john mellencamp’s election central
john mellencamp performing last week at the crump theater in columbus, indiana. photo by mark cornelison.
Here are three reasons to visit John Mellencamp’s website today:
+ First and foremost is the text of a letter Mellencamp and the Farm Aid board of directors forwarded to Congress last week. It suggested that a sliver of the then-proposed $700 billion considered for a Wall Street bailout go instead to family farm agriculture. Of course, now that the bailout bill failed to even make it through the House of Representatives, it seems unlikely Congress is going to be helping much of anyone this fall other than themselves. After all, it’s election time and everyone up for re-election (as in the entire House) will be trying to shift focus from an economy so dreary that, as David Letterman joked last night, “stock brokers are taking their smoke breaks on the ledge.”
+ There is also a nice remembrance of Paul Newman, where Mellencamp recalls watching Cool Hand Luke for seven straight nights at Seymour, Indiana’s Vondee Theater. “We saved up our lunch money so we could go and by the end of the week we could recite every line.”
+ Finally, you can hear Mellencamp’s web-exclusive cover of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are-A-Changin’ while you’re there. It’s an election year treat from the singer who told John McCain last winter to stop playing recordings of Pink Houses and Our Country at his campaign rallies.
I am a native Kentuckian and freelance journalist who has been writing about contemporary music for the Lexington Herald-Leader since 1980. I have not a lick of honest musical talent myself, just a pair of appreciative ears for jazz, folk, blues, bluegrass, Americana, soul, Celtic, Cajun, chamber, worldbeat, nearly every form of rock 'n' roll imaginable and, when pressed, the occasional tango and polka.