JOHN MELLENCAMP BAND MOVIE

The song conveys the idea that something whose value to the country could not be measured in economic terms alone was being destroyed. “Rain on the Scarecrow” is Mellencamp’s account of the crisis, in the words of a farmer who has lost the land that had been his family’s for generations. In one instance, a farmer’s wife immolated herself in a haystack bonfire. A lot of farmers, proud men accustomed to self- reliance, committed suicide, ashamed of their failure, unable to believe that the world had anything left to offer them, or both. The ripple effect meant town stores, schools, and banks went under too, and entire communities–tiny, close-knit places where people had lived all their lives–were decimated. These families lost their land, which often included the family home. The majority of these were middle-sized farms owned and run by families who derived most of their income from farming. were lost to foreclosure, bankruptcy, and restructuring. Between 19, more than a quarter of a million farms in the U.S. In the 80s, a sudden decline in land values and commodity prices and an increase in interest rates and production costs left many of them unable to meet their payments. In the 1970s, farmers, at the encouragement of lenders and consultants, took on heavy debts to expand their operations. That’s why, even though my involvement in agriculture was limited to that summer detassling job, the farm crisis of the mid-80s upset me. I grew up thinking of these fields as part of my home. In the late 80s my job required traveling through central Illinois and eastern Iowa, and as I drove along the highways and back roads I’d see farmers in their tractors, plowing in the spring, harvesting in the fall. Like most people who grew up in my hometown, I earned money for college during the summer by detassling corn plants in the fields outside of town–long hours of hot, dirty work.

JOHN MELLENCAMP BAND MOVIE

As a kid, I’d ride my bike past a half-mile-long expanse of cornfields to reach the movie theaters where I’d watch weekend matinees. People complain that this landscape is boring, but I see beauty in the open space and feel a sense of assurance and wonder at its vastness. I hear much of what is distinctive and valuable about this region in Mellencamp’s songs, both in the music itself and in the themes and concerns of his lyrics.Īs with the nation’s other unique regions, the midwest’s character originates in the land, the great plains of farm property that can extend for miles until their outermost edges touch the horizon line. The midwest, especially in rural areas, has a character all its own. But I don’t believe it for the rest of this country. That view may be true of the suburbs, and is precisely the reason I don’t want to live in one. Reading the lyrics on the back of the album and seeing the picture of Mellencamp hunched over a barbed-wire fence, wrapped in a blue jeans jacket, his face somber, reminded me why I was homesick.Ī lot of people will tell you that there are no distinct regional identities in the United States anymore, that television, fast-food chains, and shopping malls have turned every place into the same place. I had nothing to play it on and no money to buy it with, but when Scarecrow came out I went into a Crazy Eddie’s record store just to look at it. Mellencamp already had impressed me with Uh-Huh, the 1983 collection of Rolling Stones-derived rockers that began his rehabilitation from an irritable, confrontational singer of dumb, insubstantial guitar-driven songs into an irritable, confrontational singer of smart, substantial guitar-driven songs. I’d heard that John Cougar Mellencamp, as he was called at the time, was readying an album that would touch on the farm crisis that was then raging, and on other midwestern themes. It was an exciting, scary time, and I had a lot of fun, but I missed my home a lot too. I was 22 when I got to New York, on my own for the first time, in a city that was dirty, ugly, noisy, confusing, thrilling, energetic, and strange. I had grown up in a small northern-Illinois town surrounded by cornfields, and I’d gone to school in an even smaller town in eastern Iowa. Get your UnGala tickets: A museum takeover and art party celebrating the Reader's 50ish anniversary CloseĪfter graduating from college in May 1985, I worked my way east from Illinois, and by late August I’d landed in New York City.

John mellencamp band