John Mellencamp sings songs about difficult relationships and the challenges of small-town life, and he has had plenty of experience with both. In fact, despite his decades of success in the music industry, Mellencamp has had quite a tragic life. The singer was born with spina bifida, which was thankfully taken care of right after his birth thanks to a then-new procedure. And before he found fame, he became a father himself at 18 years old. He's also spoken at length about how difficult his relationships have been and still are today. Let's take a look at some tragic details about John Mellencamp.
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00:00Everybody can relate to the people and themes in John Mellencamp's music.
00:04That's because he's a real guy who's lived a few lifetimes' worth of drama and struggle.
00:09Here's a look into the tragic, real-life story that shaped the life and work of John Mellencamp.
00:14Mellencamp is lucky he made it out of his childhood alive.
00:18Shortly after his birth in 1951, he underwent surgery for spina bifida,
00:22a birth defect that leaves an opening in the spinal column that can make the spinal cord
00:26extend outside the body and leave a growth. That was usually a fatal condition back in
00:31the early 50s, but a new surgical technique saved young Mellencamp's life.
00:36More than 60 years later, in 2014, he met the surgeon who performed the operation,
00:41Dr. Robert Heimberger.
00:43He remembered it because I was the first one they'd ever done.
00:45According to Mellencamp, Heimberger and associates performed operations on three
00:49infant spina bifida patients at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis.
00:54One died on the table. Another girl lived, I think, till she was 14, and then she died, and then me.
01:03Mellencamp's songs are often from the point of view of the underdog.
01:07They're about hardworking individuals from small towns trying to get a leg up to be able to afford
01:11a little pink house. That's a struggle Mellencamp witnessed in his hometown of Seymour, Indiana,
01:17and within his own family. His father Richard met his mother when he literally ran into her
01:22on the street one day. As Mellencamp told The New York Times in 1987,
01:27Richard and his older brother Joe were running from cops after roughing up four guys in
01:31retaliation for a beating Richard had gotten earlier. Those Mellencamps were playing the
01:36detestable part in which the community had cast them. As Mellencamp explained,
01:41for as far back as anyone can care to remember, there has been a rigid, petty, small-town class
01:46system in Seymour. The top of that system was occupied by people who became rich during the
01:51Industrial Revolution, while the rest were farmers. The singer's great-great-grandfather
01:56moved from Germany to Indiana in 1851 and started the family farm, which had to be sold a generation
02:02later. That left John's grandfather Harry to drop out of school in the third grade to work as a
02:07carpenter. When Harry went to register to vote, the clerk laughed at him and made fun of his name.
02:13As John put it,
02:14We were always hearing talk that,
02:15You low-class Mellencamps will never amount to anything.
02:19At the age of 18, Mellencamp was dating a woman three years older than him named Priscilla
02:23Esterline. When she became pregnant in 1970, the couple tried to do the traditional thing and get
02:29married, but under Indiana law at the time, 18-year-old Mellencamp wasn't old enough to do
02:34so without parental permission. But that's when the couple hit upon a solution. They eloped,
02:38to Kentucky, the next state over. That marriage lasted a little over a decade through Mellencamp's
02:44early career hurdles, stumbles, and dead ends. But it couldn't survive when he fell for another
02:49woman. After seeing a photo of professional TV extra Vicki Granucci at a friend's house,
02:55Mellencamp became infatuated. When they finally met, it turned out they actually had fantastic
03:00chemistry. He and Esterline quickly split up so that Mellencamp could marry Granucci,
03:05who notably stars as Diane in Mellencamp's Jack and Diane video.
03:09Two months after they made it official, they welcomed their first daughter, Teddy Joe,
03:13who would later go on to become a cast member on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
03:18After he married Granucci, Mellencamp's history of tumultuous love affairs still wasn't over,
03:23as he would once again fall for a new woman, leave his current wife,
03:27marry the new gal, and put her in a music video. This time, it was Elaine Irwin,
03:32whom he met when she was the cover model for his 1991 album Whenever We Want It.
03:37Ten weeks after their first face-to-face, they were engaged, and in 1992, they married.
03:43She's also the star of his video for Get a Leg Up. This third marriage lasted a long time,
03:48almost 18 years, but it nonetheless fell apart as surely as the first two.
03:53Apparently women just don't like me very much. That's all I can say about that.
03:58In 2011, not long after his divorce was finalized, Mellencamp struck up an on-again-off-again
04:03relationship with movie star Meg Ryan, a coupling that apparently left the rocker a little wounded.
04:09When he appeared on Howard Stern's radio show after splitting with the actress in 2014,
04:14he revealed,
04:15Oh, women hate me. I loved Meg Ryan. She hates me to death.
04:19But all was not lost forever. After a year-long relationship with model Christy Brinkley,
04:24Mellencamp and Ryan reunited, and in November 2018, they got engaged.
04:28How'd you figure out at 67 now, let's do this thing for real?
04:34I don't know what you mean.
04:35While John Mellencamp suffered from a potentially fatal birth defect as a baby,
04:40his third child similarly faced an uncertain future.
04:43In 1985, Mellencamp and his wife at the time, Vicki Granucci, awaited the arrival of their
04:49second child together. While she was pregnant, Granucci fell ill with chicken pox, and doctors
04:55informed the expectant parents that the illness might result in fetal deformity. Mellencamp told
05:00the New York Times,
05:01We were so terrified. Maybe the way my parents were with my spinal problems at birth.
05:06Mellencamp also noted that he and Granucci were so afraid of losing their child that
05:10they didn't decide on a name until the day Granucci gave birth. He told the Times,
05:15As the doctor began the delivery, we decided that if there was any justice in the world,
05:20the baby would be healthy. In the end, she was just fine, and accordingly,
05:24since there appeared to be justice in the world, Mellencamp and Granucci named their new daughter
05:29Justice.
05:31Mellencamp has left alcohol and marijuana behind, but he's not a man totally devoid of vice,
05:36as he's an enthusiastic lifelong smoker. As he revealed in a 2018 interview with CBS News,
05:42he started puffing on cigarettes at the tender age of 10, and he doesn't think more than five
05:46decades of the habit have been all that bad for him, and he's got a bit of a theory about that.
05:51I believe that it's the combination of cigarettes and alcohol that get people,
05:58the two of them combined.
06:00That theory may not carry too much weight, though, considering that Mellencamp suffered
06:04a heart attack in 1994 at the relatively young age of 42. He was on tour, and he didn't feel well,
06:10so he went back to his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, to consult with doctors there.
06:15He later spoke about the health scare during an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman,
06:20mentioning that when the doctor told him he was having a heart attack,
06:23he went nuts and called him, quote, everything in the book.
06:25He said, John, you can say whatever you want to me or act any way you want,
06:29but a first-year medical student could tell you you've had a heart attack. And I went, oh.
06:35Nevertheless, Mellencamp didn't entirely quit smoking after that.
06:39He just cut down from four packs a day to one.
06:43I'm just gonna, this is the number for the Surgeon General.
06:46Mellencamp's road to fame and fortune as an authentic rock and roll star wasn't traditional
06:53or short. By the time he scored his first Top 30 hit in the United States with I Need a Lover in
06:581979, he was almost 30 years old, which is fairly long in the tooth for the youth-oriented music
07:04industry. And that came after he'd already recorded two misbegotten albums that each
07:09failed in their own unique way. In 1975, Mellencamp, tired of playing in go-nowhere
07:14bar bands, moved to New York City to make it as a rock star. He found a champion in David Bowie's
07:20former manager Tony DeFries. Bowie had just unamicably parted ways with DeFries, and so
07:26the manager tried to position Mellencamp as the next Bowie by way of Bruce Springsteen.
07:31Saddled with the silly stage name of Johnny Cougar, Mellencamp released his first album,
07:35the DeFries-produced Chestnut Street Incident, in 1976. It consisted primarily of covers of
07:42familiar tunes like Jailhouse Rock and Hit the Road Jack. It sold only a paltry 12,000 copies.
07:49Afterwards, Mellencamp's label, MCA, refused to release his next album, The Kid Inside,
07:54and then dropped him entirely. Mellencamp experienced some hard-rocking success with
07:59the release of his albums American Fool and Uh-Huh in 1982 and 1983, respectively.
08:05Then, he doubled down on the social commentary and soul-searching with 1985's Scarecrow and 1987's
08:11The Lonesome Jubilee. Among the biggest sellers of his career, they went on to be certified five
08:16times platinum and three times platinum, respectively. But the success of those
08:21albums bears a painful origin, as Mellencamp created Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubilee
08:26to cope with the deaths of loved ones and how his family shaped him.
08:30As he told The New York Times in 1987,
08:33Let's face it, you are your parents, whether any of us like it or not.
08:36The Lonesome Jubilee, like Scarecrow and the rest of my best stuff,
08:40is about me and my family tree grappling against both the world and our own inner goddamn whirlwind.
08:46His grandfather, with whom he was incredibly close, died of lung cancer in 1983.
08:51Mellencamp shared with The Times,
08:54Just before his death, he called everybody into his bedroom, and although he wasn't a
08:57religious person, he said,
08:59You know, I'm having a real bad beating of a time with the devil.
09:02It stopped me cold to see my grandpa so scared. Six hours later, he was gone.
09:08After that death, John Mellencamp's uncle Joe became, quote,
09:11the kindest soul you could imagine. But then he died, too. Mellencamp has revealed that the song
09:17Paper and Fire from The Lonesome Jubilee is about Joe and his family's ingrained anger.
09:22It's widely known that Mellencamp was born in a small town,
09:25specifically the south-central Indianaburg of Seymour. He's easily the town's most famous son,
09:31but the second most famous might be George Green. He and Mellencamp have known each other
09:36since they were in the same Sunday school class, and they would later go on to write
09:39some songs together. In fact, Green helped Mellencamp pen some of his best-known tunes,
09:44including Hurt So Good, Crumbling Down, Rain on the Scarecrow, and Human Wheels.
09:49The last song they wrote together was Yours Forever for the soundtrack to the 2000 film
09:53The Perfect Storm. Soon after, they had a falling out. Mellencamp wrote about their split in the
09:58liner notes to his 2010 box set On the Rural Route 7609. Like when you're married, when you're
10:05friends with somebody for a long time, the more things build up, the more things can go wrong.
10:10There were personal problems cross-pollinated with professional issues.
10:14George has written some great lyrics and we've written some great songs together,
10:18but I just couldn't do it anymore. After that fallout, they never collaborated again,
10:22as Green died in 2011 at age 59 after a short battle with an aggressive form of lung cancer.
10:29Mellencamp has projected an image as somebody who likes to get rowdy and mix it up.
10:34After all, he's the guy who fights authority, even though authority always wins.
10:38It turns out that his sons, Hud and Speck, have lived out the central battle described
10:42in Authority's song, Out in the Real World. In the early morning of July 16th, 2017,
10:48Hud and Speck got into a fight in the parking lot of a Jimmy John's sandwich shop in Bloomington,
10:52Indiana. According to the police report, a small group of men started mouthing off to the Mellencamp
10:58boys, and then things escalated. Hud said that somebody hit him, while Speck had blood on his
11:03face by the time police showed up. Speck was sentenced to community service and probation
11:08after pleading guilty to a count of public intoxication. This isn't the first time Speck
11:13and Hud have run afoul of the law. In 2015, Speck served four days of jail time for a misdemeanor
11:19battery charge over an incident in 2013 in which the brothers kicked a teenager they thought had
11:24hit Speck. At this rate, it looks like the troubles in the Mellencamp family will continue
11:29for generations to come.