Everybody can relate to the people and themes in John Mellencamp's music.
That's because he's a real guy who's lived a few lifetimes' worth of drama and struggle.
Here's a look into the tragic real-life story that shaped the life and work of John Mellencamp.
Mellencamp is lucky he made it out of his childhood alive.
Shortly after his birth in 1951, he underwent surgery for spina bifida, a birth defect that
leaves an opening in the spinal column that can make the spinal cord extend outside the
body and leave a growth.
That was usually a fatal condition back in the early fifties, but a new surgical technique
saved young Mellencamp's life.
More than sixty years later, in 2014, he met the surgeon who performed the operation, Dr.
Robert Heimburger.
"He remembered it 'cause I was the first one they'd ever done."
According to Mellencamp, Heimburger and associates performed operations on three infant spina
bifida patients at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis.
"One died on the table.
Another girl lived, I think, 'til she was 14, and then she died.
And then me."
Mellencamp's songs are often from the point of view of the underdog.
They're about hardworking individuals from small towns trying to get a leg up to be able
to afford a little pink house.
That's a struggle Mellencamp witnessed in his hometown of Seymour, Indiana, and within
his own family.
His father Richard met his mother when he literally ran into her on the street one day.
As Mellencamp told The New York Times in 1987, Richard and his older brother Joe were running
from cops after roughing up four guys in retaliation for a beating Richard had gotten earlier.
Those Mellencamps were playing the detestable part in which the community had cast them.
As Mellencamp explained,
"For as far back as anyone can care to remember, there has been a rigid, petty small-town class
system in Seymour."
The top of that system was occupied by people who became rich during the Industrial Revolution,
while the rest were farmers.
The singer's great-great-grandfather moved from Germany to Indiana in 1851 and started
the family farm, which had to be sold a generation later.
That left John's grandfather Harry to drop out of school in the third grade to work as
a carpenter.
When Harry went to register to vote, the clerk laughed at him and made fun of his name.
As John put it,
"We were always hearing talk that, 'You low-class Mellencamps will never amount to anything.'"
At the age of 18, Mellencamp was dating a woman three years older than him named Priscilla
Esterline.
When she became pregnant in 1970, the couple tried to do the traditional thing and get
married, but under Indiana law at the time, 18-year-old Mellencamp wasn't old enough to
do so without parental permission.
But that's when the couple hit upon a solution.
They eloped to Kentucky, the next state over.
That marriage lasted a little over a decade, through Mellencamp's early career hurdles,
stumbles, and dead-ends.
But it couldn't survive when he fell for another woman.
After seeing a photo of professional TV extra Vicky Granucci at a friend's house, Mellencamp
became infatuated; when they finally met, it turned out they actually had fantastic
chemistry.
He and Esterline quickly split up so that Mellencamp could marry Granucci, who notably
stars as Diane in Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" video.
Two months after they made it official, they welcomed their first daughter, Teddi Jo, who
would later go on to become a cast member on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
After he married Granucci, Mellencamp's history of tumultuous love affairs still wasn't over,
as he would once again fall for a new woman, leave his current wife, marry the new gal,
and put her in a music video.
This time it was Elaine Irwin, whom he met when she was the cover model for his 1991
album Whenever We Wanted.
Ten weeks after their first face-to-face, they were engaged, and in 1992 they married.
She's also the star of his video for "Get a Leg Up."
This third marriage lasted a long time, almost 18 years.
But it nonetheless fell apart as surely as the first two.
"Apparently women just don't like me very much.
That's all I can say about that."
In 2011, not long after his divorce was finalized, Mellencamp struck up an on-again, off-again
relationship with movie star Meg Ryan, a coupling that apparently left the rocker a little wounded.
When he appeared on Howard Stern's radio show after splitting with the actress in 2014,
he revealed,
"Oh, women hate me.
I loved Meg Ryan.
She hates me to death."
But all was not lost forever.
After a year-long relationship with model Christie Brinkley, Mellencamp and Ryan reunited
and in November 2018, they got engaged.
"How did you figure out at 67 now, let's do this thing for real?"
"I don't know what you mean."
While John Mellencamp suffered from a potentially fatal birth defect as a baby, his third child
similarly faced an uncertain future.
In 1985, Mellencamp and his wife at the time, Vicky Granucci, awaited the arrival of their
second child together.
While she was pregnant, Granucci fell ill with chicken pox, and doctors informed the
expectant parents that the illness might result in fetal deformity.
Mellencamp told The New York Times,
"We were so terrified, maybe the way my parents were with my spinal problems at birth."
Mellencamp also noted that he and Granucci were so afraid of losing their child that
they didn't decide on a name until the day Granucci gave birth.
He told the Times,
"As the doctor began the delivery, we decided that if there was any justice in the world,
the baby would be healthy."
In the end, she was just fine, and accordingly, since there appeared to be justice in the
world, Mellencamp and Granucci named their new daughter "Justice."
Mellencamp has left alcohol and marijuana behind, but he's not a man totally devoid
of vice, as he's an enthusiastic lifelong smoker.
As he revealed in a 2018 interview with CBS News, he started puffing on cigarettes at
the tender age of 10, and he doesn't think more than five decades of the habit have been
all that bad for him, and he's got a bit of a theory about that.
"I believe that it's the combination of cigarettes and alcohol that get people, the two of them
combined."
That theory may not carry too much weight, though, considering that Mellencamp suffered
a heart attack in 1994 at the relatively young age of 42.
He was on tour, and he didn't feel well, so he went back to his hometown of Bloomington,
Indiana, to consult with doctors there.
He later spoke about the health scare during an appearance on The Late Show with David
Letterman, mentioning that when the doctor told him he was having a heart attack, he
went nuts and called him, quote, "everything in the book."
"Then he said, 'John, you can say whatever you want to me or act any way you want, but
a first-year medical student can tell you you've had a heart attack,' and I went, 'Oh.'"
Nevertheless, Mellencamp didn't entirely quit smoking after that.
He just cut down from four packs a day to one.
"I'm just gonna, this is the number for the Surgeon General."
Mellencamp's road to fame and fortune as an authentic rock 'n' roll star wasn't traditional
or short.
By the time he scored his first top 30 hit in the United States with "I Need a Lover"
in 1979, he was almost 30 years old, which is fairly long in the tooth for the youth-oriented
music industry.
And that came after he'd already recorded two misbegotten albums that each failed in
their own unique way.
In 1975, Mellencamp, tired of playing in go-nowhere bar bands, moved to New York City to make
it as a rock star.
He found a champion in David Bowie's former manager Tony DeFries.
Bowie had just unamicably parted ways with DeFries, and so the manager tried to position
Mellencamp as the next Bowie, by way of Bruce Springsteen.
Saddled with the silly stage name of Johnny Cougar, Mellencamp released his first album,
the DeFries-produced Chestnut Street Incident, in 1976.
It consisted primarily of covers of familiar tunes like "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hit the Road
Jack."
It sold only a paltry 12,000 copies.
Afterwards, Mellencamp's label, MCA, refused to release his next album, The Kid Inside,
and then dropped him entirely.
Mellencamp experienced some hard-rocking success with the release of his albums American Fool
and Uh-Huh in 1982 and 1983, respectively.
Then he doubled down on the social commentary and soul-searching with 1985's Scarecrow and
1987's The Lonesome Jubilee.
Among the biggest sellers of his career, they went on to be certified five times platinum
and three times platinum, respectively.
But the success of those albums bears a painful origin, as Mellencamp created Scarecrow and
The Lonesome Jubilee to cope with the deaths of loved ones and how his family shaped him.
As he told The New York Times in 1987,
"Let's face it, you are your parents, whether any of us like it or not…The Lonesome Jubilee,
like Scarecrow and the rest of my best stuff, is about me and my family tree grappling against
both the world and our own inner goddamned whirlwind."
His grandfather, with whom he was incredibly close, died of lung cancer in 1983.
Mellencamp shared with the Times,
"Just before his death, he called everybody into his bedroom, and although he wasn't a
religious person he said, 'You know, I'm having a real bad beating of a time with the Devil'...It
stopped me cold to see my Grandpa so scared.
Six hours later, he was gone."
After that death, John Mellencamp's uncle Joe, became, quote, "the kindest soul you
could imagine."
But then he died, too.
Mellencamp has revealed that the song "Paper in Fire" from The Lonesome Jubilee is about
Joe and his family's ingrained anger.
It's widely known that Mellencamp was born in a small town, specifically, the south-central
Indiana burg of Seymour.
He's easily the town's most famous son, but the second-most famous might be George Green.
He and Mellencamp have known each other since they were in the same Sunday school class
and they would later go on to write some songs together.
In fact, Green helped Mellencamp pen some of his best-known tunes, including "Hurts
So Good," "Crumblin' Down," "Rain on the Scarecrow," and "Human Wheels."
The last song they wrote together was "Yours Forever" for the soundtrack to the 2000 film
The Perfect Storm.
Soon after, they had a falling out.
Mellencamp wrote about their split in the liner notes to his 2010 box set On the Rural
Route 7609:
"Like when you're married, when you're friends with somebody for a long time, the more things
build up the more things can go wrong.
There were personal problems, cross-pollinated with professional issues.
George has written some great lyrics and we've written some great songs together, but I just
couldn't do it anymore."
After that fallout, they never collaborated again, as Green died in 2011 at age 59 after
a short battle with an aggressive form of lung cancer.
Mellencamp has projected an image as somebody who likes to get rowdy and mix it up.
After all, he's the guy who fights authority, even though authority always wins.
It turns out that his sons, Hud and Speck, have lived out the central battle described
in "Authority Song" out in the real world.
In the early morning of July 16, 2017, Hud and Speck got into a fight in the parking
lot of a Jimmy John's sandwich shop in Bloomington, Indiana.
According to the police report, a small group of men started "mouthing off" to the Mellencamp
boys, and then things escalated.
Hud said that somebody hit him, while Speck had blood on his face by the time police showed
up.
Speck was sentenced to community service and probation after pleading guilty to a count
of public intoxication.
This isn't the first time Speck and Hud have run afoul of the law.
In 2015, Speck served four days of jail time for a misdemeanor battery charge over an incident
in 2013 in which the brothers kicked a teenager they thought had hit Speck.
At this rate, it looks like the troubles in the Mellencamp family will continue for generations
to come.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.