It is a product.”įew American artists have engineered the transformation of John Mellencamp, whose own aspiration to authenticity has the signposts of his previous stage names: From Johnny Cougar to John Mellencamp, he has managed to accomplish the rare reversal of fame’s effect. Art, if you can even call it that, that happens according to plan, where everyone is working off a blueprint, is corporate. Mellencamp then offered a criterion for the evaluation of “true art”: “It should surprise everyone involved, most especially the creator. “The similarity is that with painting you start with big, broad strokes and you have a slight idea of what you are making,” Mellencamp explained, “and that runs in unison with song, because songs begin with such simplicity, but then arranging parts for the band and going through the tedious process of record and mixing, it becomes something else.” “Painting offers me solitude, which I prefer,” Mellencamp told me when I asked about his personal difference of experience between the creation of visual art and music. His current exhibition, " Life, Death, Love and Freedom," is at ACA Galleries in New York. In the years that have passed, his paintings have adorned the walls of galleries, universities and museums.
He made the same trade, only in reverse, in 1988 - painting for hours on end every day. He pursued the passion he developed with a cheap acoustic guitar over Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan records, while allowing another to rest. The New York Student Art League demanded more money than he could afford, and a music management agency offered to pay him more money than he had ever seen. On the streets of New York, pulsating with the hum of electric dreams, he submitted an application to the New York Student Art League and also dropped off demo tapes to several record companies and music management agencies. Immediately after his graduation from Vincennes University, he made a journey nearly universal to American artists and adventurers.
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As a child, he watched his mother paint in her few free moments between working and raising children, and in adolescence, he picked up the brush himself. He added with a laugh, “I have a big ego, but I don’t need the applause of twenty thousand people to know who I am.”ĭuring his unannounced hiatus from recording music, Mellencamp returned to his primary artistic impulse. And suddenly I thought, ‘competition with who? Competition for what?’ It was so far disconnected from the reason why I wrote songs,” Mellencamp said, “I just felt like I was being whored out, as a monkey on a string, for people to make money.” “I found myself in competition for who sold the most records, who could sell out the most shows, and the people around me were all talking about competition. He remembered that he played more than 130 arena shows in 1987, and excited promoters, practically making cash register sounds between the words of their sentences, presented him with a plan to play stadiums. “I could have made much more money and had many more hits if I kept going, but I didn’t want to do it anymore.” “Everyone thought I was a fucking lunatic,” Mellencamp told me during a recent phone conversation. It would be three years before he would step on stage again. “I want, I want / I need, I need / To live and see it all / Laugh, and touch it all,” John Mellencamp sings on, “To Live,” a rollicking exhibition of what he called “gypsy rock” from one of his best records, “Big Daddy.” Even before its release in 1989, at the peak of his popularity, Mellencamp had stopped playing music publicly.
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