05 January Is For Videos: John Cougar Mellencamp – Small Town

John Cougar Mellencamp is from Seymour, Indiana, just 217 miles from Gary, Indiana, home of Michael Jackson and family. Some know this soft rocker as John Cougar. To others he’s John Cougar Mellencamp. He tried dropping the cat to be just John Mellencamp. Now I hear he’s now referring to himself as Jean Paul “Le Tigre” Diddycamp*. Whatever his name, in the 80′s I was growing up in small town Indiana and knew him as John Cougar Mellencamp. My third grade teacher would help us learn our multiplication tables and cursive writing (both of which I’ve given up using in real life, thanks to computers) by bribing us with odds and ends from her prize box. Mrs. Taggart was a dyed-in-the-wool John Cougar Mellencamp fan, so one fortunate day, after completing some extremely difficult third grade task, I got the best prize in the box: a John Cougar Mellencamp “Scarecrow” cassette tape. I wore that tape out. After school, I would go to my room, put the cassette in my boom box, pull out the liner notes, and lay there in a pile of my Legos, reading along to the most rock and roll thing I had ever heard. Mellencamp sang about farmers, small towns, girls, Jesus, the government. It didn’t make sense to me, but it rocked. He was rough and untamed, yet still seemed to emote respectable values. I couldn’t quite grasp everything he said, but it resonated with me. He was rock and roll and a Hoosier. In those days, I didn’t know that being from Indiana was actually a strike against someone when dealing with the entertainment industry. I was oblivious to the Midwest Curse. Maybe growing up in Indiana wasn’t very cool in the eyes of east and west coast folk, but man I felt proud to be from Indiana when I listened to “Small Town.” In many ways, I still am proud to call Indiana home, thanks to John Cougar Mellencamp. The YouTube video embedding is disabled for this video, so you’ll have to CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE “SMALL TOWN” VIDEO. *Not factual.