Tag Archives: john mellencamp

January 10, 2011

Listen to your coach: Don’t get caught watching the finger-paint dry

By Jeff Vrabel

The finest film ever made about Indiana basketball. IN YOUR FACE, Hackman.

GateHouse — So somehow I ended up an “assistant coach” on my son’s first-grade basketball team. I might as well be a neurosurgeon, snake handler, public speaker or priest. There are few, if any, non-crocodile-related activities on Earth I am less equipped to introduce to others, even if those others are mostly interested in constantly pushing each other and dramatically falling down for no discernible purpose. Once, while playing for a 2007 rec league team of suckitude so legendary that it was brought up on Facebook this past Sunday, I successfully nailed two consecutive free throws, and the heartbreakingly sympathetic, oh-bless-his-heart applause from my quote-fingers friends in attendance still echoes in my mind on the cold nights.

I am, however, easily swayed and blessed with a below-average awareness of my own shortcomings, so when my friend (and actual basketball person) Jamie needed a hand, I said sure, figuring:

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  1. You know, “attentive parenting” or whatever and
  2. I grew up in Indiana in the 1980s, in a nice house in a nice neighbborhood with a nice, picturesque, state-issued rickety backboard nailed to the side of the barn (if you didn’t have one already, barns were assigned to residents via the popular Post-”Hoosiers” Civic Pride Act Of 1986). I also attended Indiana University, so I figured if things get really hairy I could always just fall back on my geographic instinct, which is to choke somebody and get fired.

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John Mellencamp — Small Town (acoustic).mp3

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Back Home Again In Indiana, Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Humor Columns

September 2, 2010

Interview: John Mellencamp’s new testament

By Jeff Vrabel

Hilton Head Monthly — A few weeks ago, John Mellencamp wandered through a large and shiny mall in Indianapolis in a futile, climate-controlled and probably Cinnabon-smelling hunt for the record store.

This was, of course, a terrible idea, in part because you can imagine what happens when John Mellencamp wanders unannounced through a mall in Indianapolis, but also because he’d have had about as much luck finding a reliable VCR repairman or some MySpace gear; who knows the last time the mall had a record store. So he abandoned the search and did the only logical thing he could — went over to the Apple store. “The place was packed,” Mellencamp said. “Packed. People swarming in line, the way the record store was when we were kids.”

That was, needless to say, some time ago; these days when you accidentally stumble across a record store it feels weird, like an abandoned mining town or an undervisited museum. It looks passed over and it feels old-fashioned, but that makes sense, says Mellencamp, because so is rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s done. It’s over. We killed it,” he says, pausing for effect between each little eulogy. “There’s nothing that’s going to revive it, or give us that extra little goose, like punk or grunge did. We ruined it. We outgrew it. So I’m kind of excited to see what’s next.”

Read the full story at Hilton Head Monthly.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Hilton Head Monthly, Interviews, Music Writing

August 10, 2010

Interview: John Mellencamp on “No Better Than This,” his unusual fall tour and what the blank he was doing in the ’80s

By Jeff Vrabel

Rolling Stone — Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp’s tour wraps in September, but Mellencamp will continue on this fall with sixteen Midwestern dates in support of No Better Than This.

Unlike his immaculately produced ’80s albums, Mellencamp wrote this record quickly, on acoustic guitar, and recorded it in mono on a 55-year-old Ampex tape recorder. “I looked at T Bone and I said, ‘What the fuck were we doing in the ’80s?’” Mellencamp told RS. “I made a record once that took almost a year. I spent millions of dollars dicking around with songs, and in the long run it paid off because it sold millions of copies. But I go back and I listen to the record today, and it was…more of a craftsman thing.” Read the full story at Rolling Stone.

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  • Stream the title track from “No Better Than This” at mellencamp.com

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Interviews, Music Writing, Rolling Stone

January 10, 2007

Rick Moranis: Honey, I Shrunk The Coug, or Only One Man Would Dare Give John Mellencamp The Raspberry

By Jeff Vrabel

Or: Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

Billboard’s Jaded Insider — J.I. needs no more reasons to love Rick Moranis; on the stone tablet on which we keep inscribed a list of our of favorite people, he falls somewhere around “Weird Al” Yankovic, Charles Grodin and Cal Ripken.

But we’ve got one anyway – Moranis’ official web site now features a parody of John Mellencamp’s ubiquitous single/car ad/”Like A Rock” wannabe “Our Country,” entitled “America, My Truck” and credited to Rick Cougar Moranis. This comes on the heels of Moranis’ ‘GRAMMY-NOMINATED country-western album “The Agoraphobic Cowboy,” lovingly recalled here.

A visit to Moranis’ page is worth it just for the cover image, which is not something Lewis Tully would ever be caught dead doing. But check out Moranis’ dead-on Coug impression, as he growls and groans through lines like “America can’t spin her wheels and sometimes she gets stuck/I love America … America’s my truck.” He must have suck down like three packs of Winstons that day to get that kind of grit, leaving him still far short of Mellencamp’s daily pack intake of 38.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Billboard, Billboard.com / Jaded Insider, Humor Columns

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