When record company advisers said there’s no way that would get played on the radio, Mellencamp rewrote, taking out any racial references.Īlso, the young lovers were originally suckin’ on cigarettes outside the Tastee-Freez instead of chili dogs. Interestingly, “Jack and Diane” was originally written as “Jack and Jenny” – and as an interracial couple with Jack being Black. It’s easy to forgot how many hits there are, among them “Hurts So Good,” “Jack and Diane,” “Pink Houses,” “Lonely Ol’ Night,” “Rain On the Scarecrow,” “Cherry Bomb,” “Check It Out,” “Authority Song,” “Crumblin’ Down,” “Small Town,” “Paper in Fire,” “R.O.C.K. Mellencamp first came briefly into consciousness with 1978’s self-penned single “I Need a Lover” (released under the management-driven name “Johnny Cougar”), and then hit big success starting with 1982’s American Fool album. Mellencamp (out September 14) is the first major biography on the pride of Seymour and Bloomington, Indiana. Though if you invited them all to a dinner party, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out which one would want to start a fight, even with the host.Īuthor and music journo Paul Rees has penned books on Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the Who’s John Entwistle, while ghostwriting the memoirs of Toto’s Steve Lukather and UFO’s Pete Way. He went on, “They’d been telling me for years to get on cholesterol medicine, and I would go, ‘Am I all right now?’ And they’d go, ‘Yeah.Book cover His tough-as-nails/loud-as-a-motorcyle-engine persona and songs have helped define an image and put him on the same shelf as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger and Tom Petty. … He said, ‘John, you can say whatever you want to me or act any way you want, but a first-year medical student can tell you you’ve had a heart attack.’” “The looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’ I went nuts,” the “Jack & Diane” singer remembered. Mellencamp famously recalled the story of his heart attack while smoking a cigarette during a 2015 appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” “I learned my lesson after I had a heart attack at 42.” Mellencamp eventually gave up the hard partying and drug use of his younger years on the road. “I had lots of doctors going, ‘John, your cholesterol’s way too high and you smoke.’ I’d go, ‘F–k it,'” Mellencamp, who began smoking at the age of 14, recalled.

The musician admittedly still smokes but is mindful of his overall well-being after suffering a serious health scare in 1994 after a show at Jones Beach in New York. But when you get to a certain age, it’s not funny anymore. “It’s funny and attractive to be 25 years old and be someplace high and drunk. “There comes a time when you got to go, ‘OK, I’m done with this s–t.’ “They couldn’t get off the party,” he explained. He said that unlike many of his friends and peers, he was able to simply mature out of using them. Mellencamp quit drugs and alcohol in 1971. “And you’re talking to the luckiest guy you’re ever going to talk to.” “Very simply, luck is thinking you’re lucky, period,” the 70-year-old rocker told People Wednesday while reminiscing on his decades-long music career. John Mellencamp knows how fortunate he is to have survived a rock star lifestyle and a heart attack. Identity of John Mellencamp’s mystery new girlfriend revealed

John mellencamp