It’s been a prolific summer for John Mellencamp, release wise. A few months ago he brought out On the Rural Route 7609, a combination box set-greatest hits-rarities collection that didn’t seem to have a real point. Those of us who put him on the same level as Bob Dylan and Neil Young already had most of these songs, while new fans were bewildered by some of the oddities.
Maybe he thought that people would spend $40 for the fancy booklet, But why bother when the Internet is one giant set of liner notes?
Mellencamp deserves the coffee table treatment, but this one fell onto the rug. It scattered rarities along with those previously released, inviting us to listen to the old songs in a new context. Well, John, we do that all of the time around here, and it’s called “playlists.” Well before iTunes I was making my own best-of sequences; constantly creating context.
So this “reimagination” only works for the committee that assembled the song list. It didn’t work for me, since any Mellencamp list I make won’t go anywhere near either Jack or Diane.
And why bother with the old, when he’s come up a brand=new bag full of old sounding tunes? Witness No Better Than This, a rockabilly flavored set meant to recall when people recorded live in a small room with single microphone, in mono. This was way riskier than putting out a identity-free box set, since it stood the chance of becoming an annoying gimmick.
Singers start with a concept and only follow the rules when it suits them. There is a lot about this album that is authentic, the music has an old feel but is contemporary enough that it doesn’t sound dated. Perhaps it is because early rock lyrics were stupid, and Mellencamp’s lyrics aren’t.
But the biggest difference between this album and those it emulates is length. The really early rock albums had a dozen songs two minutes long. The new one stretches 13 songs into 53 minutes. Which is really long, for a gimmick.
I know this album should be shorter, but haven’t heard it enough to decide which songs he could have left off. By the time I’ve done all that research I’ll probably conclude that it’s pretty good, all the way through. Or like a lot of his stuff just put it away, to return in a few months to realize that it was better than it sounded the first few times.
I’m no Mellencamp completist, and haven’t heard any of his pre-Scarecrow LPs all the way through. Since then I’ve bought all his albums and haven’t dug every one, but there are some pretty extroadinary songs. And flashes of brilliance, like the entire Mr Happy Go Lucky album.
We know where this idea came from. No Better Than This is Mellencamp’s second collaboration with T-Bone Burnett, whose 1980 LP Truth Decay used the same idea.
At the time, an unknown guy on a backwoods label hardly caused a ripple, and he probably just filed away the idea to use when people were listening.
Now that T-Bone has a larger audience he’s retreading the idea with Mellencamp, and it works pretty well.
