John Cougar Mellencamp. Think about that name for a minute. Strip away the recording artist and all his songs we know are attached to it. Focus on the name. Doesn't it sound like something a stamp collector in a leather jacket would call himself? My real name is Mellencamp. But I'm a Cougar! Grrrrrr!

That paradox is what I find special about John Mellencamp (he permanently dropped the feline stage name in 1987)--his burning ambition to be a star and the reality of who he is. He resented the "Cougar" tag from the day then-manager Tony DeFries (the man behind Ziggy-era Bowie) slapped it, unknown to him, onto his first album in 1976, "Chestnut Street Incident". He wanted fans to believe he despised that whole side of the industry (which he skewered in 1989 with his single "Pop Singer"), but he understood it implicitly. One of my favorite quotes from Frederic Dannen's excellent book on the recording industry, Hit Men, is from Billy Gaff, Mellencamp's former manager: "John would murder his mother for a hit record."

Maybe it was essential that he dropped "Cougar" from his name, as this also signaled a change in his image to a more respectable, Springsteen-styled icon, via both his music and social concerns (like his integral role in organizing the ongoing Farm Aid concerts). But there's a good bit of honesty in that name "Cougar"--as much as Mellencamp would love to deny it--the kind of honesty that says more about naked ambition than how one wants to be remembered. By dumping an outrageous stage name and resorting to his even more clunky real one, he used the same tactic DeFries employed at the start of his recording career, which was to find the best way to appeal to his audience. By 1987, John knew these were people who would relate far more to a regular Joe named Mellencamp than a star named Cougar.

Critics lump in John Mellencamp with that small stable of tried-and-true American rockers: Springsteen, Seger and Petty. But a better comparison would be Billy Joel. Both consistently put out spotty albums and have a brilliant knack for writing hit singles. They came from troubled working-class backgrounds and ended up wealthy with model wives (and divorces). Both have suffered from bad management deals and persevered. While Joel was branching out with socially-conscious songs like "Allentown," Mellencamp was feeling his way into more serious material with "Jack and Diane." Both moved away from their younger, more combative images. And both aged gracefully thereafter, with far more clout in the industry than either had before.

If there's one thing I've always enjoyed about Mellencamp, it's that he's no Springsteen. There's something even more cheesy about Mellencamp--or maybe it's that Springsteen's cheese seems more desperate than Mellencamp's. It's the way he used to constantly grunt in his songs like on "Crumbling Down," or unabashedly bawl out "oooh, yeah" as he did in "Little Pink Houses." Even his hair, at least in his mid-80's commercial prime, was cheesy. He pulled up short of a mullethead, but sported a floppy bouffant mop that had "aging juvenile delinquent" written all over it, as did many of his songs. Thanks to a sinister goatee and near crew cut, he now looks like a pint-sized strip-club doorman.

If there's one thing I dislike about Mellencamp (or any of the American Rock icons), it's the working-class hero malarkey. It's wise here to compare their songwriting style with another great chronicler of working-class life: Ray Davies of the Kinks. What? He's not mentioned in the same hushed tone as Springsteen?

In the late 60's, especially on their epic album "Arthur", Davies examined British working-class life in ways as humbling and moving as any writer. A song from that period, "Autumn Almanac," is about a man who takes great pleasure in sweeping leaves in his small backyard and watching his favorite football team on a Saturday. The song's bridge ("This is my street/And I'm never going to leave it") signals a poignant shift in the melody, and we're made to understand the depth of loyalty and despair the man feels for his way of life. "Shangri La" is a similar classic where a suburban home owner feels the need to name his house to distinguish it from all the others on his block. This, after working and saving his entire adult life to reach a plateau of uniformity, only to realize it isn't the paradise he dreamed it would be.

And that's as good as anything you'll find on "Scarecrow", or "Born in the USA". So why then is it that a British songwriter doing much the same as his American counterparts is now recognized as a quirky pop genius instead of a hero for the working man? Well, he's British, and most Americans know or care nothing about how their working-class lives or compares to ours. A large part of it is Davies' idiosyncrasies. His only big hit of that time was "Lola"--putatively about his being picked-up by a transvestite in a London club and hardly the stuff of working-class heroes. He went on to make some truly awful concept albums with the Kinks through the mid-70's, and more unabashedly commercial music after that, with the occasional reminder that he could still hit the mark. It's not so much that he rejected the image as he refused it.

Mellencamp saw the value in a working-class image. He was from there; these were the people he wrote about. It made sense. My problem isn't with the material; "Little Pink Houses" and "Rain on the Scarecrow" are tremendous songs that deserved to be hits. Were they honest? I'd say they were more well-intentioned; he had a big pink house, so to speak, but knew of little pink ones. Mellencamp was a successful musician, a superstar if you will, and that's an entirely different way of life from working in a factory or living on welfare. Capturing the factory in song would sound like Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music"--60-plus minutes of grinding white noise. Anybody who has worked in one, you can bet your sweet ass, knows this. The "working-class hero" image works brilliantly in the way it replaces fear with envy. It makes people yearn for a rough-hewn simplicity that just doesn't exist, but looks good on paper and sounds great in song.

This doesn't render his music invalid. It simply puts it in a different context--one that record companies will use to sell the artist's sincerity as the foundation of his image. No one's going to question it because it's working-class and supposedly beyond reproach, as everyone wants to worship a working-class hero, but the thought of actually working in a factory or standing in a welfare line is one most people would find highly unappealing. People of all classes will buy this music. Working-class people will smile and say, "Yes, someone understands us." Those higher on the food chain will wipe a tear away and say, "God bless the working man, I wish I could afford to be one, too."

And the managers and record companies will hear that sweet "cha-ching" sound of a cash register opening, guaranteeing they'll never have to live like the heroes in these songs. The same sort of reverse class worship goes on constantly with hip hop , to the point of white kids deeply affecting the MTV-fed speech and dress patterns, to great comic effect. There is nothing romantic about the working-class way of life, be it black, white or any color. But there is romance in pretending, whether it's that one is working class, or that the working class is somehow more noble than others. Our culture has become so inundated with this well-meaning falsehood that even working-class kids are mythologizing themselves, although reality will set in for them soon enough.

There's little romance in striving to be financially successful in our society, even though you'll find millions of people dreaming of or doing it. Those are very real dreams, but the reality of being rich, at least for working-class kids like Mellencamp, must be to long for their working-class roots, which must feel like Psalms in The Bible compared to the thorny truths concealed within their superstar machinery. Getting rich, assuming one isn't born that way, generally takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice, often in terms of time and one's private life. Still, is anyone out there gullible enough to believe Mellencamp, or any of the American Rock icons, would be more satisfied working in a factory and playing guitar weekends in a wedding band? They learned how to play guitars in the first place to avoid that kind of life. And now they're heroes?

So knowing all this, why do I still listen to John Mellencamp? For the reason anyone listens to any musician: the music. I can live without the image. A market was created in pop music throughout the 70's that may not have required him to adopt it, but certainly benefited his career to do so. At that time, around the start of the ‘80's, there were dozens of bands/recording artists who fell into the "working-class" genre created in the wake of Springsteen's and Seger's success. Most of them were bland to awful, and featured at least one prematurely balding member who always had a beard, wore aviator/mirror shades and either a beret or a fedora. Very few of those bands made it through the early 80's, when hair metal and new wave wiped them off the map. Mellencamp had good timing, with key hits like "Jack and Diane" and "Little Pink Houses" arriving just as the industry was siphoning off all but the biggest stars in his genre. As the 80's wore on, younger bands like the Long Ryders, Jason & the Scorchers and the Del Lords mixed country and punk influences, starting up the then-nascent Roots Rock movement, which slowly evolved into the now-thriving No Depression scene. (Image-wise, the musicians got a little younger, and they traded their berets and mirror shades for leather chaps and silly cowpoke neckerchiefs of the variety usually worn by dogs in the park catching Frisbees.)

The problem with much of Mellencamp's music in the 90's, i.e., after his name change, was that he started taking himself far too seriously, to the point of starring in and directing an awful movie, Falling from Grace, that seemed to be loosely based on the familial and marital problems in his life. In the movie, he plays a burned-out country singer coming home to Indiana with his L.A. wife and child to check in with his family, only to find that his headstrong father is fucking everything in sight, including his old flame, who's now married to his oafish brother, but she even finds time to pencil him in for a few nostalgic rolls in the hay. Falling from Grace feels like "As the World Turns" crossed with "Hee Haw". About its only saving grace is Mellencamp's former lead guitarist, Larry Crane, who's surprisingly good as the illegitimate half-brother doing the dirty work of running the family's successful chicken farm. Mellencamp spends much of the movie pouting, smoking cigarettes and over-acting in ways that might make it in four-minute videos but don't translate well to a full-length movie.

But every now and then, Mellencamp nails it like no one else can. "Lonely Ol' Night" and "Authority Song" are simply great songs, while lesser hits like "Ain't Even Done with the Night" show a deep understanding of the 60's pop and soul he was raised on. I miss that sloppy-Joe, biker-bar charm to songs like "Hurts So Good," back when he was Johnny Cougar. There's just as much truth--real working-class truth--in an unashamed, fun moment like that as there is in all the sobering, thoughtful songs he and all the other American Icons have churned out over the past three decades.

When a bunch of guys get off work from their shift on a Friday night, they don't want to sit in a dark living room and cry over "The River" on the stereo. Why should they? They're living "The River" and don't need to be reminded of it. They want to go out to a bar and hear "Hurts So Good," or "Pink Cadillac," or "American Girl," or "Old Time Rock and Roll." Maybe even with a young woman shaking her artificially-endowed breasts in their faces and giving them a welcome diversion from their less-adventurous realities. But the images from all these songs critics continually fawn over lead one to believe that heroes never indulge in such base pursuits--they just drive off into their darkness and dreams in their street rods with their haunted little girlies. The grease monkey Lone Rangers. They eventually come back and never have any fun. Senior vice presidents may not be having any fun either, despite (or more likely in the pursuit of) their financial success. But who wants to hear a song about unhappy rich guys, unless it makes them out to be idiots?

If there was one thing I always hated about being raised working-class, especially when I went off to college, it was people middle-class or higher expressing pity for my socioeconomic status. Pity tends to be a strange mix of sorrow and contempt, and it offended me, especially when I saw how these people lived and recognized that they were looking down from a perch that was false and misguided. That pity is part of the problem, where the myth begins. The artistic impression of being working class takes on more value than being working class itself. And maybe that's the whole problem--there are no more working-class heroes. Or, at least, if they're considered as such, they should be genuinely working class, i.e., doing the thankless grunt labor of our society while they express their heroic qualities, although I'm afraid I don't understand what's "heroic" about holding down a job and maintaining self respect, whether it's at a sewage treatment plant or on Wall Street.

There was a moment in every John Cougar show where Cougar would run up behind guitarist Mike "Chief" Wanchic and vault onto his shoulders, then lead the crowd in a sing-along while Wanchic played on. The audience loved it--then again, they were more than likely kids ripped to the tits on six packs of Pabst and bong loads in the arena parking lot. The possibility of this occurring at a John Mellencamp show? Highly unlikely--and not just because Wanchic might throw his middle-aged back out. Everything's changed: Cougar, Wanchic, and most importantly, the audience. Maturity? Maybe. But as young Johnny Cougar would have been glad to point out in between grunts and hair-combing fits, that has nothing to do with rock and roll.