John Mellencamp

"Hurts So Good" went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 25th Grammys.

"'To be real honest, there's three good songs on that record, and the rest is just sort of filler. It was too labored over, too thought about, and it wasn't organic enough. The record company thought it would bomb, but I think the reason it took off was – not that the songs were better than my others – but people liked the sound of it, the 'bam-bam-bam' drums. It was a different sound.'"

With some commercial success under his belt, Mellencamp had enough influence to force the record company to add his real surname, Mellencamp, to his stage moniker.

John J. Mellencamp (born October 7, 1951), previously known as Johnny Cougar, John Cougar, and John Cougar Mellencamp, is an American singer-songwriter.

He is known for his catchy brand of heartland rock, which emphasizes traditional instrumentation.

Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Indiana, on October 7, 1951.

He is of German and Dutch ancestry.

He was born with spina bifida, for which he had corrective surgery as an infant.

Mellencamp formed his first band, Crepe Soul, at the age of 14.

Mellencamp attended Vincennes University, a two-year college in Vincennes, Indiana, starting in 1972.

During this time, he abused drugs and alcohol.

During his college years, Mellencamp played in several local bands, including the glam rock band Trash, which was named for a New York Dolls song, and he later got a job in Seymour installing telephones.

During this period, Mellencamp, who had given up drugs and alcohol before graduating from college, decided to pursue a career in music and traveled to New York City in an attempt to land a record contract.

After 18 months of traveling between Indiana and New York City in 1974 and 1975, Mellencamp met Tony Defries of MainMan Management, who was receptive to his music and image.

DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, Chestnut Street Incident, a collection of cover versions and some original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, insisting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market.

Mellencamp reluctantly agreed, but the album was a commercial failure, selling only 12,000 copies.

Mellencamp recorded The Kid Inside, the follow-up to Chestnut Street Incident, in 1977, but DeFries eventually decided against releasing the album, and Mellencamp was dropped from MCA records (DeFries finally released The Kid Inside in early 1983, after Mellencamp achieved stardom).

Mellencamp drew interest from Rod Stewart's manager, Billy Gaff, after parting ways with DeFries and was signed onto the small Riva Records label.

At Gaff's request, Mellencamp moved to London, England, for nearly a year to record, promote, and tour behind 1978's A Biography.

The record wasn't released in the United States, but it yielded a top-five hit in Australia with "I Need a Lover".

Riva Records added "I Need a Lover" to Mellencamp's next album released in the United States, 1979's John Cougar, where the song became a No. 28 single in late 1979.

Pat Benatar recorded "I Need a Lover" on her debut album In the Heat of the Night.

Mellencamp rose to fame in the 1980s while "honing an almost startlingly plainspoken writing style" that, starting in 1982, yielded a string of Top 10 singles, including "Hurts So Good", "Jack & Diane", "Crumblin' Down", "Pink Houses", "Lonely Ol' Night", "Small Town", "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.", "Paper in Fire", and "Cherry Bomb".

He has amassed 22 Top 40 hits in the United States.

In addition, he holds the record for the most tracks by a solo artist to hit number one on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, with seven.

Mellencamp has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning one.

He has sold over 30 million albums in the US and over 60 million worldwide.

His latest album of original songs, Orpheus Descending, was released in June 2023.

In 1980, Mellencamp returned with the Steve Cropper-produced Nothin' Matters and What If It Did, which yielded two Top 40 singles – "This Time" (No. 27) and "Ain't Even Done With the Night" (No. 17).

In 1982, Mellencamp released his breakthrough album, American Fool, which contained the singles "Hurts So Good", an uptempo rock tune that spent four weeks at No. 2 and 16 weeks in the top 10, and "Jack & Diane", which was a No. 1 hit for four weeks.

A third single, "Hand to Hold on To", made it to No. 19.

"The singles were stupid little pop songs," he told Record Magazine in 1983.

"'I take no credit for that record. It wasn't like the title was made up – it wasn't supposed to be punky or cocky like some people thought. Toward the end, I didn't even go to the studio. Me and the guys in the band thought we were finished, anyway. It was the most expensive record I ever made. It cost $280,000, do you believe that? The worst thing was that I could have gone on making records like that for hundreds of years. Hell, as long as you sell a few records and the record company isn't putting a lot of money into promotion, you're making money for 'em and that's all they care about. PolyGram loved Nothin' Matters. They thought I was going to turn into the next Neil Diamond.'"

The first album recorded under his new name John Cougar Mellencamp was 1983's Uh-Huh, a Top-10 album that spawned the Top 10 singles "Pink Houses" and "Crumblin' Down" as well as the No. 15 hit "Authority Song", which he said is "our version of 'I Fought the Law'."

During the recording of Uh-Huh, Mellencamp's backing band settled on the lineup it retained for the next several albums: Kenny Aronoff on drums and percussion, Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic on guitars, Toby Myers on bass and John Cascella on keyboards.

Mellencamp is also one of the founding members of Farm Aid, an organization that began in 1985 with a concert in Champaign, Illinois, to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land.

Farm Aid concerts have remained an annual event over the past 37 years, and the organization has raised over $60 million.

Mellencamp confessed in a 2005 interview:

"'That [name] was put on me by some manager. I went to New York and everybody said, 'You sound like a hillbilly.' And I said, 'Well, I am.' So that's where he came up with that name. I was totally unaware of it until it showed up on the album jacket. When I objected to it, he said, 'Well, either you're going to go for it, or we're not going to put the record out.' So that was what I had to do... but I thought the name was pretty silly.'"

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.