Ain’t that John Mellencamp?

There’s enough you may think you already know about John Mellencamp. There’s the former Johnny Cougar of “Jack and Diane” fame, the man behind “Little Pink Houses,” and the voice you hear behind that ubiquitous truck commercial. This is also the small-town Hoosier boy who did good, helping catapult Farm Aid into the signature social support of family farmers, raising nearly $40 million dollars for struggling farmers since 1985.

But there’s also the movie producer, the activist and political critic who, for the benefit of being unrefined and unrepentant, seems to get away with it all. It bubbled up threw the rockstar veneer: In the 1980s, he wrote several songs critical of the “Country Gentleman” Ronald Reagan. In 2004, he performed with the Vote for Change tour in October 2004, pushing an undercurrent campaign to defeat George W. Bush. He has written, sung and spoken out against the Iraq wars and other conflicts that continue to trample on the future of young people’s lives. His 2007 album “Freedom’s Road” includes a hidden track called “Rodeo Clown” in a not-so-veiled reference to Bush. This year he’s released “No Better Than This,” produced by T Bone Burnett, an album created in the rough to reflect the bygone American folk tradition. Rolling Stone has named it one of the best albums of 2010. With 25 albums to his credit, he’s performed for rednecks, radicals, a president and troops, but you won’t hear him crowing about any of it. You don’t do that in small town America, and he’s small town. But ain’t we all?

Ken Leslie, the founder of a homeless tent city in Toledo, Ohio, recently interviewed Mellencamp, revisiting their first meeting years ago. The relationship between Leslie and Mellencamp began in 2007 when Mellencamp visited Toledo’s Homeless Awareness Project Tent City. That visit became the inspiration for creating the homeless advocacy and service program 1Matters, which went on to launch the street paper Toledo Streets.

Ken Leslie: We first met two years ago or so when you made an un-promoted stop at the annual Tent City, Project Homeless Connect in Toledo. You just wanted them to know they matter, and you’ve said you were touched by the experience. How so?

John Mellencamp: When you see what progress can produce, and also what progress can discard, it makes a feller wonder if some of the progress, let me put it this way, calling it progress does not make it right.

In this country right now there is no middle class, no place for middle class. You are either really rich or you are really down and out. It’s hard times in this country right now.

K.L.: You brought your wife Elaine and son Speck with you to Tent City. When you had your private talk with some of the unhoused, at first Speck stood back, but by the end of your conversation he was in the circle listening to every word. Compassion is a pretty cool thing for a father to pass on to a son. Did he share his thoughts on the experience before and after?

J.M.: He is a very activist type of kid. I found that out when he was pretty young. He did some research at school on some chocolate company and he wrote them a letter and it said, “You cheapskates, why don’t you hire and why don’t you pay fair, ya so-and-so.” And he almost got me into trouble last year, too.

K.L.: How so?

J.M.: He had a petition on Facebook to try to get me to stop smoking. He had, I think, about a half a million people sign up and he had to get a million. The whole conversation was just at Thanksgiving last year. He said, “Hey Dad, if I get a million people to sign up on Facebook would you stop smoking?” And I said, “Yeah, go ahead.” That was the end of the conversation.

A couple weeks into it, Larry King wanted him to come on, Good Morning America asked him, and of course I wouldn’t let him go on anywhere. First of all, I don’t want him talking about my bad habits; and second of all, ya know, I knew he’d reach his mark.

K.L.: And then what?

J.M.: And then I’d have to stop smoking.

K.L.: Would you? Have you tried? How many times have you tried?

J.M.: Listen, I have no desire to stop, so there’s no reason to even have that conversation. If I would have wanted to stop smoking I would have years go.

K.L.: When you were on stage at Tent City, you spontaneously decided to invite everybody there to your concert, all of the unhoused people.

J.M.: Right.

K.L.: 60 – 70 people went and I understand you talked to them from the stage about hope. Your whole career, you’ve had the compassion for and worked for those with little or no voice. What is the root of that compassion. Where does it come from?

J.M.: Well for me, it started with race. I was in a band when I was 13-14 years old and it was the mid-60’s and it was a racially mixed band. I was the lead singer and this black kid was a singer he was a couple years older than me, really good. We’d play every weekend at fraternities and in hotels and stuff like that. It was a soul band. And I saw the way people treated him. It was like, wow. Really? Wait a minute, you loved him on stage, but now he’s gotta go wait outside? And so I think that made quite an impression on me as a young guy.

K.L.: How’d you respond?

J.M.: Well, there were times that there were fist fights. I remember in a little town in Indiana there was a fist fight during one of our breaks because of his race.

K.L.: And since then you’ve carried on standing up for farmers, for the people, I remember Jena (Louisiana), you stuck up for people there and actually put a lot of your work and effort into that.

J.M.: Well I’m Sisyphus myself; I’m always the guy who’s rolling the rock up the hill. Ya know, and every time I get too close to the top I either let it roll back down on purpose or it just rolls back, catches on fire and rolls down at someone. So, I know what it’s like to have to work at something. My struggle is obviously different than some folks’ struggle, but, nevertheless, we all have our problems.+

K.L.: Tell me about that one moment that caused you to be a part of Farm Aid 25 years ago and to maintain it even today.

J.M.: I had written a song with a friend of mine called “Rain on the Scarecrow” and I had just made an album about what I had seen. Ya know, what prosperity had done to the small towns. How they had leveled them out and devastated small town America. So we made this record called Scarecrow. And then when Willie called, it took me about a second to decide I wanted to be a part of Farm Aid. He had like a vague notion of what Farm Aid was gonna be. It was no more than just a vague notion and we really had no idea it was gonna last. We had our 25th anniversary on October 2nd.

K.L.: One of the things that I’ve always admired about you is your courage in social justice. You take a huge pile of truth, dump it in front of them and say, “Smell this.” Based on your lifetime of fighting for the truth, has your position changed in the sense that authority always win?

J.M.: Oh, I’m a hypocrite, there’s no question about it. Don’t you know a hypocrite when ya see one? You’re looking right at him. Ah yeah, I’m in the wind all the time because you have to be in the wind all the time. I have a new song, it’s called “Save Some Time to Dream,” and I address that and it says always keep your mind open and always question your faith. You can’t just say that this is my position and this is my position for life because, you discover new information. You grow up. You see things through different eyes. So, you know, I suppose that in the world’s eyes, I’m a hypocrite because I’ll say one thing and do another, but I said one thing 25 years ago and being judged for an action that I did today. So, ya know, things change, man.

K.L.: In the past few years there have been people talking about drafting you to become an authority, to get you involved with politics.

J.M.: Oh, I couldn’t do that at all. My “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers” would probably not fly very well in conversation in the Congress.

K.L.: I could see you on the floor: Your honorable son-of-a-bitch…

J.M.: “Ya’ lying cocksucker.” Yeah, I don’t think it would go very good. Besides, why was that job open? Cause the guy that was doing it couldn’t stand it any more. He wanted to quit because the hypocrisy was too great for him so he said, “I can’t do this anymore.” Not me.

K.L.: You’ve always fought convention in your work, your life, and your music. And “No Better Than This” is the perfect example of busting convention to shreds. What was your inspiration for the whole premise?

J.M.: Well, I knew I was going to go on tour, Bob [Dylan] and I did a tour last summer and I knew I was gonna come close to all these places. It was kind of a leisurely tour, so I thought, well hell, at the time, let’s make the most out of this – we’re gonna be in these places and that was just how it started. I wrote all those songs in about in about 10-15 days, I don’t know. It was just I’d get up every morning and I’d write —two or three songs in a day. And I let the songs write themselves, as opposed to sometimes when you write songs you try to steer them a way that you would like them to go. But these songs, they kind of wrote themselves, really.

K.L.: What about the idea of the recording process, recorded in Mono?

J.M.: Well, it was a rebellious act. There is a song on the record called “The West End” and it says, “It’s worse now, look what progress did.” So I decided that to go just as far away from the popular culture of music as I possibly could and just go back to where it began. The whole record was recorded on one channel and — one tape machine (a 1955 Ampex), and the whole band played it once and there was one microphone.

K.L.: It is such a pure sound.

J.M.: There are no over dubs, no echo, there’s no anything. It’s just what the room sounded like and it was fun because it was musicians actually playing music, as opposed to building a record or constructing a record.

K.L.: How did you choose the locations?

J.M.: By the way the tour was routed. I knew that I was gonna be close to Memphis, and I knew I was gonna start in Savannah and I have a house right outside of Savannah on an island, so it gave me an opportunity to stay there and work a couple days, and then we went to Memphis. Then we tried to go to Texas to the building where Johnson also recorded, but it was condemned and they wouldn’t let us in. So we ended up having to go to San Antonio, which was kind of out of the way, but we were only there two days.

K.L.: I can tell you that from when I was unhoused and living in my car, you nailed the feeling of hopelessness in “Graceful Fall:” “It’s not a graceful fall from dreams to truth, there’s not a lot of hope if you got nothing to lose.”

Since 2007, foreclosures and job losses increased the number of families in shelters nearly 30 percent. Each night there are 640,000 unhoused Americans who have lost domestic autonomy and are living on the streets and in shelters, 15 percent are veterans. Some of those will be selling the very street papers which are carrying your words right now. What are your words of hope to all of our brothers and sisters who are living on the streets of our country?

J.M.: Wow, that’s a big question, that’s an awfully big question. I wish I had something that I could say that seemed to address that question, but I’m not sure I really do at this point in our country.

I’ve always had a bunch of dumb cliché things that my family taught me that I always passed on to my kids. My grandfather passed them on to me and they’ve always provided some sort of hope in my life.

They’re not very eloquent, but the greatest advice I ever got in my life and, it’s not very eloquent, but “If you’re gonna’ hit a cocksucker, kill him.” And what my grandfather meant when he said that was, if you’re actually going to do something, don’t talk about it, don’t brag about it, just go do it and do it to the best that you can possibly do. And that’s what he was saying, don’t be threatening, don’t be talking, don’t be bragging. I think that as un-eloquently as it was said, it was probably one of the most important things said to me in my life.

K.L.: Which is a perfect thing to say to the people on the streets, because if you’re going to get off the streets, you can.

J.M.: You can, you need to! See, the problem is most people give up too early. I’m just talking about people in general. They give up on relationships too early, they give up on themselves too early, they give up on life too early. I mean I’ve been writing that since I was a kid. In the song called “Jack and Diane” you know they were only 16 and already giving up. People just give up too early, they just quit, you know, “this is too hard,” or, “I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

I think that’s a problem, and I think that’s a problem our country has. Over the decades it was allowed to happen by the work ethic and through capitalism, a lot of things that affect this country that allow people to think that way, that the world owes them a living. And as soon as you start thinking that somebody owes you something, forget it man, you’re done. And as soon as you start thinking you’re right and everybody else is wrong… It’s like the guy who was married six or seven times, hell, I think it might be me – I think this could be me, I’m starting to think this is my problem.

Photo by Stephanie Pfriender