![]() Reading the lyrics on the back of the album and seeing the picture of Mellencamp hunched over a barbed-wire fence, wrapped in a blue jeans jacket, his face somber, reminded me why I was homesick.Ī lot of people will tell you that there are no distinct regional identities in the United States anymore, that television, fast-food chains, and shopping malls have turned every place into the same place. I had nothing to play it on and no money to buy it with, but when Scarecrow came out I went into a Crazy Eddie’s record store just to look at it. ![]() ![]() Mellencamp already had impressed me with Uh-Huh, the 1983 collection of Rolling Stones-derived rockers that began his rehabilitation from an irritable, confrontational singer of dumb, insubstantial guitar-driven songs into an irritable, confrontational singer of smart, substantial guitar-driven songs. I’d heard that John Cougar Mellencamp, as he was called at the time, was readying an album that would touch on the farm crisis that was then raging, and on other midwestern themes. It was an exciting, scary time, and I had a lot of fun, but I missed my home a lot too. I was 22 when I got to New York, on my own for the first time, in a city that was dirty, ugly, noisy, confusing, thrilling, energetic, and strange. I had grown up in a small northern-Illinois town surrounded by cornfields, and I’d gone to school in an even smaller town in eastern Iowa. After graduating from college in May 1985, I worked my way east from Illinois, and by late August I’d landed in New York City.
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