Sifting through the backstory of the artist known as John Cougar and his 1982 hit rock ballad Jack & Diane, one word comes up time and again – heartland.
It’s a word that seems to encapsulate the all-American working-class story behind the artist and the song. The word appears in the second line of the song’s lyrics and inspired the genre of ‘heartland rock’ that was so often used to described the music of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger and Cougar.
Released on 24 July 1982, Jack & Diane spent four weeks at No.1 in the US and turned Cougar into a star.
He would go on to sell over 60 million albums worldwide, but Jack & Diane is his only chart-topping single and the bona fide classic that would define him. And for all its success, the song’s creation was far from straightforward.
John Cougar was born John J Mellencamp in Seymour, Indiana in 1951 and is of Dutch and German ancestry.
By 1974 he was playing in college bands and travelling regularly from Indiana to New York in a bid to secure a record contract. His first manager Tony DeFries convinced him to change his name to Johnny Cougar in 1976 and this was shortened to John Cougar three years later. By 1983 he had become John Cougar Mellencamp before reverting back to John Mellencamp by 1991.
He signed to MCA Records, who promptly dropped him when his debut 1976 album Chestnut Street Incident flopped. His third album A Biography (1978) yielded what Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described as Mellencamp’s “first good song”, I Need A Lover, which shot to No.5 in Australia.
The Steve Cropper-produced album Nothin’ Matters And What If It Did (1980) followed, yielding two Top 40 US singles. But Mellencamp dismissed much of his early work. “They were just stupid little pop songs,” he told Record Magazine in 1983.
All that changed with his breakthrough fifth album American Fool, recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami with producer Don Gehman.
From the outset, Mellencamp had a clear vision for a whole new sound. Early on in the sessions in 1981, he sat down with Gehman and played him Phil Collins’ monster hit In The Air Tonight.
“He said, ‘This is what I want to create’,” Gehman told writer Richard Buskin of Sound On Sound magazine in 2011. “‘I want to have a couple of verses that sound like a little folk song and then I want the big, bombastic entrance of some drums, and we’ll take it to a whole new place’.”
American Fool marked the point at which Mellencamp transformed himself from a slick ’70s pop-rock star into a rootsier, folk-infused artist of the ’80s.
Admittedly, it’s a patchy album, front-loaded with the best tracks on side one, but the song that stands head and shoulders above the rest is Jack & Diane. Everything about it, from its composition and instrumentation to the production and arrangement, is well thought-out and driven by a strong creative vision.
According to Mellencamp, the song was based on the 1962 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play Sweet Bird Of Youth. It’s a simple narrative about a high school couple falling in love. It is also a coming-of-age tale in which the reality of thwarted dreams is contrasted by the idealism of youth.
“Most people don't ever reach their goals, but that's cool, too,” Mellencamp said in The LA Herald Examiner in 1982. "Failure's a part of what you're all about anyway. Coming to terms with failed expectations is what counts.
“I try to write about the most insignificant things, really. I mean, someone who picks up a copy of Newsweek, then sits down and writes a song about the troubles in South America – who cares? What's that song telling us that we don't already know? Write about something that matters to people, man!”
In Jack & Diane, Mellencamp does exactly that. As Richard Buskin put it in Sound On Sound magazine, Jack & Diane “espouses the small‑town values with which the no‑nonsense, gravel‑voiced heartland rocker has most closely aligned himself during his 35‑year career. Namely, the industriousness and integrity of working-class life”.
But while the lyrics were soon in place, instrumentally, the song proved far more challenging.
“Jack & Diane was a terrible record to make,” Mellencamp reportedly said in a 2008 interview cited in Classic Rock magazine. “When I play it on guitar by myself, it sounds great – but I could never get the band to play along with me. That's why the arrangement's so weird. Stopping and starting, it's not very musical.”
Help came in the form of producer, arranger and ex-Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, who Mellencamp and Gehman invited to the sessions.
“I owe Mick Ronson the hit song Jack & Diane,” Mellencamp told Sound On Sound. “Mick was very instrumental in helping me arrange that song, as I’d thrown it on the junk heap...
“All of a sudden, for Jack & Diane, Mick said, ‘Johnny, you should put baby rattles on there.’ I thought, ‘What the fuck does ‘put baby rattles on the record’ mean?’ So he put the percussion on there and then he sang the part, ‘Let it rock, let it roll’ as a choir‑ish‑type thing, which had never occurred to me. And that is the part everybody remembers on the song. It was Ronson’s idea.”
Ronson was also pivotal in creating the drum sound that would make the track fly.
"We used a LinnDrum borrowed from the Bee Gees,” recalled Gehman, “and for two months we had the intro, the first three verses and all the stuff up to where the real drums enter.”
Gehman continued: “I didn't know anything about rock ’n’ roll drum sounds… [Ronson] said, ‘Well, you ought to do a gated echo with a plate.’ I said, ‘Huh? What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Make the plate kinda short, put gates on the returns and gate the send.’ And when I did that it was one of those ‘Aha!’ moments – ‘Oh, my God, so this is how you make something sound like it's getting hit hard!’ That was the beginning of things starting to click. Just that one little thing made it like we were a rock band. What Mick told us was a gift.”
The track is elevated by the tight musicianship of guitarists Ronson, Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane, bassists George Perry and Robert Frank, drummer/percussionist Kenny Aronoff and keyboard player Eric Rosser. It also reportedly features some uncredited session musicians who add nuances and textures.
What is so remarkable about Jack & Diane is how fresh it sounds, with a minimalist production that ensures acres of space in the mix.
The track opens with power chords – triads and inversions of A, D and E. These are set against a sparse Linn Drum rhythm and some high-in-the-mix handclaps.
Almost 30 seconds in, the crisp, minimal intro gives way to acoustic guitar strumming and the first lines of Mellencamp’s vocal. “Little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane/Two American kids growin’ up in the heartland”.
By the second verse, flowing piano enters the mix. At 1:15, the song picks up as Mellencamp sings one of the defining lines: “Oh yeah, life goes on/Long after the thrill of living is gone.”
This is ostensibly the chorus, although as Gehman told Sound On Sound, “But then, what is the chorus to that song?”
The strength of the song and what makes it unusual, he suggests, is its numerous hooks. “There are musical hooks, there are the claps, there's all kinds of stuff.”
At 1:30 it returns to the power chord intro and then into the third verse, with nifty vocal phrasing from Mellencamp as organ swells appear in the mix.
At 2:30, a walloping drum fill – a direct nod to In The Air Tonight – kicks the song into a whole new dimension as everything but the live drums and vocals fill the mix.
Then, Mellencamp and assembled players belt out the line: “Let it rock, let it roll.”
“Until we had ‘let it rock, let it roll’, there was no payoff,” said Gehman. "That was a gang vocal, with the guys all standing around one mic, and we layered it with some low harmonies, creating three or four tracks of three or four people. The band had a lot of singers. Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane both had very unique voices.”
It’s a big vocal sound with rich harmonies, and it then shifts to just the mammoth kick and snare, before segueing back to acoustic guitar and the chorus.
At 3:20 a flute adds a graceful motif before the song lurches back to the power chord intro and fades to its close.
Jack & Diane was released on 24 July 1982 and shot to No.1 in the US and Canada. Its success was fuelled by a grainy nostalgia-tinged video, directed by Bruce Gowers and featuring Mellencamp and his then-wife, Victoria Granucci.
The song received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with critics lauding its relatable bittersweet tale of Midwestern teenage life.
But for all its success, Mellencamp’s view of the song was far from positive.
“I always detested that song until the last couple, three years,” he told Forbes magazine in January 2022.
Four decades after its release, he was still shocked by how many people connected with the song.
“I watched a football game this past weekend, and 80,000 people were singing that song at half-time. Can you imagine? I thought, ‘Shit!’ I said, ‘How do all these fucking people know this song?’”
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