, personal and, yeah, mature record, an exercise in consolidation and continuity and craftsmanship.

The first thing you notice is the way the album sounds. Like Springsteen, Petty and Seger, the other major American mainstream rockers who emerged during the past two decades, Mellencamp has a band whose distinctive sound alternately defines, inspires and limits him. Its signposts are the remarkable, lean whap of Kenny Aronoff’s drums and the gritty guitar rasp of Larry Crane: These guys make dirty, rough-hewn Stones-style rock that packs a real wallop. But unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers and others of that ilk, Mellencamp’s mainstream rock band has, on The Lonesome Jubilee and now on Big Daddy, been distinguished by decidedly nonmainstream touches that give this thoroughly citified genre a touch of the Appalachian hills or the Southern bayous: fiddles, accordions, dulcimers, banjos, penny whistles.

The result is a sound more distinctive and refreshing than that of any of Mellencamp’s contemporaries. Certainly, it’s true that fiddles and accordions are the lead instruments in some of the most invigorating pop music being made today – from Louisiana’s Beausoleil to England’s Oyster Band – but it’s startling to find them on AOR radio. And for that reason alone, Big Daddy deserves attention.

Of course, the sound of the album is nothing new: Mellencamp toyed with this approach on some of Scarecrow, then developed it fully on The Lonesome Jubilee. And in the same way, the theme of Big Daddy returns to a vein he’s mined before: American dreams, and the difficulty of ever realizing them. You could listen to the album, take note of Mellencamp’s continued fondness for the heartland and borrow a movie title to describe it: Field of Dreams. Except there’s no Hollywood happy ending anywhere on the album.

Big Daddy picks up where the last verse of the single “Paper in Fire” left off; these are songs about the pursuit of dreams, in which the fever of that pursuit as often as not either destroys the dreams themselves or blinds the characters to what’s happening around them. It’s an album peopled by folks who run after their dreams so hard and so fast and for so long that they lose sight of what they were after to begin with: You could say that about the authority figure in the title track, about the wild teens who are “chasing after something/And neither one of them believing in nothing” and about the blinkered old fool who makes things worse for everybody and turns out to be a certain recently retired president of the United States. You could also say it, it seems, about a rich and famous rock star.

The landscape on Big Daddy is as bleak as it was on Scarecrow and Jubilee, but Mellencamp has for the most part dispensed with the folkish small-town narratives he was once known for – even though Big Daddy titles like “Martha Say” and “Theo and Weird Henry” and “Jackie Brown” and “Country Gentleman” would suggest otherwise. The first of those is a hardhearted sketch of a woman trying to remain independent, the second a piece of nostalgia that doesn’t sound half as jubilant as the last album’s “Cherry Bomb.” And “Country Gentleman,” which comes near the end of the album, suggests that Ronald Reagan just might be to blame for some of the mess evoked in the rest of these songs: “He ain’t a gonna help no poor man/He ain’t a gonna help no children/He ain’t a gonna help no women/He’s just gonna help his rich friends.”

Certainly, you could blame the country gentleman and his friends for what happens to Jackie Brown, Big Daddy’s most fully drawn character both musically and lyrically. The song is the story of a man’s life, and if the details are a little predictable and a little maudlin – Jackie Brown has a wife and daughter; he can barely support them; he’s “going nowhere and nowhere fast”; he dies; nobody cares – the music gives him life and makes his story heartbreaking. The spare, lonely ballad is set to one of Mellencamp’s finest and most delicate arrangements: a couple of softly picked acoustic guitars, a skeletal dream beat, an understated accordion, the soft cry of a fiddle playing an absolutely lovely melody.

But there’s another life story that emerges on this album, too, more fully than it has since the days when the younger and more foolish Mellencamp would use his albums as display cases for his hardass, don’t-give-a-damn cynicism. This is the story of another dreamer, one who avidly pursued his goals and wound up a rock star and now makes music, works for good causes and still wonders why he doesn’t feel satisfied. Certainly, some of this story sounds self-serving: Are we really supposed to believe that the guy who let a manipulative manager change his name to Johnny Cougar “never wanted to be no pop singer”? But at the same time, it’s impressive to see Mellencamp step out from behind his characters to confess his uncertainties (especially in the disquieting “Void in My Heart”) and ask the frankly baffled query of the final song, “J.M.’s Question”: “What kind of world do we live in?”

To his credit, Mellencamp doesn’t supply any easy answers; for some time now he’s spent more time asking the hard questions than figuring out the answers, and Big Daddy breaks no new ground on that or any other front. In fact, what’s missing from the album is the kind of transcendent single or two that has surfaced on the last few albums. But then again, Big Daddy is consistent, and it happily lacks any songs as superficial or marginal as, say, “Hotdogs and Hamburgers” or “You’ve Got to Stand for Somethin’.”

In the end, you’ve got to admire a guy who, even with his inbred pessimism, still has the sense of humor about himself to write “Pop Singer”; who has the talent to build that song and others around great, grungy riffs; who still prefers to make things sound rustic or raw rather than slick; and who’s open enough that his relentlessly bleak cynicism sounds less like annoying bluster and more like honest concern and befuddlement. A guy who’s matured, you might say.

Steve Pond

Another review written by Anthony DeCurtis for Rolling Stone, Oct. 8, 1987…
 

In dedicating his last album, Scarecrow, to his grandfather, who had recently died, John Mellencamp wrote, “There is nothing more sad or glorious than generations changing hands.” That idea suffused the songs on Scarecrow, which was released in 1985, and it comes to the fore once again on Mellencamp’s complex, moving new album, The Lonesome Jubilee.

To state his theme this time, Mellencamp prints a passage from Ecclesiastes on the record jacket, one of many Biblical references that run through The Lonesome Jubilee. “Generations come and go but it makes no difference,” the passage goes. “Everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied. … So I saw that there is nothing better for men than that they should be happy in their work, for that is what they are here for, and no one can bring them back to life to enjoy what will be in the future, so let them enjoy it now.”

The blending of fatalism and celebration, of the pleasures of life and the specter of death, evident in those verses makes The Lonesome Jubilee something like Mellencamp’s Nebraska. The rhythms are more exuberant and the arrangements are fuller on these ten songs than on Springsteen’s grim masterpiece, but the chilling fear that some unknown, inexorable force in human affairs makes contentment impossible haunts both records. And just as Springsteen chose the directness of folk music for Nebraska, Mellencamp has laced his songs with Celtic and Appalachian folk instruments – hammer dulcimer, mandolin, penny whistle, Dobro and accordion. These evocative musical touches make the dilemmas of The Lonesome Jubilee seem that much more ancient and unchanging.

For this reason, the songs on The Lonesome Jubilee that address troubling social issues paradoxically provide the most reassuring moments on the record. The harsh, angular “Down and Out in Paradise” – with its desperate pleas to “dear Mr. President” from an unemployed worker, a homeless woman and an unhappy child – at least assumes a comprehensible system in which uncaring governmental figures can be held accountable for the suffering chronicled in the song. The prayerlike “We Are the People” – despite its foolishly misplaced sympathy for the “fortunate ones” (because “it’s lonely up there” and “nobody’s got it made”) – revives Sixties-style political rhetoric and warns manipulative leaders, “If you try to divide and conquer/We’ll rise up against you.”

But other songs on The Lonesome Jubilee suggest that the sources of people’s unhappiness reside at least partly within themselves or, more disturbingly, in the fabric of life itself. In the R&B-driven “Hard Times for an Honest Man,” Mellencamp blames bad economic conditions for the anger that causes a frustrated worker to abuse his family and for a woman’s emotional isolation. But the song also appears to imply that these people are responsible for internalizing and perpetuating their victimization – particularly when they are seen in contrast with the poverty-stricken couple of the previous song, “Empty Hands,” who refuse to replay society’s exploitation of them in their supportive marriage.

The Lonesome Jubilee is also filled with characters who betray their futures and willfully trivialize their lives by chasing shabby dreams. The man in “Paper in Fire,” the album’s hard-hitting opening track and first single, wants “love with no involvement,” and the guys in the poignant “Check It Out” manage to build material security but cheat on their lovers and stint on expressing their feelings toward their friends. Again and again on the album, Mellencamp counts the painful cost of these leaps of bad faith, stating the case most plainly in “Paper in Fire”: “There is a good life/Right across this green field/And each generation/Stares at it from afar/But we keep no check/On our appetites/So the green fields turn to brown/Like paper in fire.”

Interestingly, The Lonesome Jubilee seems to be an album concerned with the very real, if sometimes vague, dissatisfactions of early middle age – Mellencamp’s own time of life. Aging offers appreciation of the depths of life’s mysteries but no greater understanding of them, Mellencamp seems to be saying. “This is all that we’ve learned about happiness,” he says in “Check It Out,” his disbelief softened by his compassion. “This is all we’ve learned about living.” In their entrapment the characters in “The Real Life” believe there must be an existence more genuine and rewarding than their own, but they are completely unable to imagine what it might be. Despite its easygoing groove, “Cherry Bomb,” a nostalgic reflection on lost youth in the manner of “Glory Days,” speaks of a time in which “we were young and we were improvin’” – in implied contrast with the present on both scores.

The Lonesome Jubilee questions both the hotshot arrogance Mellencamp epitomized early in his career and the populist idealism he discovered around the time of Uh-Huh, in 1983. Despite his breakthrough to seriousness, his macho swagger has proved difficult to shake, while political convictions have failed to answer all his questions about the world and its ways. But as this album amply demonstrates – in its white-hot, slamming sound, courtesy of Don Gehman, as well as in the meanings of its songs – seeing the limits of youthful bluster doesn’t necessarily mean losing one’s gusto for life. And certainly testing the point of one’s beliefs need not predicate a descent into cynicism.

Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, John Cougar once spat in an album title. Now John Cougar Mellencamp marvels at how much things matter and wonders why and to what end. That’s quite a distance traveled. “I guess it don’t matter how old you are/Or how old one lives to be,” Mellencamp tentatively concludes in “The Real Life.” “I guess it boils down to what we did with our lives/And how we deal with our own destinies.” If this feeling but unsentimental album doesn’t make for a particularly joyous jubilee, the universality of its concerns ensures that finally it isn’t all that lonesome, either.