John Mellencamp when he was John Cougar

In 1978, when the then 27-year-old John Mellencamp – who however signed his records with his stage name Johnny Cougar – released his second album, “A biography”his career was already stalled. The first album, released two years earlier, “Chestnut Street Incident”had been practically ignored, which cost him the exit from the record company contract. But the inscrutable plots of fate were moving. In the tracklist of “A biography”in fact, there was a song that would give him time to develop his talent. That song was “I Need a Lover”and had had some success in Australia.

Mellencamp himself recalled it in “Plain Spoken: From the Chicago Theater”: “When I landed, there were some guys – a bunch of screaming girls and some guys with haircuts identical to mine – waiting for me. They wouldn’t even pick me up in Bloomington, where I lived, if I hitchhiked. I couldn’t take it seriously; it was a joke. I thought it was an isolated thing.”

To be honest, the song was successful, but not thanks to John… as he honestly told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013: “By my mid-twenties I was done. Then two record producers named Chinn and Chapman heard “I Need a Lover” and made Pat Benatar sing it.” The debut album of
Benatar
,
“In the heat of the night”
in which it was inserted
“I Need a Lover”
went platinum. At that point John’s label thought it wasn’t a bad idea to include the song on his third album too,
“John Cougar”
released on July 27, 1979. With the re-released version, Mellencamp’s album entered the American charts for the first time.

The life of
John Mellencamp
before the stalemate we were referring to, he had been in a hurry: he had married very young in high school and had a son at 19, at 21 he was already looking for a new life, be it in art or music. Here’s how he described those distant times to CBS in 2018: “I found out that the New York Art Student League wanted money, while the record company wanted to give me money! I finally signed a record contract. The head of a record company and signed me within minutes. With the utmost humility, I tell you what happened to me. They didn’t even listen to the demo!”

It all seemed to be very easy, but right then things started to get difficult. It happened that the former manager of
David Bowie
,
Tony DeFries
invented a banal stage name for him, then the label wanted to transform him into a sort of rebel. Not the rebel who
John Mellencamp
was actually, but a version that was between Bowie and

Bruce Springsteen
. It didn’t work. In England, in 1978, he had to play under the stands of a ruined football stadium. Everything seemed to collapse around him. His guitarist,
Larry Crane
speaking to Rolling Stone in 1986, summed it all up by saying, “We were in a room that looked like a kiosk. Do you wonder why John was unhappy at the time?”

It’s not that
John Cougar
had no talent, he just had to focus on writing and have a little luck on his side. As he so lucidly stated in 1987 when he was now an established rocker: “As a child I liked the attention that telling stories got. I liked to fascinate people with my stories, even lying like a shameless son of a bitch, just taking a story and making something up. That’s how I realized that if I could put these lies on paper, I would really achieve something. And that’s how my songwriting began. It wasn’t very sincere; it was just what I thought would be interesting.”

“I had to make records that would play on the radio and be undeniable hits. I didn’t know how. I’d gotten lucky with ‘I Need a Lover,’ but how could I do it again? I had no idea. The only way I knew I’d survive was to become so popular on the radio that no one could stop me from going on.” John achieved his intent in 1982 with the album

“American Fool”
and songs like
“Hurts So Good”
And
“Jack and Diane”
. Once he conquered the charts, Mellencamp felt ready to take back his real name, a plan he had had in mind from the beginning.

Of his beginnings, and his hated stage name, he once explained to UPI: “I was 22. At the time, I listened to every suggestion. I thought these people were in the music business and I wasn’t, so I better pay attention. Someone would throw out an offhand comment and I’d take it to heart, whether it was about writing, production or image. Then one day I woke up and realized that listening to these people had gotten me nowhere. That I was further from what I wanted to do than I had ever been.”

After
“American Fool”
the album was released in 1983
“Uh-Huh”
and in the name printed on the cover it finally appeared as well as

John Cougar
also Mellencamp. In 1991, with
“Whenever We Wanted”
the nickname was eliminated. Although, even today, after all these years, Mellencamp still hasn’t completely gotten rid of the hated Cougar. “It will never go away,” he stated
John Mellencamp
to NPR in 2010. “I walk down the street and still people say, ‘Hey, John Cougar.’ I hear it all the time. Or they introduce me as John Cougar Mellencamp. It used to be just like that. I mean, that’s how people knew me, and it’s… it’s just fate.”