The singer Bruce Springsteen crowned as the most important roots rocker: “He has carved his own path”
Everything that Bruce Springsteen has written about has always been about the heartland.
As much as some nincompoops like to claim that he is responsible for the death of the American dream and is nothing but a communist masquerading as a rock and roll star, ‘The Boss’ always believed in the values that America always had, and he was going to do everything he could to make sure that the blue collar workers he grew up with never had to change their ways. But around the time Springsteen was making his own music, he wasn’t the only one trying his hand at more everyman songwriting.
Some of the biggest stars in the world before Springsteen had been following in the Bob Dylan tradition, and since Dylan only wrote about what he knew, people were springing up from all corners of the country talking about what they had seen. It was easy to get swept up in whatever Eagles were talking about or feel how sinister Lou Reed felt on every single Velvet Underground song, but the regular Joes of rock and roll were coming from the less commercial parts of America.
Tom Petty had been slogging away in Florida before he had the drive to move out to California, and even though Bob Seger remained friends with the Eagles for years, he prided himself on being from Detroit before anything else. These hometowns were a point of pride for every roots rocker, and if Springsteen could rep for New Jersey better than anyone in the world, the same could be said of John Mellencamp.
But what Mellencamp did was a little bit different. The biggest names in music have always tried to give back to their community, but when looking at what Mellencamp has done with Farm Aid is about more than simple charity. He didn’t want to see the hard-working people get shafted by big business, and Farm Aid was a way of reminding everyone of what the roots of America always were.
And you can really hear that kind of attitude in Mellencamp’s music as well. When you listen to him sing ‘Hurts So Good’ or ‘Jack and Diane’, he was never interested in writing the same boring songs that every other rock band was making at the time. Led Zeppelin could write about mythology and the biggest prog bands could write fanciful tales, but unless Mellencamp could actually give these characters flesh and blood over the course of a few minutes, it wasn’t a road worth going down.
So for someone who appreciated the fictionalised version of America as Springsteen did, he figured that Mellencamp was a fellow legend trying his best to show the world what America looked and sounded like, saying, “He has carved his own path in the live arena and in the studio. John Mellencamp is arguably the most important roots rocker of his generation. John’s made dulcimers and fiddles into lead rock instruments on par with electric guitar. His best music is rock and roll stripped of all escapism.”
And that’s what separates him from the Springsteens of the world. Despite all of the heartache in ‘The Boss’s tunes, there’s still a hint of romanticism that maybe everything will work out in the end. That doesn’t happen in Mellencamp’s tunes. If one of his characters gets their hearts broken by the end of the song, they have to go on their way and go through the sad reality that their true love isn’t coming back.
It’s a hard lesson for anyone to learn in a song, but Mellencamp’s greatest strength was about not sugarcoating anything, either. He wanted to show America’s good times as well as its bad times, and even if the world seemed a bit darker by the end of those few minutes in his songs, he was still reminding everyone that it was a world still worth fighting for even in its worst moments.
