
but I thought the name was pretty silly." 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.

I was totally unaware of it until it showed up on the album jacket. 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. Mellencamp confessed in a 2005 interview: "That was put on me by some manager. Mellencamp reluctantly agreed, but the album was a commercial failure, selling only 12,000 copies. DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, Chestnut Street Incident, a collection of covers and a handful of original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, insisting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market. Music career 1976–1982: Performing as Johnny Cougar and John Cougar Īfter 18 months of traveling between Indiana and New York City in 19, Mellencamp found someone receptive to his music and image in Tony DeFries of MainMan Management. 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. There would be four or five days like that when I would be completely gone." ĭuring his college years, Mellencamp played in several local bands, including the glitter-band Trash, which was named for a New York Dolls song, and he later got a job in Seymour installing telephones. I would lie there, listening to Roxy Music, right next to the record player so I wouldn't have to get up to flip the record over. During this time he abused drugs and alcohol, stating in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, "When I was high on pot, it affected me so drastically that when I was in college there were times when I wouldn't get off the couch.

Mellencamp attended Vincennes University, a two-year college in Vincennes, Indiana, starting in 1972. Mellencamp formed his first band, Crepe Soul, at the age of 14.

He was born with spina bifida, for which he had corrective surgery as an infant. Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Indiana, on October 7, 1951.
