“That shit hit us,” Mike Wanchic, John Mellencamp’s rhythm guitarist since 1975, said when I asked him how the family farm crisis influenced the songs of his bandleader, and their performances throughout the 1980s. Mellencamp was born and raised in the “small town” he honored with a song of that name, Seymour, Indiana. Wanchic spent his formative years in nearby Lexington, Kentucky.
They did not have to look far to survey the destruction that big agriculture’s factory farming inflicted on thousands of families in the heartland during the 1980s. Mellencamp, who had farmers among his ancestors, sat down with lifelong friend, George Green, at his kitchen table in Bloomington, Indiana, and wrote a song about, in Mellencamp’s words, “what the devil can do if you don’t keep your eye on him.”
“Rain on the Scarecrow” was the result. Its story depicts a source of injustice that is not theological, but economic and political. And it became the album opener to 1985’s Scarecrow—rereleased in a deluxe box set edition in November of this year. The federal government’s subservience to multinational corporations had allowed for the steady liquidation of family farmers. “Small towns,” Mellencamp said, “were once owned and operated by the people who lived there. But big business changed everything, and first the family farmers went bankrupt, then small businesses went bankrupt, and then the towns themselves went bankrupt.”
Mellencamp’s voice in “Rain on the Scarecrow” sounds like a fire-and-brimstone preacher as he adopts the identity of a farmer and condemns the bank that auctions his land, mourns the loss of his family’s vocation and purpose, and bitterly sings of the only thing that remains of his community: “97 crosses planted in the courthouse yard for 97 families who lost 97 farms.”
Scarecrow features Mellencamp, as he described it on VH1 Storytellers in 1998, “looking out my window and telling the truth about what I saw.” Drawing on the influence of his favorite 1960s rock records, many of which he references in the pop radio hit, “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.,” he created a timeless classic of “heartland rock.”
Many music journalists also consider Scarecrow, and Mellencamp’s other late 1980s records, formative of the “alt country” sound that bands like Son Volt and Whiskeytown would master in the 1990s. Lyrically, Mellencamp aspired to write in the school of his literary idols, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, and Larry McMurtry, whom he quotes in the rollicking single, “Lonely Ol’ Night.”
Looking out his window, Mellencamp became a rock-and-roll reporter on the triumphs and tragedies of the Midwest. “Small Town” is an anthem paying tribute to the beauty of communal solidarity. Another track, “Minutes to Memories,” is an homage to his grandfather, a dutiful and loving role model who taught him that “an honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind.” While those towns capture the joy and love of small town living, “Between a Laugh and Tear,” featuring Rickie Lee Jones, gives a plaintive voice to the melancholy that can often sneak up on the spirit when a “cardboard town can no longer amuse you.”
It was his fear that the Seymour of his youth was slipping into alienation and poverty, and that folks like his grandparents were losing hope in an increasingly cutthroat American economy, that inspired Mellencamp to write “Rain On the Scarecrow.” Those worries were also the impetus for Scarecrow’s other acidic laments of American injustice, “Face of the Nation,” “Justice and Independence ‘85,” and “You’ve Got to Stand for Somethin’.”
Following Scarecrow’s release, Mellencamp joined Willie Nelson and Neil Young in the creation of Farm Aid, a benefit concert for family farmers facing foreclosure or dealing with the effects of natural disaster. The inaugural Farm Aid took place in 1985, and still happens on an annual basis. In the 1980s, Mellencamp also testified before Congress on the plight of the family farmer, and performed at farmer protest rallies in Missouri.
Scarecrow’s reemergence in 2022 presents a perfect opportunity to revisit Mellencamp’s masterpiece, along with the bonus material of outtakes and alternative versions of its songs. It should also prompt listeners to consider the dangerous misuse of the political term, “populism.”
As Donald Trump campaigns to return to the White House, and the Republican Party attempts to regroup after its lackluster midterm performance, right wing officials and propagandists will claim that they represent the “working class,” “blue collar America,” and the “real Americans” who reside in small towns like Seymour, Indiana. They will also attempt to brand their increasingly menacing form of reactionary politics as “populist.”
If populism means nothing more than demagoguery, the current gaggle of Republicans, like George Wallace and Joe McCarthy before them, certainly qualify. But if populism is a rebellion against mistreatment and pilfering from powerful institutions in finance, business, and real estate, Republicans have no right to claim the term. Genuine populism, from historical tribunes like Eugene V. Debs and Jesse Jackson, advocates for equality and fairness, protecting the lives and interests of workers, consumers, and the poor against the rapacious designs of major corporations, and the politicians who serve them.
Looking out his window, Mellencamp became a rock-and-roll reporter on the triumphs and tragedies of the Midwest.
Scarecrow gives a soundtrack to progressive heartland populism. It was the album in which John Mellencamp discovered his voice as an artist, and also when he began a lifelong dedication to activism—first with Farm Aid, but later with contributions to the causes of antiwar advocacy, racial equity, LGBTQ+ rights, poverty relief, and environmentalism.
In 2007, Mellencamp looked out his window again to describe the sad devastation in many of the Midwestern small towns that never recovered from the series of economic blows that began with the family farm crisis. “Ghost towns along the highway,” Mellencamp sings in a song of the same name, “I guess no one wants to live around here anymore…”
Right wing demagogues in the Trump mold will tell voters that their towns steadily shifted from stability to sorrow because of immigrants, Jewish “globalists,” Black Americans, or any other convenient scapegoat with superficial differences. Mellencamp’s music and politics explore the deeper truth, and rather than offering the easy answer of social division and hostility, demand multicultural solidarity in service of social liberalism and economic justice.
Emma Goldman famously said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” Scarecrow, like much of Mellencamp’s rock and roll, gives plenty of provocations to dance.
Editor’s Note: All John Mellencamp and Mike Wanchic quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky).