After 40 years in music - making hits and selling out arenas - Mellencamp still has a garage band.
The band could see me from the window of the rehearsal space, which is little more than a finely renovated and converted garage. Unsure where to go or what to do, I wandered around the driveway. I waved back, and just a moment later found myself pulling into the driveway of the Belmont Mall, where I could hear one of the world’s best bands running through a fiery rendition of “Rain on the Scarecrow,” Mellencamp’s enraged and mournful reaction to the corporate pulverization of the family farmer. When I was less than two miles from Mellencamp’s recording studio, and driving slow through the twists and turns of the Indiana forest, I passed a ramshackle home with a large, bearded man sitting on the front porch reading the Bible.
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Outside the window of Mellencamp’s Nashville recording studio - that's Nashville, Indiana - you will see the majesty and rarity of undeveloped America, and you will also see people who, for those who have spent their lives in nearby Indianapolis or Chicago, exist only on the large screens of movie theaters or in the dusty pages of novels. “I just looked out my window, and wrote what I saw,” he said. “Small Town,” a magnificent celebration of communal bonds of solidarity and empathy with an alt-country meets rock ‘n’ roll rhythm, is such an act of musical observation, but so is “Ghost Towns Along the Highway,” a 2007 lament of funereal rock for villages like the one of Mellencamp’s origin - Seymour, Indiana - that were once prosperous but now hang over the edge of oblivion. Mellencamp once attributed his uncanny ability to capture the reality of America’s triumphant and tragic struggle to achieve the beauty of democratic and egalitarian promise in the midst of painful, even fatal failures to simply looking out his window. I got into a bad one with another guy from Man-O-War. When my own amusement prompted him to elaborate, he said, “Oh yeah - one of the guys from the Cars. “I have this studio, because I used to get into fights with other musicians when we worked out of the big studios in New York or LA,” John Mellencamp told me with a sardonic laugh. Then, with the correct navigation, you will find an unassuming, small green house where one of America’s greatest songwriters has created a life’s work of music - music to accompany the search for an American soul - since 1983. You will see a lawnmower repair shop with Coca-Cola machines propped against the wall near the front door. Just one hundred yards of dirt, grass and gravel separate speaking in tongues from the “Barn Dance” - a massive red edifice where country music blasts through the speakers every weekend, and the locals scuff the floors and wear down the heels of their cowboy boots. You will pass miniature white churches, including one that proudly advertises itself as a home for Pentecostals. The cell phone will have no signal, and the road will be too narrow to accommodate two automobiles. You and your vehicle will fall on the mercy of the wilderness. If you take the exit for the right rural route in Indiana, you will drive through hills of lush green on narrow backwoods roads.
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