It’s not every day a major record company asks if an act would cut a blatantly uncommercial album of vintage blues and folk songs. But John Mellencamp says that’s just what Columbia Records president Don Ienner asked him to do last year.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” says the singer. “You just don’t get asked to make records like this.”
Even rarer is when the results hew so close to the spirit of music this raw. On “Trouble No More,” which will be released Tuesday, Mellencamp and his band neither modernized old blues songs nor fetishized them into history lessons. Instead they bored deep inside the songs to bring back their haunted spirits whole.
In cover versions of music by Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie and Willie Dixon, the band got the drums to rattle and the guitars to clack in a way that sounds like they were recorded in a shotgun shack in 1930.
Ienner first heard the band nailing this elusive sound at a benefit show last year at Madison Square Garden for the family of Tim White, the Billboard editor in chief who died of a heart attack at age 50. The band performed the Johnson song “Stones in My Passway,” a favorite of White’s.
Mellencamp says Ienner called him with the idea for the album the next day.
“I just thought John could make a great album of roots music and do it an authentic way that would be artistically satisfying,” Ienner says.
But there may be more to the story. The singer had recently parted with Columbia after fulfilling a two-album contract with his modest-selling 2001 CD, “Cutting Heads.”
“I didn’t want to spend any more time talking to record company executives about money,” Mellencamp, 51, says of his exit. “This isn’t what I signed on to do 25 years ago.”
In that context, Ienner’s proposal looks like a clever lure to get Mellencamp back on the label. Either way, it worked.
But the singer didn’t say yes to the project right away.
“I told him, “Maybe we can pull it off. Maybe we can’t,”‘ Mellencamp says.
Then he spent weeks with the band trying to figure out if they could come up with a sound that suited the older songs. The first burden fell on guitarist Andy York.
“I said, “I don’t want you to play like Foghat,”‘ Mellencamp explains. “Most of the people who play blues, particularly white guys, have over the years methodically ruined it. But Andy locked himself away and listened to Robert Johnson and Son House. It’s not just a matter of copying. You have to put yourself inside of all those rhythms and pickings. It’s a tribute to Andy that he was able to do it.”
Once Mellencamp felt his band could do the songs justice, he faced a big challenge in tracking down the right material. He says he actually found it harder to locate good cover songs than to pen his own. “After six to eight weeks of looking, I said, “I could have written my own album by now.’ This is too hard because when you get into the blues, there’s just this endless stream of material. There’s East Coast blues and West Coast blues and Louisiana blues. You think you know this music, but you don’t.”
Mellencamp researched it with the help of Steve Berkowitz, head of Columbia’s Legacy label, which oversees the company’s vast catalogue. “He was funneling music and books and articles my way. And then we got the Smithsonian involved,” Mellencamp says.
He finally settled on performing rare songs by well-known pioneers. “I didn’t want to get too obscure. I would do names like Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie, but not their trump-card songs.”
He researched the songs fully enough to revive some of their lost history. His take on Son House’s “Death Letter” uses the lyrics that had been censored by House’s record company.
“When you hear (the officially released) version, you only get half the song,” Mellencamp explains. “You only find out that his girlfriend or wife or concubine is dead. In his original version you realize, “Oh my God. He killed her.”‘
In fact, many of the songs have the scent of death about them. Collecting them here points up the deep fascination traditional American music has with mortality and the Devil.
“Death is something that’s not spoken about by most people,” Mellencamp says. “And in songs written today you’re not encouraged to go to those places.”
Mellencamp broke with current trends, too, by including a blatantly political song on the album, “To Washington.” It’s the sole piece to bear his writing credit, though he wrote only the words. The tune had been used by scores of players, from the North Carolina Ramblers to the Carter Family. Mellencamp’s version, originally released over the Internet around the time of the Iraq war, chronicles his complaints with President Bush.
“It’s a troubadour’s responsibility to look out the window and write about what he sees, if he chooses to,” the writer says. “And I didn’t make any of this stuff up. You can pull this out of any newspaper.”
As you can guess, Mellencamp feels the Dixie Chicks got a raw deal for speaking their minds. “It’s almost surreal to me that now you have to watch what you say. You can have freedom of speech, but there’s a price attached to it,” he offers.
Mellencamp says he’s willing to pay the price, not just for his politics but for making music that’s unlikely to bolt up the charts. When asked how he thinks this new album will sell, he says he doesn’t care: “Making the record was such a joy, that’s my reward.”
Still, Mellencamp remains so wary of the industry, he claims he may never record again. “I made 21 albums,” he says. “That’s enough, isn’t it?”
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