Rain On the ScarePOLL - The John Mellencamp "Scarecrow" Poll

"Rain on the Scarecrow" is really the only song of the man's I've ever liked.

It's certainly the only song from this album I'd ever want to hear again.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yay!

The right song won. Rumbleseat might have actually been my second choice. Totally forgot about that song.

"R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to '60s Rock)"

I wonder why this is the only song with the helpful parenthetical. None of the other songs are as easy to figure out from the title.

I remember this poll happening, so I'm surprised to scroll through and find I never participated in it. Every track on this album is a keeper, but I'm particularly fond of Rumbleseat today. Those big washes of tremolo-y guitar during the solo sections are perfect, but the whole song is really a fine distillation of Mellencamp's craft in that era.

"R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to '60s Rock)" is so damn overplayed.

Forgot I started this poll.

btw I assume "Rain on the Scarecrow" and "Rumbleseat" got more airplay -- MTV and otherwise -- than their middling chart positions suggest.

I guess Mellencamp has no New Jerseys in his catalog? Uh-Huh looked like it might be: two top tens but the album a relative failure beside its predecessor. But Scarecrow was massive: five singles, a steady sales presence through summer '86, his second best selling album.

Someone ought to record "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to '90s Rock)" in the style of Soul Asylum or something and namedrop a lot of awful songs and bands. At least Cougs had better content to write lyrics about.

btw, the overplayed single from Scarecrow is Small Town. It's running a way higher burnout risk than R.O.C.K. imo.

uh-huh is his best album! it was genuinely massive also, i can remember 'authority song' cleaned up at mtv's friday night fights jukebox jury type show, plus 'pink houses' for crying out loud (mtv gave away a pink house!). dude was pretty ridiculously huge from american fool thru lonesome jubilee, i might vaguely argue lonesome jubilee as his new jersey in that there's maybe some inertia helping it (it's the album after that lets you know if an album was a new jersey) but i think it did too well and 'earned' too much of its success (then again i don't really think new jersey is a new jersey). i'm not sure if any of those big 80s albums have 'gone away' enough for them to come close to qualifying - still hear 'pink houses', 'small town', 'cherry bomb' w/ some regularity. big daddy could've been his new jersey but didn't manage to become a big enough hit, in any case i haven't heard 'pop singer' in forever. another thing that has ime seemingly disappeared surprisingly, esp considering i still hear 'wild night' and 'key west intermezzo' and 'just another day', is 'human wheels'; absolutely massive at the time and suggesting he might be more like tom petty than bruce springsteen in terms of figuring how to navigate the 90s, i couldn't tell you the last time i heard it. this might just be my experience though.

(mtv gave away a pink house!)

...that happened to be adjacent to a toxic waste dump.

lol was it? Not surprised.

The first one they bought was, so they bought another to give away. It's in the MTV oral history book.

i was pretty happy they devoted some time to the contests in that mtv oral history cuz it was such a thing back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP0l-H4tAik

a garage full of hawaiian punch fruit punch

I still think that run from Whenever We Wanted through Dance Naked is some of his best work, and at the time it seemed like those albums just came out bang! bang! bang! (they did all arrive in a three year period). That marriage really inspired him it seems.

Pretty impressive that he was able to maintain success for about a decade after his absolute peak (which was way higher than I expected, sales-wise at least). But he kept putting out platinum records until '96, and was a presence on MTV/VH1 until around the same time.

"Check It Out" was huge, as should it have been; Kenny Aaronoff's re-entrance is a wonder to behold.

(from the era when Aaronoff wasn't a terminally beak-wetting ham-fisted session shmoe)

I have no recollection of Human Wheels being massive on any level: it charted high and disappeared. Dance Naked and "Wild Nights" is another story; the success of that song blocked the rest of the singles. And it holds up well! When I watched Me'shell at EMP last month I remembered what an estimable cover it was.

The Lonesome Jubilee did less well than Scarecrow but still rode the top ten for months and coughed up three singles, only one of which ("Cherry Bomb") we hear today, but it's the album that made Coop "respectable," right? Don't know anyone but Los Lobos doing riffs + fiddles + Kenny Aronoff in '87. Plus, he gave Lisa Germano her break.

and yeah "Key West Intermezzo" and its damn Junor Vasquez drum loops generated a shit ton of airplay well into '97.

I get why Cherry Bomb is the enduring single from Jubilee, but by rights it should've been Paper in Fire or Check It Out.

I'll admit I haven't heard any of his most recent albums because I grew to loathe "Our Country" when it was in a Chevy truck commercial every five minutes for a year or more.

was gonna say "Los Lobos didn't have Kenny Aronoff"

WWW's "Get a Leg Up" is one of his best singles. The guitars are fierce.

Ugh, forgot about that fucking Chevy ad. It was particularly annoying because Mellencamp had been previously been pretty vocal about never allowing any of his songs to be licensed for ads.

he started to become respectable w/ uh-huh, it was consolidated by lonesome jubilee (i might be revisionist on uh-huh there, i remember it placed highest in rolling stones decade end list, but it didn't place in pnj that year while scarecrow and lonesome jubilee placed pretty high). big daddy relatively flopped and he took what seemed like an insane amount of time (for him at least) off before whenever we wanted which felt like him reaching back to that american fool sound on his own terms (which reminds me i never hear 'get a leg up' anymore really). you might be right about 'human wheels' relative success, it charts high on mainstream rock chart but not on hot 100. we might have just heard it alot in athens cuz it sounded a little like rem (vs rem sounding a little like him about six or seven years prior).

Speaking of songs with great guitar playing on Whenever We Wanted, "Last Chance" is A+.

balls, I still think you're overstating Uh-Huh's success -- because the 'Pink Houses' campaign was so damn omnipresent? Check out his sales and chart positions. I mean, the first three Scarecrow singles charted progressively higher, and the album's timed with AF as best-seller.

"Human Wheels" and "What If I Came Knockin'" were both in pretty heavy rotation on my local AOR station at the time, but I don't remember the Human Wheels album being a big deal in and of itself.

yeah he was a constant AOR presence through the nineties; that's where I heard "Pop Singer" and "Get a Leg Up" and "Again Tonight."

Here's a forgotten gem: "Hand to Hold On To."

yeah i might be overstating it somewhat (it was still a big hit album, but apparently maybe not as big as scarecrow - i'm more convinced by 'rain on the scarecrow' being the fourth single and then 'rumbleseat' as a classic fifth single), i'd maybe argue that those chart positions don't reflect how big uh-huh's singles were on mtv but scarecrow's were just as huge so it's factored in already somewhat. scarecrow might've tied american fool but none of the mellencamp albums were quite as huge as american fool in the moment, it was the biggest selling album of the year. i wonder if the reason mellencamp and sprinsteen had more difficulty adjusting to the 90s than petty is they were more country than petty ie it wasn't so much grunge disrupting their market as garth.

Mellencamp after '88 became a VH-1 guy while MTV didn't lose its infatuation with Petty until the Total Request era.

you can hear the trouble on "Pop Singer" despite the pretty good groove: he's already whining about success.

Mellencamp got what the Boss and Petty didn't: a #1 single and far more top tens.

Here's a stat from my Whitburn book: Uh-Huh hit the top ten in its thirteenth week for one week (January '84), dropped out, returned several weeks later for another one-week stay, then tumbled down the chart. Meanwhile Scarecrow and TLJ debuted in the fall of their respective years and rode the top ten well into late spring.

Uh-Huh had some pretty stiff competition, though.

so did TLJ! Bad, Dirty Dancing, Tunnel of Love. I just read a Paul Grein column in Billboard in which he notes the surprising tenacity of TLJ against this competition months later.

yeah mellencamp's nineties is odd - most pop success of the three (four if you still want to pretend segar was part of the conversation) and yet somehow diminished in some way enough that he feels the need to hook w/ junior vasquez for some grab at relevance. i think he'd have switched places w/ petty's 90s in a heartbeat. mentioning 'pop singer' reminded me of an old john leland column where he basically teases out the secret pop history of the 80s by comparing it to taste of honey's 'boogie oogie oogie'; i couldn't find it but i found a fantastic end of decade wrapup singles column by frank owen that mentions it in passing (i guess leland had moved on by that point), then i wondered what became of frank owen and found this and had a little chuckle at the byline. 'small world' as huey lewis once sang.

Good point re: TLJ's chart competition, and yeah, rustic tenacity in the face of state-of-the-art dance pop.

Speaking of Leland, I seem to remember Spin digging on Mellencamp much more than you'd expect them to.

most pop success of the three (four if you still want to pretend segar was part of the conversation) and yet somehow diminished in some way enough that he feels the need to hook w/ junior vasquez for some grab at relevance

live by pop, die by pop

that was all guccione apparently, dude just loved him some johnny cougar. it wasn't even really a part of spin's general zag when rolling stone zigs mo which led to them putting hip-hop, freestyle, and mod rock acts rolling stone wouldn't dream of giving a cover to (moz, the cure, inxs, nick cave amazingly) on their cover in the 80s.

i respect mellencamp working w/ vasquez and admire the popist nature of the impulse (the closest petty would come to that in a million years is working w/ dave stewart) but in retrospect the relevancy move to make there was to work w/ sheryl crow, maybe hire mitchell froom.

gross

man that frank owen column is fantastic, and such an effective counterpoint to rolling stone's state of the 80s, the beginning of the piece for the best albums of the 80s issue going: This has been the first rock & roll decade without revolution, or true revolutionaries, to call its own. The Fifties witnessed nothing less than the birth of the music. The Sixties were rocked by Beatlemania, Motown, Phil Spector, psychedelia and Bob Dylan. The Seventies gave rise to David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, heavy metal, punk and New Wave.

In comparison, the Eighties have been the decade of, among other things, synth pop, Michael Jackson, the compact disc, Sixties reunion tours, the Beastie Boys and a lot more heavy metal. But if the past ten years haven't exactly been the stuff of revolution, they have been a critical time of re-assessment and reconstruction. Musicians and audiences alike have struggled to come to terms with rock's parameters and possibilities, its emotional resonance and often dormant social consciousness.

clueless motherfuckers

Petty's MTV longevity is because he made the better videos, right? Or maybe because "Free Fallin'" was a pretty widely loved peak and came out in 89, after Mellencamp and Springsteen had already peaked?

probably didn't hurt that he was able to get, like Johnny Depp in videos somehow.

but he got Me'shell Ndegeocello.

maybe? i just know that everybody my age played the fuck out of petty's greatest hits and wildflowers, he maintained some kind of relevance and cool that mellencamp and springsteen esp couldn't approach. it was the 00s before i routinely met normal ppl in their twenties that loved springsteen again.

But if the past ten years haven't exactly been the stuff of revolution,

Ugh, what the fuck. Reminds me of RS' 1988 year-end issue, and the capsule review of Nation of Millions. It was generally positive, if lukewarm, but decided to let Flav's "Yo, I wanna watch the game!" ruin the experience; the review ended with, "If the revolution is televised, Chuck and Flav might miss it because they're watching the game."

@balls that reflects my experience as well. Feel like tons of people, including my friends, were jamming Dookie, Vitalogy, Wildflowers, and the Weezer record throughout that year.

it may have just been that mellencamp became a vh1 artist, springsteen released his worst music, and petty timed his comeback well. i still think there was something specific to petty that mellencamp and springsteen lacked that gave him that post-grunge appeal. it may just be 'he recorded a fake neil young song'.

I do wish we had a new guy in this style. The Springsteen/Seger/Petty/Mellencamp guy who writes hit songs.

The guys you're looking for all live in Nashville now and wear dumb hats.

http://forum.maplewoodonline.com/uploads/FileUpload/50/0e2f6ea120d5d47727f8ecb2343aff.jpg

lookin' bad, Tom

well, you guys aren't wrong. Miranda Lambert's recorded a series of Coug-esque rockers.

@fcc I mean, it seems obvious in retrospect that HT/LT had slim commercial prospects, but did it feel that way at the time? It had 6 singles and 4 videos. I feel like those albums had a strong marketing push, but didn't connect because they were Springsteen's weakest works and he was maybe out of place in the early 90s music landscape.

they did have a big marketing push, that's true, and he was still a megastar, but he was not the same megastar he had been seven or eight years earlier and it was fairly obvious, even at the time, which way his pendulum was swinging. he had waited five years to follow up tunnel of love, an album that was already quieter and smaller in both its sound and its impact than born in the usa. he pissed a lot of people by firing his band. he pissed some other people off by getting divorced and quickly remarrying. the pop landscape had changed, a lot, and in no way where either of the 1992 albums pop albums in any way that a 1992 pop audience would understand, and it seems clear to me that he and his people were very much aware of that, in real time. he launched his u.s. tour for the albums with a long run of shows in new jersey, most of which did not sell out. during the tour, he frequently joked about his age and about his disappearance from the pop charts. only two singles, both from human touch, charted in the u.s., one at #16 and one at #68. the #68 was "57 channels," which was a very strange-sounding song as bruce springsteen went, intentionally so i believe. i think, at least to some extent, he was consciously turning his back on a part of himself.

Miami New Times wrote a sardonic account of that night's show; it took him to town for playing with L.A. geezers and working the crowd too damn hard for third-rate material.

http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/covergallery/img/1992/jun51992_121_lg.jpg

working the crowd too damn hard for third-rate material

dude has always worked a crowd way too hard; that's part of his appeal. but, yeah, i think what once looked youthful and exuberant and loose was starting to look labored around that time, and laboring on behalf of material that doesn't reward the labor is always a chore.

he pissed a lot of people by firing his band.

This was the big thing. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is a lot better than Bruce Springsteen and the LA Session Guys.

Also, the 90s alternative rock guys who were huge at the time didn't have a big Springsteen influence. There were no Cobain covers of Badlands.

lol i'm reminded of the bruce mcculloch joke - 'our love is like a bruce springsteen concert. it's not that great, it's really long, but wow! what energy!'

I remember hearing Rage Against the Machine's cover of "The Ghost of Tom Joad" on some "alternative" station, and the dj smirked, "You guys would've never guessed; that song was originally done by (snicker) Bruce Springsteen! Remember that guy? Ugh!"

there's still a certain segment of gen x that would be befuddled to find out springsteen became cool again

and i can remember hearing dave grohl in an interview trash springsteen and the interviewer being kinda shocked and asking 'you don't like the boss?' and grohl responding 'who's boss? HE'S NOT MY BOSS!', it was the first of many clues that dave grohl is a tool. this wasn't long after the brief window when it looked like he might become tom petty's new drummer.

I asked on one of the threads whether anyone – anywhere – has made a case for HT or LT as "better than you remember!" albums. At Stylus I dangled these treats in front of writers and no one bit.

"Ghost of Tom Joad" is a horrible song no matter who wrote it.

HT and LT could be condensed into a single album that's solid, but still weaker than Tunnel or Tom Joad.

"human touch" is a way better SINGLE than i originally thought. my impression when it came out was that it, along with much of the two albums, was self-parody, but today i'd rate it an A-plus springsteen single, and it remains one of my favorite springsteen live songs.

the albums as a whole still sound like parody to me, filled with rote arrangements and playing and way too much imagery of rivers and birds and other such stuff that makes me want to throw up onto my freshman poetry syllabus. but make it into a single album with "human touch," "living proof," "leap of faith," "if i should fall behind," "lucky town," "my beautiful reward" and a few others and it could be a mildly catchy document of the rock star approaching middle age.

His solo in "Human Touch" is solid.

absolutely!

Yes. Always loved the song Human Touch.

Didn't get to vote in this, but the top 3 would have been mine as well. And I love the album cuts, too. "Minutes to Memories", "Between A Laugh and A Tear", "Face Of A Nation". I played this a lot in 1985.

Heard Minutes to Memories on the radio for the first time in probably 20 years today. Holy fuck is that a great song.

Fantastic discussion upthread about Springsteen.

So...if he'd released HT/LT in '90 instead of '92, would they and its singles have been better received? Would he have had a Rhythm of the Saints moment i.e. "solid return and acclaim and sales" or gone The Razor's Edge and A Night on the Town? I tend to think that if the latter had happened, we'd remember TOL as a genuine New Jersey.

"rumbelseat" and "authority song" are about the only two post-1980 JCM songs that don't wear me out these days. and tbf the only pre-80 songs I can say for sure i know are "i need a lover" and "ain't even done with the night" but those are fucking dope k-classic all-timers imo

The third single is the worst.

A few days ago, WXRT in Chicago did a program on this album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47xRaz2AGk

Listening to it now, the program's probably not my thing, but if you're a huge fan of the album, hopefully it's a good listen - I never got the impression there was that much info out there on the making of Scarecrow.