We learned them not just listening to them, but we learned every single nuance of every single song, whether it was “ABC” by the Jackson Five or “White Room” by Cream, “Dancing Days” by Zeppelin, the Rascals catalog, a bunch of Motown, we made a thorough study of what we could bring back to the table. At one point we did a study of American music, we spent three months learning 90 songs of other bands. We rehearsed for six months before a major tour, it took forever. We went into rehearsal at a level that no one ever has. Wanchic: We had consciously in our minds the idea of being the best rock band in the world, whether or not we ever would be was open to question. NUVO: At the same time that you were moving in the public’s mind from John Cougar, a product, to John Cougar Mellencamp, the artist, what crystallized within the band to bring the live shows to their incredible peak? What was going on within the band to drive that? We had no intention of making a record, but he had some inspiration for a few weeks and he wrote the whole record. It was a very spontaneous record, a record that we hadn’t planned to make … I was in the middle of Lake Cumberland on a houseboat when John called me. Big Daddy was certainly a melancholy record and it came at a time in John’s life when he was very reflective. There was a natural progression from Scarecrow which had certain thematic content, to adding the expanded instrumentation on Lonesome Jubilee, completing what we started with Scarecrow. Scarecrow was a transition record between the raw rock ’n’ roll of Uh-Huh and the American music of Lonesome Jubilee. We were feeling our oats as a young American rock band with a lot of success at that moment, we felt we could take the liberty, hell, we even thanked the Rolling Stones on the record.
The Uh-Huh record was heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, very heavily. From that point on we were conceptualizing these records, each one on our own. Don Gehman has production credits on those records, so that we could tell the record company, “This guy’s co-producing our record,” but he was really an engineer … he was a collaborator, but he was by no means our producer. Wanchic: It was the first time we had worked without an outside producer. NUVO: There was a magic that started then, what happened? Mike Wanchic: Larry Crane, myself, Toby Myers and Kenny Aronoff. NUVO: What I’d like to focus on is the period between Uh-Huh and Big Daddy, when you were really gelling as a band and coming into your own as one of the great American rock bands of that era. Self-effacing, hardworking and unsung, the John Mellencamp Band left its mark as one of America’s great rock bands almost as an afterthought, a byproduct of their collective approach to rock ’n’ roll. How did John Cougar from Seymour become John Mellencamp, a Midwestern archetype? Well, the untold part of the story is that he had a secret weapon: his band. Mellencamp has had a longer run than Bird or the IRL, and may yet outlast corn and soybeans. John Mellencamp is as ubiquitous in Indiana as: Larry Bird, the IRL, monoculture? The correct answer is all of the above. Remembering the John Mellencamp Band, one of America’s greatest
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