John Mellencamp was making waves. Saddled with the stage name “John Cougar” when he came onto the scene in the late-1970s, once he began climbing the singles and sales charts, he asserted his artistic identity much more forcefully by crediting his hit October 1983 LP Uh-Huh to John Cougar Mellencamp. He did so again on his full-artistic break-through album, August 1985’s Scarecrow, before dropping the Cougar moniker entirely when the ’90s rolled around.
is the LP that catapulted Mellencamp from being known as a brash hitmaker showing flashes of brilliance songs like 1979’s “Great Mid-West” (from the self-titled ), the bridge section of ’s chart-topping 1982 hit “Jack & Diane,” and the defiant slant of ’s “Crumblin’ Down” coupled with the melancholic, wistful verses of “Pink Houses.”
