Notes on Mellencamp

A Cougar in his natural habitat. (Myrna Suarez)

There were so many parts of my tet-a-tet with John Mellencamp a couple weeks back that I knew I’d never be able to use in the <1,000-word piece the Paper of Record commissioned but that I was loath to lose all the same. When he started, I told him that I’d been listening to his music for as long as I’d been listening to music, so it was exciting and a little intimidating to be speaking with hime. “Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t put that much emphasis on it.”

I told him how it was only in 2021, after hundreds of exposures to his 1985 song “Small Town,” that I realized the line I’d always heard as hate the city was in fact hayseed. Such a specific, regional insult! He told me that audiences at his shows always mime holding a cigarette to their lips while singing along to the chorus of “Cherry Bomb,” his typical set-closer: “That’s when a smoke was a smoke.” Only that’s not the line, despite the evidence of their ears and mine. It’s “That’s when a sport was a sport,” which he said he got from the caption of a photo of him with David Bowie in some British paper in the 70s, probably not too long after Bowie’s then-manager, Tony DeFries, slapped his new client Mellencamp with the regrettable stage name Johnny Cougar. (His grown daughter Teddi Jo still calls him “Coug” to roast him, he said.)

We also talked about the consistent placement of such excellent album cuts as “Minutes to Memories” and “Jackie Brown” is his otherwise heavy-on-the-hits setlists, and why he opens his performances — not concerts — with a clip reel of scenes from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paper Moon. I misidentified the director of the first two of those as Billy Wilder, realizing after I’d said it that they were both Elia Kazan films — but I pulled the name of screenwriter Bud Schulberg before his assistant could, preventing him, maybe, from thinking me a hayseed.

"Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story" REVIEWED IN THE WASHINGTON POST

Reviewing Bono’s memoir for the Washington Post was a big deal for me. U2 was my first favorite band, and I remain, as I say in the piece, “wearily devout.” It’s been a few years (but only two albums) since the Paper of Record let me rank their albums! (I’d like a word with circa-2009 me about some of my decisions.)

I didn’t find space to point out that the only two living world leaders for whom The Fly has anything less than an admiring word are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Or to point out that two episodes from the author’s career — though I would not call them successes — go unmentioned entirely: U2’s 9/11 memorial performance at the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show, and Bono and The Edge’s ill-fated foray (with Julie Taymor!) into musical theatre with the Broadway flop Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Though it you want to know about that exercise, I can recommend Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History.

Anyway. My review of Bono’s memoir is here. Am I boogin’ ya I doon’t mean to boog ya.

Pop Culture Happy Hour No. 255: Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation

Jeremy Renner, Tom Cruise, and Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.

It was my honor to spend, for the second consecutive year, my birthday — well, the eve of my birthday — at NPR with Team PCHH. Here're my notes and omissions on this thrilling episode.

• I can't believe I did not ask ace PCHH producer Jessica Reedy to play a few bars of Lalo Schifrin's "Theme from Mission: Impossible" to set up that segment. Sure, we all know what it sounds like, but any excuse to play it is a good one. What the hell is wrong with me?

• My friend and editor Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice is a noted Tom Cruise-hater. We've debated the relative merits of Cruise's (terrific) Mission: Impossible films and (demonstrably inferior) Fast & the Furious series at a length that I feel is entirely age-appropriate for both of us. I wanted to quote Alan's line about how Cruise is less an actor than a running-man GIF file. The difference is that he considers that at insult and I think it's a compliment, at least when we're discussing an action picture. Vin Diesel looks intimidating standing still but doesn't move especially well. Cruise looks great in motion.
• Had I known on Monday evening when we taped this episode that the podcast U Talkin' U2 2 Me? would post an episode on Wednesday that features a long-form interview with U2, recorded in New York City the night before I saw the band play Madison Square Garden, that would've been What's Making Me Happy this week. Apparently this interview happened just prior to when The Edge and Adam Clayton crashed a 20th anniversary party for the best U2 fansite, @u2.com, where a U2 cover band was performing. For U2 to actually show up on a show that is at least 45 percent devoted to making (affectionate) fun of them is surreal. It won't stop all y'all from continuing to claim they are humorless, but it should.

It finally happened. Scott and Scott traveled to the legendary Electric Ladyland Studios in New York City for a monumental bare all confessional interview with the lovable lads Bonobos, Thedge, Larry Mullen Sr.'s Son & Adam Clay 2000 Pounds.

• The Thing that I did say was Making Me Happy, and still is, Hamilton, now has a release date for its Black Thought and Questlove-produced cast album. 

Pop Culture Happy Hour: The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Pop-Culture Pariahs

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are 40 percent of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. (Marvel)

On this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, I join host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon to dissect Joss Whedon's super-packed super-sequel The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Then we talk about what makes a pop culture pariah, or Why I Will Always Stick Up for James Cameron and U2 no matter what you or, more to the point, they say. This wasn't the place for me to go into about how U2 brilliantly satirized their own inflated post-The Joshua Tree celebrity while promoting their best album, 1991's Achtung Baby, and in the subsequent 1992-3 ZOO TV Tour, the stadium-rock spectacle so dazzlingly smart and subversive that no one has yet surpassed it – not even U2, though they have tried.

You can get a little taste of all that in the 1992 video below, if you dare.

And here they are 23 years later, having some fun with the Central Park bike accident last fall that landed Bono in the hospital for months and forced their planned weeklong, Songs of Innocence-promoting Tonight Show residency to be scrubbed. Also check out their performance of "Angel of Harlem" with The Roots, holy cow.