Musicians like Jack White, Billy Corgan, and Bruce Springsteen. You could change the names and places and this would be a story about a band of rock musicians who grew up in the second half of the 20th century. John and his dad, Richard Mellencamp, didn’t get along they fought about a lot of things that fathers and sons fight about, especially about John’s long hair. On the sports field, swaggering.” John Mellencamp was 14 years old, a freshman at Seymour High School. At school, he “shape-shifted into his own version of Newman’s Hud, a self-styled rebel, cause uncertain. His first hero was Paul Newman’s character in Hud. (He says that’s when he began to learn about race in America.) A year or so later, he joined a band that meant business: Crepe Soul had eight musicians, all older than John and six of them Black. They learned six or eight songs, enough to get a gig at a house party and once, a 45-minute set at the American Legion. The first band he played in was the Five Ms, all guys with names starting with M. The first record he bought with his own money at the Sears Roebuck store in Seymour, Indiana, was Chubby Checkers’ number one hit, ”Peppermint Twist.” The first music he loved was Motown soul music that he listened to on AM radio stations from Detroit, Chicago, and Louisville.

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