Ah-ha, I have finally unearthed music I think my father must’ve liked - Frank Sinatra, which is no surprise. While the number of Sinatra albums isn’t surprising given my parents’ demographic, it's still interesting to me. A total of 12 Sinatra albums, far and away the most by any artist they had.

What drew me to The Broadway Kick is that there are two copies of it. In my fantasy retelling, my parents bonded over this album while dating, and neither could part with their copy when they married. But knowing my parents, that’s probably way too romantic a read. I’m certain that the story is much more benign than that, but I should say that both of these albums have seen a lot of travel over the years, so maybe there is something there. I think I’ll stick with my more romantic interpretation.

The Broadway Kick is one of four compilation albums of Sinatra’s put out by Columbia Records in 1959 (and two albums put out by Capitol Records). Man, they released a lot of albums back then. I mean, looking at Sinatra’s album list is like trying to count the grains of sand on the beach.

That being said, no matter what era you look him up in, Sinatra won’t be defined by one album.

The Broadway Kick feels less like a definitive statement and more like a transitional document. It sits in that middle period of his career, when he’s no longer the scrappy saloon singer, but not yet the elder statesman he would become in time. What you get on this record is a performer engaging with the Broadway canon.

Sinatra, who made a career out of making intimacy sound effortless, sounds like he’s keeping this material at arm’s length. These aren’t songs that belong to him in the way that songs like “Luck Be A Lady” did. Still, when it clicks, he bends the song to his will, turning theatrical bravado into something more personal.

The track list here pulls from Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, Kiss Me Kate, among others, and even though he sounds like he’s keeping everything at a distance, Sinatra handles most of it with his usual authority. “Some Enchanted Evening” is exactly what you’d expect, which is to say, it’s excellent. “Lost in the Stars” is quieter and more interesting; Frank sounds like he actually means it, which on this record, isn't always a given.

The problem, such as it is, is that these songs weren’t written for him. “There’s No Business Like Show Business” will forever be an Ethel Merman number, and Frank sounds faintly uncomfortable here, like a man wearing someone else’s suit. He’s too cool for the material… and the material knows it.

“They Say It’s Wonderful” is a gentle Irving Berlin number and more in Sinatra’s wheelhouse. He sings it delicately, and it shows. “Why Can’t You Behave” is a Cole Porter song from Kiss Me Kate, and Porter and Sinatra were a natural pairing.

“I Whistle A Happy Tune” is the odd one out. It’s a Rodgers and Hammerstein number from The King and I, originally sung by a woman to comfort a child. Sinatra gets through it, but you can almost hear him wondering how he got here.

The two genuine highlights here are buried. “There But For You Go I” from Brigadoon is a gorgeous ballad that Frank treats with the care it deserves. He’s understated, warm, and completely in control of the material. And “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific is a Polynesian-flavored tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein, complete with steel guitar. Sinatra wraps it with a high note that reminds you, in case you’d forgotten, exactly who you’re listening to.

What saves the album is what always saves every mediocre Sinatra record, his voice. Even when the song isn’t quite right, the instrument is. You can put Frank Sinatra on any ill-conceived song and walk away with something worth hearing.

The arrangements lean polished, even grand, but they rarely overwhelm, as if anything could. If anything, they underscore the central tension of the record: Sinatra as interpreter versus Sinatra as institution. It’s not his most essential album, but it’s revealing. You can hear him negotiating his place, and that alone makes it worth sitting with.

At this point, I have to wonder if some of these records don’t belong to someone else. While it’s true that my brother's limited collection was included (unbeknownst to him) in this acquisition, I can say with almost complete certainty that my parents weren’t into Rush or Iron Maiden. Although at this point, anything goes.

If I work under the presumption that these unusual finds are theirs, I’m left asking myself who these people were. As I mentioned, my father had almost zero interest in music, so I feel these records I am discovering are, safe to say, my mother’s.

This week, it’s Leon Russell and the Shelter People from 1971.

By 1971, Leon Russell wasn’t just part of the machinery; he was building his own. Leon Russell and the Shelter People feels like a man stepping out from behind the console and deciding the room should sound like him.

Leon Russell is one of those musicians you've definitely heard of but maybe don’t know. A prolific writer, you’ve more than likely heard one of the songs he’s written. He never wrote solely for his own voice; he left room for interpretation. A Leon Russell song sounds like him, but it also sounds like whoever covered it, which is a harder trick than it looks. That may be why there are over 20 versions of his song “This Masquerade” (off of Carney), with George Benson’s version being the best-known.

This record appears to have been recorded in fits and starts, because it lists four different groups as background musicians. It’s less a band and more like a loose collective; there’s The Shelter People, the Tulsa Tops, Muscle Shoals Swampers, and Friends in England. That being said, there is a cohesive fluidity to the album that belies the varied and seemingly complicated background groups.

Russell has a unique ability to compose his songs from the piano outward, which is to say that his songs feel played versus constructed.

The reflective and soulful “Stranger in a Strange Land” opens the album. There is a gospel sense of drama here as he sings about feeling out of place and the questioning of one’s life, “How many miles will it take to see the sun and how many years until it’s done”, but is never self-pitying. Russell isn’t asking for understanding; he’s documenting distance.

Judging by the title alone, “Of Thee I Sing,” you might think it’s a gospel song. And I suppose it is of sorts, as it was written in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings. Musically, the song begins with Russell’s energetic piano a la Jerry Lee Lewis. The music builds with gospel backing vocals and a tight rhythm section. Another thrilling build takes the song’s climax straight to the pulpit. The music pauses. The preacher preaches, and on the last note, everybody testifies.

This is the “Tulsa Sound” with muscle. Gospel, country, rock, and a little bit of preacher’s dust all kicked into the same corner. It’s loose, but not sloppy. There’s a difference. Russell understood that feel matters more than precision, even if he had the chops for both.

By the time you get to his cover of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rains Gonna Fall”, he’s not covering Bob Dylan so much as reclaiming the song, turning it into something heavier, almost apocalyptic.

Side two cracks open with “The Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” a song from the documentary Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Russell's sparse piano and string arrangement reads almost as a rationalization for the confusion and mayhem that was documented in the film. This one doesn’t quite land. It feels more like an obligation than a song.

Russell covers one more Dylan song here with “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Make You Cry”. This is the type of song that typifies the “Tulsa Sound.” It’s loose, has a groove, and a lack of polish that makes you feel like you’re a fly on the wall.

That feel is what you get from this album. You can almost get a contact high listening to it. Leon Russell and the Shelter People reminds me of what I like about albums from this era: the imperfection. This was a popular and successful record, but it isn’t perfect. So much popular music today is perfect; sure, imperfection is found on the fringes, but by and large, perfection is the name of the game. There was a time not too long ago when groove was the name of the game and perfection was secondary.

The more I dig into these records, the more I realize I'm not just finding great music. I'm finding a version of my mother I never knew existed. At this point, I'm not sure which discovery is more surprising.

I’m still rifling through my parents’ record collection and realizing my mother (it would’ve absolutely been her) didn’t have such awful taste. Sure, there are loads of duds, but there are enough diamonds in the rough to make me wish she were still here so I could ask her questions.

I stumbled on the original rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar from 1970. Like its predecessor, the year before, The Who’s Tommy, it was an album before it became a theatrical production.

The record itself is in miraculous shape (complete with libretto) for an album that’s 56 years old. If I’m honest, like the Little Feat album, it initially felt a little out of place, but then I thought more about it.

We were a church-going family. But we went to a straight-up Lutheran church, not one that mixed experimentation, Eastern religion, or celebrated a revival of Jesus as a counterculture figure. I’m learning that my mom had diverse musical tastes, but diversity in religion seemed anathema to what I knew of her. Perhaps I was wrong.

Now, I don’t have a real fondness for musical theater (and, no, I have not seen Hamilton). I don’t hate it, and would prefer showtunes over the sounds of my neighbor’s leaf blower, but I can’t say it’s ever a go-to genre for me. But for my parents, or at least my mother, musical theater was. Their record collection contains an alarming number of cast recordings. For me, seeing a show is a wildly different experience from listening to the soundtrack, and I don’t mind watching musical theater.

The two names I recognized from this recording were Ian Gillan and Yvonne Elliman. Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple, sings the part of Jesus. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some tongue-in-cheek casting of the lead singer of a rock band as Jesus. I wonder how David Lee Roth would fare in the same role. Elliman, probably most known for her contribution to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, “If I Can’t Have You", sings the part of Mary Magdalene.

Jesus Christ Superstar is one of four Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice collaborations (I honestly thought there were more). Their third after The Likes of Us and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and the one before Evita. That’s not too bad a CV.

The premise of this musical is based on the Passion narrative in the New Testament. In other words, the events of the final week of Jesus’s life. I’m going to guess that if you’re reading this, you are at least moderately familiar with how that all played out.

The album spun off two hit singles, “Superstar” by Murray Head and “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” by Yvonne Elliman. The album itself hit number one on the Billboard album charts and stayed there for three weeks.

If you know the story, the album plays like a stage production in your head. Each song unfolds like a scene, with characters entering and exiting in sequence. By the time the record reaches the climax, you’re not just listening, you’re watching the entire drama play out.

Jesus Christ Superstar plays like a political tragedy, focusing less on divinity and more on the unstable power struggle between Jesus, the Roman authorities, and the religious establishment.

The anxiety expressed by Judas, it’s pretty fair to say, reflects fear about mass movements and megalomaniacs. It seems these concerns resonated strongly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when protest movements and revolutionary rhetoric were more common.

Jesus Christ Superstar deliberately strips the story of overt supernatural elements, which works in the album's favor and enhances its accessibility. Miracles are mentioned but not emphasized, and the Resurrection is absent entirely. Instead, the focus rests on emotional conflict, Judas’ doubt, Mary Magdalene’s affection, and Jesus’ own anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane.

And if you were the type who'd walked away from the church but hadn't entirely walked away from the questions, that probably resonated.

As I continue to sift through this collection, I am discovering so many records that feel like a small correction to what I thought I knew about my mother.

By pairing a biblical narrative with electric guitars, Webber and Rice took the New Testament and ran it through a Marshall stack.

There are more modern recordings of Jesus Christ Superstar, and honestly, you’re probably better off with one of those. This original version isn’t bad; it just shows its age.

That said, the whole project was about making an old story feel immediate. Urgent. Dangerous, even. And for one specific moment in history, the original Jesus Christ Superstar did that.

That moment has passed. What’s left is a very good album that sounds exactly like 1970 trying to ask eternal questions.

I’m doing something different this week. Instead of crate-digging through my parents’ collection, I’m passing the keyboard to . Jay is the author of Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind, and he shares in this book excerpt how the finishing touches were put on the album before Parker and his band, The Rumour, began touring behind it.

Jay is new to Substack, so be sure to give him a warm welcome and a follow.

Now, I’m not a Parker historian, so I’ll let someone who actually knows what they’re talking about take it from here.

Graham Parker’s debut album, Howlin’ Wind, turns 50 in April. In the Village Voice’s year-end 1976 Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll, Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind placed fourth. In second place was his sophomore album, Heat Treatment. Number one was Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, and in third place was Jackson Browne’s The Pretender. Among that titanic company, it’s fair to say Parker more than held his own.

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“We listened on this very small, single speaker because we wanted to pretend that maybe it would sound like this on radio,” Parker said. “Not an original idea, really, for mixing albums in some way, but, you know, it was good to bring it down to earth as opposed to the giant speakers, where it could sound fantastic and you can get misled. It was a great thing. I loved being with [producer Nick Lowe], just him and me, into the wee hours, mixing. That was a really good thing about that album. The whole experience was pretty damn good, really.”

Howlin’ Wind was completed in early January, and the release date was set for the end of April. Parker didn’t put a whole lot of thought into naming the album. Howlin’ Wind struck him as a good, inspirational title, and he liked the distant association with Howlin’ Wolf. But the song “Howlin’ Wind” was very much about himself. “I just thought the song was powerful inasmuch as it’s like reinvention,” he said. “That song is about being lost or something, and a reinvention of a person. That last person was left behind, me, and now I’m on a course. The howlin’ wind is my inspiration. I’ve got this to say. This howling need to get the songs across, as it were.”

After Howlin’ Wind was finished, Parker was proud of the album but wasn’t about to get carried away. He didn’t know how it was going to be received, and he had to prepare for tours—his first—to support the album. Then there were promotion and interviews to get through, also firsts. He was getting onto a music industry run-away train carried along by its own momentum.

“I didn’t think much further than, my first album is made. My foot is in the door,” Parker said. “That’s it. We’ll see what people make of it.” Still, he said, he thought it was a great first album, and “to this day I couldn’t have hoped for better. And it was amazing to have these musicians playing on it. [Manager Dave Robinson’s] instinct was right to get Nick, who did a fantastic job. It was so natural sounding.”

Parker and the other musicians hardly had time to enjoy the accolades the album received. Robinson lined up gigs to promote the album, and the musicians agreed to play with Parker, supporting the band Ace for fourteen dates across England, starting on January 15.

There was no doubt for bass player Andrew Bodnar, drummer Steven Goulding, and guitarist Martin Belmont. They were raring to go. “I would have said, ‘When are we going to go play this stuff live?’ Once I realized how good Graham was, I was keen to go off and work with him,” Belmont said. “He was everything we were looking for. He was a natural front man. A natural crowd pleaser. A great songwriter with a musical direction with the kind of music references and influences that I and most of The Rumour, to one degree or another, related heavily to. As far as I remember, there was nothing official like, ‘Do you want to be the band?’ Of course, we were the band.”

That meant lawyers and paperwork. Bodnar recalled, “It was quite a complicated set-up, and suddenly we were being swept up into a situation which no one had foreseen and was slightly out of our control. Suddenly, it was ‘Sign this and sign that’ and lawyers drawing up contracts.”

Howlin’ Wind was completed in January 1976. By the end of the year, Parker and The Rumour had gotten less than a month off, by [guitarist Brinsley] Schwarz’s calculations. The gigs with Ace were followed by fourteen dates, beginning on February 6, supporting Kokomo. That tour ended on February 29. On March 2, they played again at Newlands, and the next night, they had a gig at the London club Dingwalls. Then, beginning on Friday, March 5, Graham Parker and The Rumour played thirty dates supporting Thin Lizzy on their Jailbreak tour, which ended April 4.

Lowe stayed involved, serving as tour manager for Parker during the band’s tour with Thin Lizzy, a job he admits he was ill-suited for. He was pretty good with getting the band members out of bed and getting them on stage on time, but he was hopeless when it came to managing the accounts and organizing the receipts. However, Lowe said, “I needed the money, really. I was out of work. And I was pleased with how well the record had been received. And it was opening for Thin Lizzy. They were really a fantastic group at that time. It was a sensational tour for them to be on, and they did really well.”

Initially, Lowe wished the album could have been better, but eventually he felt good about it, as is his pattern. “I felt pretty much like I felt like when I produced any of the albums that I produced. I always thought, ‘It’s not quite right,’” Lowe said. “‘I did my best, but we’ve run out of time now.’ None of the records I’ve ever produced have I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, now we’re talking.’ I listen to them in greater and lesser degrees of pleasure, but you can hear it just too well, what’s going on. It’s only after a few years you can listen, when you’ve forgotten all the things you did, you can see it for what it is. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, it could be better, frankly.’ I’m a bit of an old tart, really. As soon as the reviews come out, if they say it’s great, then suddenly I say, ‘Well, fabulous. That worked well.’ The reviews were good. It was received really well, and Graham was on his way.”

Parker was satisfied with the response to the album. “They saw things in my chord progressions and voice and my intensity,” he said. “I meant business. The songs weren’t letting anyone down. Amazingly, I can’t believe how accomplished I was in some ways, to have those songs and to know they were good enough.”

“I personally felt relieved and a little bit proud to have played alright on my very first album session and pulled it off,” Bodnar said. “There was so much stuff going on around the album, and I think we plunged straight into our initial U.K. tour supporting Ace very soon after Howlin’ Wind was completed. The circus had commenced.”

The 1957 album Bergen Sings Morgan finds multi-hyphenate Polly Bergen singing songs made famous by Helen Morgan. Not that I knew who either of them was, but that seductive look of Bergen on the cover told me exactly the type of music I would hear. I knew it would be a record full of torch songs. The type of music that would benefit from a martini and a cigarette, two of my parents’ favorite things. Bergen Sings Morgan is exactly the type of album I expected to find in my parents’ collection.

Helen Morgan, it turns out, was more or less exactly the kind of figure those songs suggest. A classic torch singer, she came up in Chicago clubs in the 1920s and made her name as Julie in Show Boat, which, even if musicals aren’t your thing, is one of those roles that actually matters.

Morgan’s life followed a familiar arc for singers of that era: nightclub success, Prohibition-era complications, and a reputation shaped as much by her drinking as by her voice. She opened her own club, had it shut down, reopened it under a different name, and eventually found herself indicted before being acquitted. The details almost feel beside the point. What matters is that her voice carried that life.

She died in 1941 at 41, of cirrhosis. Which, for a singer like Morgan, feels less like a biographical detail than part of the sound.

Polly Bergen, on the other hand, was something else entirely: a career professional. Actress, singer, Emmy winner (for playing Morgan, no less), Golden Globe nominee, businesswoman, and television presence. Later generations might recognize her from The Sopranos, where she played Fran Felstein, the fictional former mistress of Johnny Soprano. Overall, Bergen built a long, carefully managed, and quite varied career that extended well beyond this material.

That difference, between someone who lived the songs and someone who mastered them, is the tension that defines this record.

After a career that kept her busy well into her twilight years, Polly Bergen passed away from natural causes in 2014.

Two tracks from Morgan’s benchmark Show Boat are here, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill”. It’s said that when Morgan was alive, she owned “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in the same way Judy Garland owns “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I’ll let you be the judge (click here).

In Bergen’s hands, the song becomes something else. The melancholy is still there, heightened, but now it’s controlled and smoothed out. Where Morgan’s version feels like it might come apart mid-line, Bergen’s never does.

That’s the tradeoff.

Bergen gives you a cleaner, more legible version of the song. But in doing so, she removes the sense that anything is at risk.

Helen Morgan is also known for her role in Sweet Adeline. Both “Don’t Ever Leave Me” and “Why Was I Born?”, from that musical, are featured on Bergen Sings Morgan. While Morgan was the originator of “Why Was I Born?”, the track would be performed by a who’s who of 20th-century music, including Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Dylan.

Bergen sings “Why Was I Born?” like she already knows the answer and has made peace with it. That’s the problem. The song isn’t supposed to be resolved. It’s meant to hover in uncertainty. Bergen steadies it, cleans it up, and in doing so, quietly removes the ache that gives the question weight.

Show tunes are not my jam, but I can appreciate a beautiful voice. Polly Bergen has a fine voice, one of those voices that feels less discovered than constructed. It’s controlled, shaped, and carefully crafted, like every note was considered before it leaves her mouth. There’s real skill in that, but it comes at a cost.

She doesn’t sound like she’s inside the song so much as presenting it. The phrasing is precise, the tone is warm, but there’s a slight remove, like she’s standing just outside the emotion rather than risking getting caught in it. You never get the sense that something might go wrong, and with torch songs, that’s the whole point.

In the end, Bergen Sings Morgan feels less like a revival and more like a translation, which makes some sense. The songs are all here, intact and recognizable, but something essential has shifted in the process. What was once fragile and perhaps a little dangerous becomes composed, even elegant.

Maybe that’s inevitable. You can’t recreate a voice like Helen Morgan’s any more than you can recreate the life behind it. The best you can do is approximate it, shape it, and present it.

Which is exactly what Polly Bergen does.

And maybe that’s why this record ended up in my parents’ collection. It takes something messy and makes it listenable. Something volatile, and makes it safe.

It’s not quite what the songs were.

But it is what they became.

How Little Feat Feats Don’t Fail Me Now ended up in my parents’ record collection is beyond me. I associate peak Little Feat with weed and good times, both of which I don’t imagine my parents taking part in. Well, certainly not weed.

The only logical explanation might be that my mom (definitely my mom) bought it (for 6.99, the price tag is still on it), thinking it was a country album. My mother liked herself some country music. My father’s taste ran more akin to muzak.

Formed in 1969 after being kicked out of (or left, reports vary) Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, Little Feat began with vocalist and guitarist Lowell George and keyboardist Bill Payne. The classic line-up of Little Feat was Lowell George - vocals, guitar; Bill Payne - backing vocals, keyboards; Paul Barrere - backing vocals, guitar; Kenny Gradney - bass; Richie Hayward - backing vocals, drums; and Sam Clayton - backing vocals, percussion.

Feats Don’t Fail Me Now is definitely not country music. The guitar sound is Bakersfield-adjacent, but it’s tough to pinpoint Little Feat. They’re not quite Southern rock in the vein of the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and they’re not necessarily known for improvisational jams like The Grateful Dead (this record’s “Cold Cold Cold/Triple Face Boogie” notwithstanding).

Even the internet has a hard time labeling them; some places call it “country funk,” and others call it “swamp rock.” I’ll call it good - a bit dated, but good.

This record sits right in the middle of the band’s classic run and captures Little Feat at the moment when their swampy funk, New Orleans R&B, and studio craft were fully locked in. Released in 1974, the record sits between Dixie Chicken and the band’s later live peak, Waiting for Columbus.

Mixing both swagger and exhaustion, the record opens with “Rock and Roll Doctor”, which straddles the fence between satire and autobiography. Sung by George, the song’s loose groove and hook highlight his pop craftsmanship.

“Spanish Moon” is arguably the album’s centerpiece. Lowell George’s songwriting wasn’t big on grand themes; his songs were observational, inhabited by bartenders, gamblers, and survivors. It’s almost anthropological, as sung by George with a half-drawl, half-smirk; it makes the “hookers and hustlers” believable.

Without tipping into excess, the keyboards and horn arrangement help give this track a theatrical feel.

The writing here is artfully tight. As the primary songwriter, George builds songs around small, vivid details rather than big emotional statements. It could be a line of dialogue, or a street name; it’s those details that give his characters dimension without needing long explanations.

That’s why many Little Feat songs feel like short stories with something missing. You drop into a scene that clearly started before the song begins and will probably continue after it ends. George rarely resolves the narrative. Like the best movies, he lets you watch the characters, albeit for three minutes, and draw your own conclusions.

Feats Don’t Fail Me Now is the band’s fourth album and the one with what is arguably their most well-known song, “Oh Atlanta.” The song, written by and sung by keyboardist Bill Payne, stands in direct contrast to George’s songwriting style.

Unlike many Lowell George-penned Little Feat songs that drift through sweaty grooves and crooked characters, “Oh Atlanta” is startlingly straightforward. It’s a road song, part love letter, part homesick daydream, about a musician imagining a place that feels a little more hopeful than wherever he happens to be standing.

Musically, it’s one of the band’s most direct rockers. The rhythm section locks in while Bill Payne’s piano pushes the song forward like a barroom train engine. Compared with Lowell George’s more shadowy storytelling, Payne’s lyric is simple and openhearted. That simplicity may be exactly why the song has endured.

While the band’s most successful album is the live opus Waiting for Columbus, the 1974 Feats Don’t Fail Me Now remains their most successful studio album, peaking at #30 on the Billboard album chart and being certified gold (500,000 units).

You can tell the album is from the mid-70s by the artwork. At first, I thought it was the work of R. Crumb, but the album cover art is actually by Neon Park (Martin Muller), best known for designing the covers of every Little Feat album except their self-titled debut. Park also designed artwork for Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Dr. John, and the Beach Boys.

On this album, the band often sounds relaxed, almost barroom-casual, but beneath that looseness lies tight control. For a band from Los Angeles, the songs lean more toward New Orleans funk than blues-rock, with Payne’s piano and organ filling the gaps and driving the groove forward.

While one wouldn’t necessarily categorize Little Feat as a “political” band, the album was released in August 1974, just as public trust in government was collapsing and Richard Nixon was resigning. The album must’ve served as a swampy reprieve from all of that.

As good as Feats Don’t Fail Me Now is, the real mystery remains how it landed in my parents’ record collection in the first place.

Some questions never get answered. This one will have to remain one of life’s little crate-digging mysteries.

I inherited my parents’ record collection, and much to my chagrin, it’s filled with a fair amount of bupkis. My parents, to put it gently, had crap taste. There are a lot of showtunes. A lot of easy listening. A lot of things I’ve never heard of. Imagine the record collection of Midwest older/nerdy boomers, and you’ll have an idea.

But every once in a while, buried among the dreck, there’s something worth pulling out and exploring. In this case, it was Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden.

After reading an IG post from my friend Rob Janicke about Reinventing Elvis - the 68 Comeback, I decided to drop the needle on this album. It helped that I’m currently knee-deep in There Was Nothing You Could Do by Steven Hyden, where the record shows up as a useful benchmark.

Hyden uses the Madison Square Garden concert and subsequent album as an analogy for the kind of cultural saturation Bruce Springsteen would reach during the Born in the U.S.A. era.

The concerts (afternoon and evening) themselves took place on June 10, 1972. Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden documents the evening performance; the afternoon show wouldn’t surface until 1997’s An Afternoon in the Garden.

By 1972, rock had moved on to singer-songwriters and album statements, but Elvis was doing something different, turning his own past into the show. Either way, the record feels less like a conventional live album and more like a high-speed revue, one hit tumbling into another, a career condensed into fifty-two minutes.

The first thing you notice is the pace.
Everything moves fast.
Like, weirdly fast.

In a 2009 BBC documentary, Elvis’s longtime drummer, Ronnie Tutt, suggested that Colonel Tom Parker had the mixes sped up to fit more songs on the record, increasing royalties. It makes for a great story, and given what little I know about the Colonel, it’s not hard to fathom.

But apparently it’s not true.

You don’t have to wait long to hear that speed as the band explodes into “That’s All Right,” and the entire show is off and running. The breakneck pace may start you wondering how a man who once received a badge from Richard Nixon as a “Federal Agent at Large” in the war on drugs was keeping up with the tempo.

Nonetheless, Elvis himself is in top form. Still riding the momentum of his 1968 comeback, he sounds like he’s genuinely enjoying himself. The cynicism that seems to define the later years, an impression picked up through the cultural ether, hasn’t set in yet. Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden falls squarely in that window when Elvis was cool again.

Backed by his TCB (Taking Care of Business) Band, firing on all cylinders, Presley visits all the hits. Clearly, this is the precursor to late-stage Elvis in Las Vegas. The Elvis no one seems to like. What the record captures, more than anything, is Elvis the entertainer and less the revolutionary force he once was, and more the ringmaster of his own legend.

Elvis wasn’t much of a songwriter, so what you get throughout his career are interpretations. This record is no different. After thundering in with “That’s All Right,” he shifts into “Proud Mary,” which he makes his own, even if it still pales in comparison to Ike and Tina Turner’s version.

One miss is “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” This is a classic torch song, but as it is here, it’s pop. Not to say it’s bad, it’s just lacking the sadness of Dusty Springfield’s original or Shelby Lynne’s later interpretation.

I would challenge anyone to pistols at dawn if they speak ill of “Polk Salad Annie.”

Moments like that are why Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden works: even when Elvis isn’t reinventing anything, he’s still the most compelling performer in the room, and sometimes that’s more than enough.

By the time Big Daddy dropped in 1989, John Mellencamp had been chronicling the Reagan era long enough to know that nothing, the economy, the rhetoric, or ordinary life ever ended as neatly as politicians promise. Where earlier records caught tension or aftermath, Big Daddy watches the dust settle into the everyday.

Ronald Reagan had been out of office for five months when Big Daddy arrived in May 1989, but his policies were still resonating. Like the record itself, Reagan’s retirement feels less like a conclusion than a quiet epilogue to the stories Mellencamp had been telling all along.

Reagan warned against government dependence; his retirement depended on it. Pension secured. Federal healthcare. Secret Service detail. Memoir advance. Speaking fees. His landing was engineered to be soft. The Midwest landing wasn’t.

In the towns Mellencamp had been singing about all decade, stability looked different. It looked like consolidation. It looked like fewer shifts. It looked like learning to live with less and calling it normal.

Mellencamp’s four albums, Uh-Huh, Scarecrow, The Lonesome Jubilee, and Big Daddy, aren’t about partisan score-settling. They’re about consequence: what economic doctrine feels like at ground level. Reagan retired into comfort. Mellencamp’s characters retired into silence, part-time jobs, empty hands, and endurance.

In the late 1980s, the farm crisis had leveled off, not disappeared. The weakest operations were gone. The survivors were larger, more leveraged, more industrial. The family farm ideal Mellencamp defended had not been restored; it had been redefined, where it remained at all.

In manufacturing towns, the same quiet recalibration was underway. Factories that reopened did so with fewer workers, more automation, and less bargaining power. Wages stabilized without rising. Nothing collapsed outright.
Nothing dramatically improved.
The decade didn’t end in ruin.
It ended in contraction.

Private-sector union membership continued its slide. In industrial states like Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, that decline wasn’t abstract. It meant less leverage, slower wage growth, and the gradual erosion of middle-class certainty. The shift that lasted longest wasn’t only economic; it was ideological.

The language of markets, efficiency, discipline, and competition hardened into common sense. Social safety nets were recast as inefficiencies, and collective identity thinned. Structural explanation gave way to personal responsibility.

The emergency phase had passed. Once the dust had settled, what remained was adjustment.

Out of that atmosphere comes Big Daddy, less combustible than Scarecrow, less communal than The Lonesome Jubilee, turning inward instead, wary and quietly unsettled.

Big Daddy

If Uh-Huh was observation, Scarecrow was indictment, and The Lonesome Jubilee was aftermath, Big Daddy is Mellencamp confronting the limits of protest, and his own place inside the America he spent the decade criticizing. Big Daddy captures the psychic cost of the 1980s.
Not outrage.
Not hope.
Weariness.

On this self-produced tenth studio album, Mellencamp extends the exploration of The Lonesome Jubilee while softening its edges. Big Daddy leans into an acoustic vibe, maintaining his blend of rock and country while centering stories of the everyman, a role Mellencamp increasingly places himself within. These are not fist-pumping songs; the lyrics adopt a more serious, reflective tone, turning inward as often as they look out.

In 1991, Mellencamp said, “Big Daddy was the best record I ever made.”

A quiet indifference skulks through much of the record. Two years before the language of “Gen X” would take hold, Mellencamp captures the confusion and the resignation that follows limited opportunity in “Theo and Weird Henry”:

I never knew what they was talking about
But they laughed like they both thought it was funny
Theo and weird Henry went chasing after something
And neither of them believin in nothin’

Moments in time they shared together
Called themselves the “He-man Woman Lovers Club”
Throwin’ pop bottles against the wall just to get some attention
There was a moment in time they swore they were friends until the end

Lest we forget the three-minute grudge that is “Pop Singer.” With its growling guitar and irony firmly in place, the song serves as a strident declaration that Mellencamp never wanted to be a “pop singer”. Like the Midwestern figures he chronicled, he resists the label attached to him, even as he cannot fully escape it.

If "Pop Singer" introduces identity tension, "Jackie Brown" reveals the human cost underneath. Like Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," it doesn't editorialize.
It documents.

Is this your meal, Jackie Brown?
Barely enough
I’ve seen people throw more than this out
Is this your home, Jackie Brown?
This three-room shack
With no runnin’ water and the bathroom out back

Is this your grave, Jackie Brown?
This little piece of limestone
That says another desperate man took himself out
Is this your dream, Jackie Brown

The anger recedes here, replaced by something slower and harder to name, a kind of existential drift.

Mellencamp undercuts the “Morning in America” brightness with a pointed song like “Country Gentleman.” Here, Reagan-era confidence gives way to wounded interiority, nationalism refracted through personal uncertainty.

Country gentleman, we see him on TV
Glad handing folks and chatting to the nation
We never knew what really to believe
Just word upon slogan with emotional connection
And in the papers all we’d ever read is
So and so big-shot signed his resignation
Now, country gentleman he wants us to believe
That he’s kind and honest with the best intentions

He ain’t a-gonna help no poor man
He ain’t a-gonna help no children
He ain’t a-gonna help no women
He’s just gonna help his rich friends

Mellencamp shifts from populist slogans to personal dislocation. The sound itself, raw and stripped down, mirrors economic bareness. Less anthemic. More claustrophobic. It feels like comedown music. Big Daddy shows how the system never fully collapsed; it hardened.
It settled.
It petrified.

“J.M.’s Question” captures the ideological residue of the decade. Mellencamp isn’t arguing policy; he’s interrogating its emotional logic. The distorted arithmetic and defensive posture point to a world where competition has replaced trust, and moral clarity gives way to calculation.

Well, what kind of world do we live in
When eleven and seven equals two, yeah?
What kind of world do we live in
When you do it to your buddy 'fore he does it to you?
Got to do it to your buddy 'fore he does it to you

Big Daddy doesn’t offer resolution. It offers recognition. The villains Mellencamp spent the decade confronting never fully disappear; they diffuse into institutions, into communities, into ordinary lives, including his own.

If Uh-Huh observed, Scarecrow indicted, and The Lonesome Jubilee endured, Big Daddy reckons. The questions are no longer about what went wrong, but about what responsibility looks like after the anger fades, when the systems remain, and the person in the mirror does too.

The Reagan era didn't end so much as it calcified. The rhetoric faded. The policies stayed. And so did the people Mellencamp had been writing about all decade, still working, still adjusting, still telling themselves the story that gets you through. Big Daddy doesn't argue with any of that. It just sits with them. Which, in its own way, is arguably the most radical thing John Mellencamp ever did.

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By 1987, Ronald Reagan was coming to the tail end of his second term. He had challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” absorbed the political damage of Iran-Contra, imposed tariffs on Japanese semiconductors, and confirmed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. On television, Reagan’s America looked triumphant. In the Midwest, the story was quieter.

Confidence at the podium did not translate to stability in the Midwest.

Recorded from late 1986 into the summer of 1987 and released that August, The Lonesome Jubilee shifts the lens inward. Where Scarecrow confronted the structural blows, foreclosures, banks, and doctrine, The Lonesome Jubilee documents the people left standing after the initial impact. The crisis is no longer just economic. It is cultural. Spiritual. Communal.

If Scarecrow was indictment, The Lonesome Jubilee is the aftermath.

Just as he had done with both Uh Huh and Scarecrow, Mellencamp fires a shot across the bow again with the album’s opener, “Paper in Fire”. A life worth living is always just out of reach:

There's a good life
Right across the green fields
And each generation
Stares at it from afar

The anger of 1985’s Scarecrow gives way, in 1987, to something more complicated: fatigue. The belt-tightening became routine. The constrictions became normalized. Mellencamp’s protagonists are not marching in protest; they are enduring.

The sardonic “Check It Out” captures that uneasy balance between aspiration and disillusionment:

A million young poets screaming out their words
To a world full of people just living to be heard
Future generations, riding on the highways that we built
I hope they have a better understanding

Going to work on Monday
(Check it out) got yourself a family
(Check it out) all utility bills have been paid
You can’t tell your best buddy that you love him

On the outside, it may have looked like Reagan’s America was winning, with a strong dollar, expanding markets, and military dominance. But in the Midwest, the landscape told a quieter story. The farms that survived were larger. The factories that remained were leaner. The banks were fewer. What had collapsed earlier in the decade did not return; it consolidated. The emergency had passed, and the structure had changed. That is the world The Lonesome Jubilee inhabits.

By The Lonesome Jubilee, the damage has settled in. The collapse isn’t loud; it’s lived-in. The album feels less accusatory and more haunted. The rage of Scarecrow gives way to something more established and subtle in The Lonesome Jubilee. Fiddles and accordions wrapped around stories of drift, compromise, and quiet disillusionment. If Uh-Huh asks what’s happening, Scarecrow says who’s responsible, and The Lonesome Jubilee asks what it costs us. We find these characters “Down and Out In Paradise”:

Dear Mr. President
I live in the suburbs
It’s a long way from Washington, D.C.
Had me a job
Working for wages
And they forgot about me
Can’t draw unemployment
For some unknown reason
My kids are hungry
I’ve got four mouths to feed
I go out every day lookin’ for suitable
Employment
Do you think, there’s something
You could do for me
Cause I’m

Down and out here in paradise
Down and out and I’m on my knees
I’m down and out, here in paradise
Looks like the milk and honey
Done run out on me

The most unsettling part wasn’t the inequity of Reaganomics, but the calm belief that the market would sort it out, even as communities collapsed. The Lonesome Jubilee doesn’t shout about collapse; it lives inside its aftermath. The protagonists in these songs don’t expect much and receive even less, yet Mellencamp renders them heroic simply by surviving - by enduring life with “Empty Hands.”

In the shadows of the smokestacks
Through the black snow, that lay on the land
Walked home one winter morning
With my life savings in my hand
Maryanne, she’s fixin’ up some breakfast
Got the lights on, on the Christmas tree
Sittin’ there, lookin’ up at an angel
With something dyin’ inside of me

Grew up with great expectations
Heard the promise and I knew the plan
They say people get what they deserve
But Lord, sometimes it’s much worse than that
Maryanne, she takin’ in some laundry
I got a part-time job in a drive-in stand
Oh Lord, what did I do
To deserve these empty hands

Across the cities
Across this land
Through the valleys
And across the sand
Too many people standing in line
Too many people with nothing planned
There’s too many people with
Empty hands

This wasn’t just metaphor. It was measurable. Beneath the statistics and policy debates lay something darker. The farm crisis produced a spike in suicides, despair turning private where protest had failed. According to the National Rural Health Association (NRHA), farmers’ suicide rate is three and a half times greater than that observed in the broader population.

With “Crumbin Down” off of Uh-Huh, “Second best is what you get until you learn to bend the rules.” That sentiment is mirrored on The Lonesome Jubilee in “Hard Times For An Honest Man,” where our character tries to maintain dignity under erosion:

One man does his work
He's not satisfied not at all
Feels like that he's being used
His self-respect starts to fall
His frustration
Running very very high he takes it out
On the ones he loves, because it's safe
And who they gonna tell
And he hates that cold-bloodedness
That runs inside

Oh yes.
It’s hard times, for an honest man
Very, very hard times
Hard times, for an honest man
Very, very hard times

The sound on The Lonesome Jubilee was a departure for Mellencamp. Having added fiddle player Lisa Germano and multi-instrumentalist John Cascella, the album provides a more layered and textured sound for his songs. They helped reshape the sound by replacing arena gloss with folk textures, almost creating a genre that only he belonged in.

Eschewing mainstream rock was a bit risky coming off one of Mellencamp’s most successful albums, but it paid off even though it sold two million fewer than Scarecrow. The Lonesome Jubilee sold over three million copies in the United States, about the same as Uh Huh. Hardly a disappointment.

Next up is Big Daddy (1989), Mellencamp’s final statement of the decade. If The Lonesome Jubilee lived in the aftermath, Big Daddy pushes further into the reckoning. The optimism some felt during the Reagan years was thinning, the culture wars were sharpening, and the fractures Mellencamp had been tracing all decade were no longer subtle. The anger returns, older now. Wiser. Quieter. Less surprised.

In the final installment, we’ll see how Mellencamp closed out the 1980s not with nostalgia, but with confrontation, and why Big Daddy may be his most unsparing portrait of not only America, but of his place in it.

If Uh-Huh marked the moment John Mellencamp began paying attention, 1985’s Scarecrow is where he stopped hedging. This was not simply an album about struggling farmers. It was a record shaped by the political atmosphere of mid-1980s America, a nation projecting confidence abroad while absorbing economic and cultural strain at home. Where Uh-Huh hinted at fracture, Scarecrow confronted it. In its anger and clarity, Heartland Rock ceased to be nostalgic and became political.

Scarecrow turned rural dispossession into chart-topping protest music, and it remains Mellencamp’s most uncompromising statement. It’s not merely an album about farmers; it’s an album about America in 1985, prosperous on the surface, anxious underneath.

What happened to American farmers in the early 1980s was not merely an agricultural story; it was an early warning signal. The same economic doctrine that promised renewal was producing uneven consequences: prosperity for some, precarity for others. As Reagan celebrated electoral landslides and Cold War resolve, rural America was confronting foreclosure auctions and collapsing banks. Scarecrow was born in that contradiction.

To blame Ronald Reagan as the sole reason the American farm system imploded in the 1980s would probably be incorrect. For an event as catastrophic as the farm crisis, there were several factors that played a role.

One thing that affected farmers was that Federal Chair Paul Volker sharply raised interest rates. This matters because farmers had borrowed heavily in the 1970s to purchase land and equipment. As a result of the rate hike, loan payments skyrocketed, which led to massive farm foreclosures. Additionally, land values collapsed, and families went bankrupt. Reagan matters here because he supported Volker’s action, despite its devastating impact on rural borrowers.

While Reagan’s economic policies led to a strong U.S. dollar, they reduced the competitiveness of U.S. agricultural exports. Not helping matters was the Soviet grain embargo, which was a holdover from former president Jimmy Carter, and exports dropped sharply in the early 80s.

As a candidate, Reagan was the champion of the “free market” and promised Midwestern farmers that he would get the government out of agriculture. In fact, his stump speech said he would “make life in rural America prosperous again” and “restore profitability to agriculture.”

Many farmers embraced Reagan’s free-market rhetoric and grew crops to compete on the open market. And for many reasons, some of them detailed here, the market did not respond in kind.

Moreover, Reagan flatly refused to do what every previous administration had done: pay farmers to stop growing. U.S. farming had been underwritten by the government since FDR’s New Deal.

There is no denying Volker’s interest rate shock, some over-leveraging in the 70s, and a global commodity implosion played a role in the farm crisis; however, Reagan’s policies of tight money, reductions in farm support, and an overall belief in market discipline over protection worsened rural collapse.

For many in the Midwest, Ronald Reagan’s approach felt like abandonment.

ALBUM 2 OF 4 - SCARECROW

After a successful tour in support of the multi-platinum Uh-Huh, John Mellencamp returned home to Seymour, Indiana, to a rural community that was in crisis. American farmers were facing an economic crisis more severe than any since the Great Depression. In March of 1985, Mellencamp and co. stepped into his Belmont, Indiana, studio to lay down his thoughts.

Released in August of 1985, Scarecrow was Mellencamp’s eighth album and definitely his most politically charged to that point. He wastes no time in firing a shot across the bow with “Rain on the Scarecrow,” the first song:

The crops we grew last summer weren’t enough to pay the loans
Couldn’t buy the seed to plant this spring and the farmers bank foreclosed
Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land
He said John it’s just my job, I hope you understand
Calling it your job old hoss sure don’t make it right
But if you want me to, I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight
And grandma’s on the front porch with a
Bible in her hand. Sometimes I hear her singing take me to the promised land
When you take away a man’s dignity he can’t work his fields and cows.

There’ll be blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.

As the fourth single, “Rain on the Scarecrow” details the emotional toll that government policy and farm foreclosures had on Midwestern farmers. The song is a narrative about generational loss, pride, and despair, all of which Mellencamp witnessed firsthand in Indiana.

The single, released in 1986, peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Not too shabby for a song with powerful social commentary on a topic as focused as the collapse of rural farming communities.

Five of Scarecrow’s eleven songs are politically charged. Almost a threefold increase from Uh-Huh’s two songs. The songs often paint a musical portrait of the struggles of various Midwestern characters. This isn’t just simple “Reagan sucks” type of music, it’s painting pictures of those feeling the wrath of Reagan’s policies.

The second song, the traditional “Grandma’s Theme” (sung by Mellencamp’s grandmother, Laura Mellencamp), can easily be seen as an allegory for the artist’s agenda:

Was a dark story night
As the train rattled on
All the passengers had gone to bed
Except a young man with a baby in his arms
Who sat there with a bowed-down head

The innocent one began crying just then
As though its poor heart would break
One angry man said “Make that child stop its noise
For it’s keeping all of us awake”

While not overtly political, the fourth track sheds light on the things that make the Midwest so unique. Spanning three generations, it’s with “Minutes to Memories” that Mellencamp paints the values of Midwestern life in 4:11.

Like “Rain on the Scarecrow,” this track was co-written with Mellencamp’s childhood friend George M. Green, and stands as one of his most cinematic, reflective, and mature songs to date.

On a Greyhound thirty miles beyond Jamestown
He saw the sun set on the Tennessee line
He looked at the young man who was riding beside him
He said I’m old kind of worn out inside
I worked my whole life in the steel mills of Gary
And my father before me I helped build this land
Now I’m seventy-seven and with God as my witness
I earned every dollar that passed through my hands
My family and friends are the best thing I’ve known
Through the eye of the needle I’ll carry them home

As the old man shares his life’s wisdom with the “young man” who is presumably Mellencamp, much is learned about the core values of life.

He said an honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind
This world offers riches and riches will grow wings
I don’t take stock in those uncertain things

By the last verse, the young man of the bus ride has matured, realizing the old man was right. He lays down this wisdom for what is presumably another young person:

Days turn to minutes
And minutes to memories
Life sweeps away the dreams
That we have planned
You are young and you are the future
So suck it up and tough it out
And be the best you can

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It’s worth remembering that by 1985, thanks to Reaganomics, income inequality had seen a sharp increase with more wealth concentration at the top. It’s against this backdrop that Mellencamp closes out side one of Scarecrow with “Face of the Nation”:

And the face of the nation
Keeps changin’ and changin’
The face of the nation
I don’t recognize it no more

By 1985, Ronald Regan had survived an assassination attempt and was being referred to as “the great communicator.” Riding high, it was true that the face of the nation had changed. And depending on your political or cultural beliefs, and your economic status, exactly how the face of your nation changed was different.

Reagan’s America looked triumphant on television. In rural counties, it looked different.

In 1985, the Cold War was not metaphorical. It was doctrine. Mutually Assured Destruction between the two superpowers, America and the USSR, wasn’t a slogan; it was policy.

“Justice and Independence ’85” distills Mellencamp’s view of America into three and a half pointed minutes, a civics lesson delivered with a snarl.

He was born on the fourth day of July
So his parents called him Independence Day
He married a girl named Justice
Who gave birth to a son called the Nation, then she walked away
Independence would daydream, and he’d pretend
That someday him and Justice and Nation would be together again
But Justice held up a shotgun shack, wouldn’t let nobody in
So Nation cried

Oh-oh when the Nation cries
His tears fall down like missiles from the skies
Justice, look into Independence’s eyes
Can you make everything alright?
And can you keep your Nation warm tonight?

Well, Nation grew up and got himself a big reputation
Couldn’t keep the boy at home no, no
He just kept running around and around and around
Independence and Justice, well they felt so ashamed
When the Nation fell down, they argued, “Who is to blame?”
And Nation, if you’ll just come home, we’ll have this family again

Not helping matters was a policy that became known as the Reagan Doctrine. This doctrine provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist resistance movements in an effort to counter Soviet-backed communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Under the banner of containing communism, American power expanded globally, even as economic strain deepened at home. This makes “Justice and Independence ‘85” one of Mellencamp’s most politically fueled songs up to that point.

The rest of Scarecrow is far from a throwaway and finds John Mellencamp in familiar territory and firing on all cylinders.

• “Small Town” - “Pink Houses” part two with Mellencamp as protagonist

• “Lonely Old Night” - small town boredom meets booty call (although allegedly inspired by the movie HUD… I remain skeptical).

• “Between A Laugh and A Tear” - relationships (with Rickie Lee Jones on background vocals)

• “Rumbleseat” - nostalgic reflection

• “You’ve Gotta Stand For Somethin’” - some braggadiccio with some humor

• “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” - nostalgic reflection part two

FARM AID

As great an album as Scarecrow is, the album’s legacy is closely tied to one thing in particular: Farm Aid.

By 1985, musicians had gained an overwhelming degree of self-importance. The high-water mark of this era is the two Live Aid shows that took place in July of 1985. In an offhanded comment during Bob Dylan’s set, he mentioned that the organizers should give some of the money to the American farmer. Those organizers may not have been listening, but John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Willie Nelson were.

Two months after Live Aid, on September 22, 1985, Farm Aid was born in Champaign, Illinois.

By all accounts, including the three founders, Farm Aid was conceived as a one-off project. Now, if you don’t think that some of Ronald Reagan’s policies had a lasting impact on farmers, in September of 2025, Farm Aid celebrated its 40th anniversary on September 20, at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

With Uh-Huh, Mellencamp was observing. He was taking notes, testing the temperature, hinting at a fracture.

With Scarecrow, he stopped hinting. He indicted.

He indicted economic doctrine. He indicted political indifference. He indicted a national mood that celebrated strength while ignoring strain.

Scarecrow captured a country split between confidence and collapse, a nation flexing abroad while foreclosing at home, projecting certainty while absorbing quiet despair.

Four decades later, that tension doesn’t feel archival. It feels familiar.

In part three, we’ll look at John Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee, which picks up where Scarecrow leaves off.

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John Mellencamp is gearing up for a greatest hits tour this summer. Rock and roll’s favorite curmudgeon has finally decided that maybe the old songs and hits aren’t quite so bad. It somehow seems fitting at this particular moment that the socially conscious Mellencamp is hitting the road to play the hits from his most successful, and arguably his most political, period.

That said, I thought I would revisit a post that I wrote five years ago over on Medium. It’s designed to be an examination of Mellencamp’s most fertile political period, whereby I examine one album per post, beginning with 1983’s Uh-Huh and going through to 1989’s Big Daddy.

But some background for the uninitiated.

John Mellencamp’s commercial peak coincided with the two terms of the Ronald Reagan administration. While it was his third album, 1982’s American Fool, that broke him to a larger audience, it’s with 1983’s Uh-Huh that Mellencamp began to explore more socially conscious songs. He produced four jaw-dropping albums using his songs as a clarion call to the fallacy of “Reaganomics.”

The relationship between music and social consciousness has a long history. In Western culture, socially conscious music is traced back to “The Cutty Wren,” a coded anthem against feudal oppression dating back to the English peasants’ revolt of 1381.

Not surprisingly, America’s first musical social commentary songs have their beginnings with slavery. Songs like “Go Down Moses” were derived from hymns about freedom.

From the songs of Woody Guthrie to “Strange Fruit” to “For What It’s Worth” to “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Fuck the Police” to “Killing In The Name Of,” socially conscious music is interwoven into America’s DNA.

But in the 1980s, one artist stood out for challenging the political environment. He was far from the only one, but as the decade progressed, John Mellencamp would become one of the most popular performers and certainly one of the most popular with a very specific point of view. His critical and incisive songs topped the charts, largely because his brand of populist rock and roll was de rigueur.

Having sold over sixty million albums, Mellencamp has made his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the only way one does… with songs. And in the 80s, many of these songs documented the slow march towards the dystopian economic landscape many Americans, especially in the Midwest, find themselves in today.

John Mellencamp, then John Cougar (after an initial period of Johnny Cougar) ascended to rock stardom just as the Reagan administration’s economic theory of “trickle-down economics” was beginning to get a foothold. Known mostly by the colloquial “Reaganomics,” it is closely linked to Supply-Side Economics, as both use the Laffer Curve to emphasize their theory.

Without going into the weeds, and perhaps to oversimplify, “Reaganomics” is:

“The implementation of lessened taxes on high earners to incentivize business expansion and investment, with the idea that this growth will trickle down to lower earners in the form of financial and occupational benefits.” Or in the more popular vernacular the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Forty-plus years later, this economic theory, this “idea,” remains popular with many politicians because of its perceived success. The fact is that the policy then, as it does now, does two things. One, it never seems to trickle down as promoted or promised, and two, it serves to make the rich richer.

Combined with other factors, this three-card monte-like monetary policy has made the national debt skyrocket.

• The national debt in 1981 was 1 trillion dollars, and by the time Reagan left office in 1989, the debt had almost tripled to about 3 trillion dollars.

• The current national debt is now 38 trillion dollars…and counting - a ten trillion increase from when I first wrote this piece in 2021.

According to the Pew Research Center: “The 1980s marked the beginning of a long and steady rise in income inequality.”

From 1981 to 1990, during John Mellencamp’s commercial peak, this “trickle-down” policy eviscerated a large swath of the Midwest's economic foundation.

Our current administration has all but stopped bloviating about the “rising tide” and just started handing out tax breaks to the wealthy.

Break on Through

As Bruce Springsteen is to the East Coast, John Mellencamp is to the Midwest. After a few years of modest success, in 1982, his album American Fool broke through as he found his voice. With the addition of drummer Kenny Aronoff, producer Don Gehman, and co-writing some of his hits with friend George M. Green, Mellencamp carved out a distinctive sound. A sound that would capture and come to define the region throughout the 80s. “Heartland Rock” went mainstream.

His self-reflective hits like “Hurts So Good” and “Jack & Diane” helped make American Fool a huge hit, peaking at #1 on Billboard’s album charts. The record would go on to sell five million copies in the US alone.

But the self-reflective songs of American Fool would soon give way to some of the most astute societal observations in pop music.

Write What You Know

What separated John Mellencamp from his contemporaries was his focus on the Midwest. Throughout his career, he never strayed, creatively or physically, from his “small town” of Seymour, Indiana. The heart and soul of the region are part of his biological and creative DNA.

Prior to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the Midwest was at its economic peak, and the middle class was thriving. You can hear Mellencamp’s admiration in the song “The Great Midwest,” from his self-titled 1979 album, John Cougar:

Everything is slower here, everybody’s got a union card
They get up on Sunday and go to church of their choice
Come back home cookout in the backyard

And they call this the Great Midwest
Where the cornfields row and flow
They’re all 5 years ahead of their time
Or 25 behind, I just don’t know

Those people Mellencamp sings about in “The Great Midwest” would soon find themselves at the ass-end of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. In the Midwest, the working middle class was not “lifted up” by the rising tides promised by “Reaganomics.” Quite the contrary.

Through this reckless economic policy, the region imploded as manufacturers shuttered or cut production, and family farms were auctioned off. By 1985, the Midwest had officially begun its decades-long economic descent, reaching its current nadir.

As income inequality grew, largely as a result of “Reaganomics,” John Mellencamp was taking notes and getting angry (he didn’t gain the nickname “Little Bastard” for his cheerful disposition).

Beginning with 1983’s Uh-Huh, Mellencamp produced four albums that capture the impact of “Reaganomics” and its influence on the widening social and economic chasms in America:

• 1983’s Uh-huh

• 1985’s Scarecrow

• 1986’s The Lonesome Jubilee

• 1989’s Big Daddy

Album 1 of 4 — Uh-huh

Despite the album’s blase’ title, Uh-Huh saw Mellencamp beginning to try his hand at more socially conscious songs. After having fought long and hard to achieve the success of American Fool, he was smart and savvy enough to hold his socially conscious ideas close to his chest.

It would be the first two songs on Uh-huh where Mellencamp tipped his hand just a little — “Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses.”

What could initially be heard as a snarky flex (or rebuke) of rock stardom in “Crumblin’ Down,” the first verse ultimately sets Mellencamp’s lyrical agenda for the next six years:

Some people ain’t no damn good
You can’t trust ’em, you can’t love em
No good deed goes unpunished
And I don’t mind being their whipping boy
I’ve had that pleasure for years and years
No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do
Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend the rules
Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall
They’re waiting outside to claim my crumblin’ walls

In 2016, Mellencamp acknowledged that “Crumbin’ Down” is indeed a very political song:

Where “Crumblin’ Down” may have been a veiled introduction to his political leanings, with Uh-Huh’s second single “Pink Houses,” Mellencamp goes all in. Immediately beginning with racial inequality and the subtle acknowledgment of eminent domain and its impact on the less privileged:

Well, there’s a black man with a black cat
Livin’ in a black neighborhood
He’s got an interstate runnin’ through his front yard
You know he thinks he’s got it so good

By the next verse, he addresses the ambivalence and hopelessness that would soon come to define Generation X:

Well, there’s a young man in a T-shirt
Listenin’ to a rock ’n’ roll station
He’s got greasy hair, greasy smile
He says: “Lord, this must be my destination.”

“Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses” are not only the first two singles from the record, but they’re also the first two songs on Uh-Huh. They are about as politically charged as he chose to get at that time. But that would change by 1985’s Scarecrow.

The rest of Uh-Huh finds Mellencamp in familiar lyrical territory. The songs reflect all the things that defined him before the success of American Fool and have come to define him over the years:

• Pugnacious — “Authority Song”

• Reflective — “Warmer Place to Sleep”

• Snark— “Jackie O”

• Playfulness — “Play Guitar”

• Rebellion — “Serious Business”

• Goofy — “Loving Mother For Ya”

• Sensitive — “Golden Gates”

  Uh-Huh, was a solid successor to American Fool, earning solid reviews, peaking at number 9 on Billboard’s album charts and selling over three million copies in the US.

While he may have only dipped his toe in the social commentary water with “Crumblin Down” and “Pink Houses.” The world would soon recognize that John Mellencamp was taking excellent notes as his family, friends, and neighbors in Seymour, Indiana, began to feel the full weight of “Reaganomics.”

Over the years, there have been many jokes made at Mellencamp’s name changes — Johnny Cougar to John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp to his actual name, John Mellencamp. Uh-Huh stands out for the reasons above, but it’s also the first album where he publicly acknowledges his given surname — Mellencamp.

And whatever, call him what you will, Uh-Huh is the beginning of John Mellencamp trying his hand at more politically charged music.

By 1989’s Big Daddy, Mellencamp had proven himself not just a hitmaker, but the most credible musical chronicler of the Midwest’s unraveling.

Coincidentally, or fittingly, 1989 is the same year that Ronald Reagan left office.

Where Uh-Huh hinted at collapse, Scarecrow stared directly at the wreckage. In Part Two, I’ll look at Farm Aid and how Scarecrow turned rural dispossession into chart-topping protest music—and why it remains his most uncompromising statement.

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Thanks to of All The Things She Said for nominating me! It’s an honor to be chosen along with so many great music writers.

I tried to go with my first responses here, so forgive the brevity in some of the answers.

1. What led you to Substack?

   I had grown a little tired of Medium and all the changes they kept going through, and figured Substack might be a better platform. It’s proven to be a wildly different platform, and one that I genuinely enjoy engaging on.

2. What prompted you to start writing about music? (Or whatever your focus is if you don’t write about music)

   I’m not really sure what got me writing about music. I suspect it’s because it is one of the few things that I have very strong thoughts about. Like, why aren’t The Replacements everyone’s favorite band?

3. What is your favorite genre of music?

   Straight up rock and roll - guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. I’m kind of a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy with both my culinary and music likes.

4. What are the top 5 concerts you’ve been to and why?

   The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me Tour. No funny intoxicating story here, they were great… and so loud. To date, the loudest show I have seen.

   Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - The River tour at Madison Square Garden. There is something magical about seeing him play there.

   Pearl Jam - Madison Square Garden 2008. Same reason as seeing Springsteen, and I recall feeling the whole arena shake. You might think that would be unnerving, but it’s really not.

   Soul Aylum - my midwestern roots are showing. Every time I have seen them, they have never disappointed me. The band doesn’t get enough attention.

   One EskimO - some downtown club. Everyone was packed in, just enjoying the show's vibe.

5. What would be your 5 “bucket list” concerts? (This could be from the past or present).

   Led Zeppelin, The Clash, U2 circa 1984/85 (the Bono mullet years), Benny Goodman, and Broken Homes (probably would’ve been the only one there).

6. Where do you listen to music most often, and what is your preferred listening format/method?

   I’d have to say the living room, and it’s a toss-up between vinyl and CD. If I am actively listening, it’s vinyl, and if I am doing something else, it is probably gonna be a CD.

7. What would be your 3 desert island albums?

   Broken Homes - self-titled debut (I never miss an opportunity to champion them).

   Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul - Men Without Women

   R.E.M. - Life’s Rich Pageant

8. What was the first album of your own that you owned?

   I seem to recall purchasing Fleetwood Mac Rumors and the Steve Miller Band Book of Dreams at Target when I was a kid.

9. What was the last album you purchased?

   The Cars - self-titled debut on vinyl. I finished reading the biography and was embarrassed to find out I must’ve sold the album years ago when I replaced all my vinyl with CDs.

10. Do you have a physical music collection? Vinyl, CD, Cassette?

    I have both a vinyl and CD collection.

11. Do you have a favorite Christmas song?

    I do. It’s “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues.

11 Writers (participation is entirely voluntary) - I’m certain some, if not all, have already been nominated, so my apologies for any redundancy.

11 questions

1. How long have you been writing on Substack? And what led you here?

2. What non-music book most shaped the way you listen to albums?

3. What album first made you realize music writing could be an art form in itself?

4. Which current artist (or genre) do you believe is most misunderstood by critics - and why?

5. How has streaming changed the way you evaluate an album’s “impact”?

6. What was the first album you can recall purchasing with your own money?

7. What’s one album you never grow tired of revisiting, and what keeps pulling you back?

8. What is one album you feel has been “abandoned” - in other words, a record that maybe hasn’t gotten the attention that you think it deserves?

9. What’s the most overrated album of the past 20 years?

10. What’s the most memorable live performance you’ve been to, and what made it stand out?

11. Which artist’s catalog rewards deep, long-term listening more than most?

The music industry is loaded with talented women. It always has been. Whether they’re behind the scenes, behind the stage, behind the pen, the motivation, or playing the instruments, they’re ubiquitous.

It’s safe to say that, in one way or another, women have been the driving force for much of… well, for much of music’s history.

It’s also safe to say that, taken as a whole, women have been marginalized and much-maligned… well, for much of music’s history.

We could easily argue that the patriarchal structure of the music business allows only one female Queen at a time, currently Taylor Swift, but that is not the argument here.

Similarly, we could argue about which era of music is the true “golden era” of music. I suspect it would create a rabble of noisy music fans. Ultimately, it’s safe to say that the definition of “golden era” would fall along generational lines.

That being said, the 80s and 90s were genuinely modern music’s heyday.

Concrete Blonde

Concrete Blonde was a three-piece LA-based band led by lead singer Johnette Napolitano. Despite having one of the best voices, male or female, in rock, the closest that she, or the band, could get to entering the court of rock deity was peering through the gate.

The first time I heard Concrete Blonde was also the first time I saw Concrete Blonde. I saw the video for “Still in Hollywood” on MTV,  on whatever “alternative” midnight show was popular at the moment.

I was immediately smitten with the band. It wasn’t just because I found Johnette Napolitano attractive — it’s the dark hair folks… gets me every time. Sure, that was the initial attraction, I’ll cop to that, but that faded by the first chorus.

Christ knows Concrete Blonde, led by lead singer Johnette Napolitano, didn’t fit in with Madonna and whatever other pop pablum that MTV was pumping and dumping on society in the mid to late 80s.

Now my knowledge of female singers at the time was limited to the big names — Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, Heart, Aretha Franklin, Chrissy Hynde, Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Starship, et al.), and there are loads I am forgetting. So my apologies in advance, but I don’t have the bandwidth to troll the deep recesses of my mind trying to recall them.

And female pop singers were primarily ingenues until Madonna started futzing with that paradigm. Of course, there were others before Madonna, but let’s be honest, Madonna achieved what many other women couldn’t. I think it’s worth noting that it’s not that previous artists wouldn’t, but they literally couldn’t (see the last comment about patriarchy). Love her or hate her, what Madonna did was say: “Fuck. That.” and she did it.

As I watched Concrete Blonde and Johnette Napolitano bang out “Still in Hollywood,” it was Napolitano’s voice. That voice! I hadn’t heard anything that grabbed me by the balls like that since I first heard Janis Joplin. But Joplin wasn’t of my generation.

And then Chrissy Hynde, well, she didn’t grab me in the same way — her grab was paired with a more seductive purr (and leather pants).

Napolitano’s energy in “Still in Hollywood” was relentless… and she was playing bass! She had done to me what both Joplin and Hynde did, but it was different. She sounded like Janis Joplin and Chrissie Hynde had a child. I was no longer smitten; by the end of “Still in Hollywood,” I had fallen in love.

[Fun fact: Concrete Blonde covered Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” on 1996’s Recollection: The Best of Concrete Blonde.]

While I knew enough to recognize the song as “punk-ish,” Concrete Blonde had something I had never heard in the punk I had been exposed to — melody, structure, and proper tuning. Aside from The Clash, my feelings about punk were, and remain, that it’s primarily fueled by energy and anger. Punk doesn’t always focus on melody and structure.

Which is fine for some people, and as time has gone by, I’ve come to appreciate punk, but I love me some good melody.

In addition to “Still in Hollywood” sounding, well, just different, the video itself was also different. The video had a punk DIY vibe.

My visual sensibility and understanding were beginning to percolate, so the black-and-white, grainy video with a jerky camera, quick cuts of the band playing live, interspersed with all kinds of Hollywood landmarks, spoke to me. It had a real Jim Jarmusch feel to it.

From my Midwestern sofa, the video seemed arty — at least the kind of arty that resonated with me — accessible instead of weird and alienating.

“Still in Hollywood” was on Concrete Blonde’s self-titled debut, released in 1986. The band was Johnette Napolitano on bass and vocals, James Mankey on guitars, and drummer Harry Rushakoff.

The song begins as if we’re listening to the band rehearse. The chatter and then the instrument plug-in flowing right into the song is an effect rarely used and even more rarely successful.

Concrete Blonde was produced by Earle Mankey, a member of the seminal band Sparks, brother of Concrete Blonde guitarist James, and producer of a slew of LA-based bands — including The Runaways. It’s his production on this record that would help shape the band's sound.

His production gave the record a “big” sound, almost like it was recorded in a high school gymnasium. This sound works to the band’s advantage, in particular on songs like “Still in Hollywood,” “Dance Along the Edge,” and “Your Haunted Head.”

The rest of the album highlights the band's lyrical and sonic diversity. It includes a ballad — in as much as one can be called that — “Song for Kim (She Said),” an instrumental “True II” (which is just the song “True” without vocals, but still effective), and even a faithful cover of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.”

By and large, this debut album has Concrete Blonde staying in its lane of rock, garage, and a dash of punk… they’re just doing it better than some of their contemporaries, who were primarily men.

With 11 songs, Concrete Blonde clocks in at about 38:00 minutes, and in the era of cassette tapes, that was the sweet spot. A remastered version from 2004 includes a 12th song, bringing the total runtime to about 43:00.

And as if having a great voice and playing a mean bass wasn’t enough, she was also the primary songwriter. Today, we may read that and shrug; however, I assure you that women band leaders like that in the 80s, signed to a major label (okay, mini-major label) was rare… not unicorn rare, but rare.

Concrete Blonde garnered some worthy buzz at the time. Not just because they had a great sound, great songs, great energy, and seemingly a shit ton of attitude, OR that they were led by a female bass-playing lead singer and songwriter — those were many of the reasons they got noticed.

But what gave them the ultimate seal of approval while still keeping their street cred was being signed to I.R.S. Records.

[Fun fact: It would be label mate Michael Stipe of R.E.M. who suggested the name Concrete Blonde because of the contrast between their hard rock music and introspective lyrics — a tip of the hat to you, Mr. Stipe.]

Despite the label’s influence, the I.R.S. catalog and panache, it was limited to only a few gold and platinum records — The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat and Vacation, The Raw & the Cooked by Fine Young Cannibals, and every album of original music released by R.E.M. on the label:

• Murmur

• Reckoning

• Fables of the Reconstruction

• Life’s Rich Pageant

• Document

Including gold certification for Concrete Blonde’s third album, 1990’s Bloodletting.

The slog for Concrete Blonde to get to that 1990 gold album wasn’t an easy one… but it was a famous Australian band who astutely noted that it was “a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll.”

In 1988, the band released Free, a solid successor to their first record. The album leads off with the explosive “God is a Bullet.” As a band from Los Angeles, the song ostensibly addresses the escalating gang violence, which was approaching its apogee at that point.

Through a modern lens, though, it’s almost too prescient:

They’re gonna call me sir they’ll all stop picking on me
Well I’m a high school grad I’m over 5 foot 3
I’ll get a badge and a gun and I’ll join the P.D.
They’ll see

Then, in 1990, came Bloodletting. This would garner the band’s only Top 20 hit in the United States, “Joey” (peaking at #1 on the Modern Rock Charts).

In her book Rough Mix, Johnette Napolitano mentioned that “Joey” was written about her relationship with Marc Moreland. The song serves as a nice bookend to “(You’re the Only One) Can Make Me Cry” off their debut.

The two songs serve as a seven-minute run-through of a relationship. “(You’re the Only One) Who Can Make Me Cry” marks the beginning of a relationship, and “Joey” is the song in which she turns her back and walks away from it. Not because she wants to, but because she has to. Sometimes, the last thing you want to do is walk away, and yet, the only thing you can do:

Thematically, the idea of having to turn your back on someone you love resonates universally,  and it is that universality that explains why the song was a hit and helped drive Bloodletting to be their best-selling album.

Right around the same time Concrete Blonde was getting some success with “Joey” and Bloodletting, Johnette Napolitano got a call to work with The Replacements for their final album All Shook Down… which was a Replacements album in name only (a story for another time).

Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg had written a song called “My Little Problem” and always intended it to be a duet with a woman. Wisely, Napolitano was his first choice, and, luckily, she was available and agreed.

“My Little Problem” remains one of All Shook Down’s highlights. However, the recording didn’t go so well. Folklore is such that the recording forced Napolitano to pull one of the most legendary Irish exits in rock.

After being cajoled to re-record her vocal part repeatedly, she left, saying she had to get cigarettes.

“It was done, but Paul wanted to do it again and again, and I ended up saying I’m going to get some cigarettes, and then I didn’t come back, famously I guess — sorry! But because it was done.” — Johnette Napolitano.

To paraphrase New Jersey's poet laureate: she “went out for a ride and she never went back.”

Concrete Blonde followed Bloodletting with Walking in London, but failed to replicate their commercial success. However, they did increase their fan base to include showrunner Shawn Ryan (The Shield), who would end up using the Walking in London song “…Long Time Ago” to play over the ending credits of The Shield’s series finale — a sweet pole position for a song, ask Journey or Badfinger.

Concrete Blonde would release two more albums — Mexican Moon in 1993 and Concrete Blonde y Los Illegals in 1997 — before hanging it up.

And in the tradition of every great rock and roll band, they reunited in the early aughts, releasing Group Therapy in 2002 and Mojave in 2004; however, the band has been silent since 2012 and, for all intents and purposes, is finished.

Of course, there have been live albums and greatest hits packages in between, but (at least to date), Concrete Blonde has released eight studio albums, which is a pretty good career in music by any measure. More impressive is the band's commitment to excellence and the fact that Johnette Napolitano kept her lyrics and voice consistently incisive.

Sure, once in a while, you’ll hear “Joey,” and it’ll take you back. But Concrete Blonde shouldn’t just be considered an oldies act. Just because “Joey” may now fall into the “classic rock” paradigm, it doesn’t mean it is. Give the song a good listen; it sounds just as fresh and relevant today. Then go back and listen to Concrete Blonde, and that too will sound just as good now as it did then.

If you’ve never heard Concrete Blonde or anything besides “Joey,” you should, but consider yourself warned.

It’s a shame that not only one of the greatest female voices in rock but one of the greatest voices in rock and roll as a whole is mainly remembered for one song,  albeit a great song. But even worse, she and Concrete Blonde may be being overlooked.

Creating a body of work that transcends decades of shifting commercial tastes without losing any of its initial impact and power is no small task.

Concrete Blonde may never have chased the spotlight; they just kept telling their truth. The world catches up with the truth eventually.

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Over the past 3+ years, I’ve been blessed to collaborate with many people who have helped shape the show, and I will be forever grateful to them. I’ve also had the good fortune to speak with tremendously talented musicians who graciously gave up their time to talk about their careers and music. To say that it’s been rewarding, exciting, and fun would be an understatement.

The fact of the matter is that the podcasting landscape has changed, and even though Center Stage was seriously niche, I could feel the crunch. And it’s not that I don’t feel what we do has value, quite the contrary.

We’ve produced over 150 episodes of good, sometimes excellent, content, and I am proud of that. I want to think there have been more bangers than not.

• What does it look like moving forward? Picture me shrugging my shoulders as I say, “I dunno.”

• How long will this sabbatical be? Picture me shrugging my shoulders again and saying, “I dunno.”

Life has gotten a bit busier in the last few weeks, and I suspect it will continue to get busier and a touch more unpredictable. Since that’s the stuff that keeps the lights on at Thunderlove Manor, it has to take precedence.

But the fact is, Center Stage will remain a living, breathing thing. In the past, I’ve done a few episodes where I’ve used interviews of artists to shape a particular episode (Buffalo Tom and Bill Hicks), so I might do a one-off like that, but as far as a week-to-week show, that’s on ice for the time being.

I feel there is value in highlighting forgotten, overlooked, or newer artists and bringing them into the cultural conversation. While I am certain we weren’t the only podcast to do this, Center Stage was the only one I was aware of that worked with the artists we did.

I’m a big advocate for podcasting. I think it is genuinely the last bastion of unrestricted free speech.

For me, most of my information comes from various podcasts because they can go deeper into a story than any newscast can. And I like to think that’s what we did, took things a little deeper from time to time.

Do I think we’ve reached peak podcast? No, but the market is saturated with people who have built-in audiences and/or significant financial backing. It’s getting harder and harder to rise above the noise, leaving little room for us scrappy indie podcasts that want to make something informative and cool.

And then there is this push for video, which I don’t fully understand. I don’t get it for reasons I won’t bore you with. More than a few artists we spoke to appreciated that Center Stage was audio only (we did have video on to make it friendlier).

If I had my druthers and an endless bankroll, I’d turn the Center Stage video podcast into an animated series. That would be more interesting than three or four talking heads. For me, audio and video are two separate media and should be treated as such.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank and Geoff Calhoun, who split mic duty with me. Their contributions were what made the machine move. And I have to give a proper shout-out to , who has been an incredible stalwart of the show. He helped keep the show going when I seriously considered hanging it up. A special hat tip to for his consistent championing and support.

So what do the next 150 episodes of the Center Stage podcast look like? I dunno, but gird your loins, it’ll happen.

With a name like Center Stage, I have more latitude in the types of guests I can welcome. They do not need to be a musician, which opens up more opportunities.

Thank you to everyone who has listened to and/or read these missives on Substack. I’ll continue to write about an abandoned album from time to time and other music-related things here (and maybe try to figure out how Notes works) until the podcast picks back up.

After years apart, the duo decided to start making music a few years ago. There was only one concern… they lived miles from one another.

Well, maybe not unique in this day and age, and in a post-COVID world, but what is unique is the quality of the music they’re creating under the moniker of Red Rose Way.

Red Rose Way is an emerging alternative rock band that feels both classic and contemporary. Drawing influences from alt-rock and writing with timeless pop craftsmanship, and a dash of power-pop thrown in for extra flavor, Red Rose Way creates music that connects instantly, with heartfelt lyrics delivered with conviction and melodic power.

Thanks to I got the opportunity to speak with Misha and Tony about the formation of Red Rose Way, their process, and their future.

(NOTE: An earlier version of this post mistakenly listed Misha Feldmann as Milos Feldman; our apologies to Misha, and the mistake has been corrected.)

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yeah, if you’re reading this, you may already know that author Janovitz is the guitarist and lead singer of Buffalo Tom. If you don’t, there you go. This is worth mentioning because, like The Cars, he is from Boston and brings a musician's ear to his wordy pursuits. His musicianship comes into clear focus when he describes in detail how The Cars recorded their debut album.

As I read it, I found the level of detail annoying because I am not a musician, so much of the jargon and equipment talk was lost on me. As I moved on in the book, he tempers this considerably when describing subsequent records, so I presume the detail is to provide context for how The Cars achieved their unique sound.

In addition to many of those who were associated with the band, Janovitz had the participation of the three surviving members, keyboardist Greg Hawkes, guitarist Elliot Easton, and drummer David Robinson (bass player and singer Ben Orr died in 2000, and guitarist and singer Ric Ocasek passed in 2019). While the three share mostly the same story, there are enough instances throughout the book where one remembers a situation, one doesn’t, and one kind of does.

The book goes to great lengths to allow each of the surviving members of The Cars to tell their story, providing insight into the band’s career from three different perspectives.

Before settling into The Cars, Ocasek and Orr had a few bands. With each new incarnation and rebrand, they seemed to accumulate the members who would eventually become The Cars. Janovitz pays just enough attention to this backstory to keep you interested and reading. If for no other reason, then you know what awaits on the other side.

While Hawkes, Easton, and Robinson are present to tell their stories, the book includes supporting and, in some cases, conflicting narratives from various people in The Cars’ orbit.

By way of proxy, it’s Ocasek’s last wife, former supermodel Paulina Porizkova, who tries to provide insight into his thinking, and one of Orr’s ex-wives and a former lover, who sheds light on where Orr was mentally at different periods of The Cars’ career.

There are a couple of conspicuous omissions from the book. But I am not sure how much context Ric Ocasek’s first ex-wife and his children would add to the story of The Cars, so I get it. And for all I know, they all may have refused participation (based on reading the book, it's a high probability).

It’s funny to think about how big a band The Cars were. Even as a young kid in the Midwest, I was hyper aware of this quirky band that I somehow knew was from Boston. Within the context of the book, that regionality is vital because The Cars were as much about Boston as Boston was about The Cars. Even after their success, it would be years before any of them moved away from the Boston area.

It’s no secret that the band, much like its music, was fraught with tension. These weren’t five childhood friends who started a band (although Ocasek and Orr did have a long friendship); these are five guys who came together and discovered they made a unique sound. A sound that seemed to resonate with people. It was also a sound that the members’ solo efforts, in particular Ocasek’s, could not duplicate.

The Cars have sold around 23 million albums worldwide. Based on the band’s popularity and lasting influence, I’ll cop to the fact that I thought it would’ve been twice that. It’s still a boatload of albums over what was ostensibly a pretty short career, nine years and six original full-length studio albums.

I exclude Greatest Hits and 2011’s Move Like This because it wasn’t really the full five-piece band, and besides, even the band wasn’t entirely pleased with the album. Besides, who among us even remembers that they released an album in 2011? Wait, I forgot the audience here. You may recall it, but when was the last time you listened to it?

What Janovitz does is give each of the albums its own chapter. What makes that interesting is that you can see both how a band functions and how it deteriorates. But this isn’t a Behind the Music type of book. Well, it is, just with a shitload more context and texture.

If you’re looking for a salacious read about success, drugs, and groupies, this ain’t it. The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told is a researched, almost academic, and well-thought-out book. Of course, all of those things are mentioned (it was the 80s), but only in passing. Janovitz highlights Orr’s alcohol abuse later in his life, but it’s more observant than accusatory or scandal-ridden.

The only truly scandalous parts of The Cars' story are Ric Ocasek’s serious control issues and perhaps the fact that Benjamin Orr and Ocasek may not have been the best partners for a romantic relationship.

Bill Janovitz does a remarkable thing with The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told - he doesn’t mythologize The Cars; he humanizes them, warts and all.

Such was the case when Pete Droge recently stopped by Thunderlove Studio to discuss his life, career, and new album, Fade Away Blue, a collection of deeply personal songs.

Pete Droge's songs are wry, tuneful, and often surprisingly tender, adult pop without the smarm.

This made Hollywood take notice. In addition to his scoring work, his tracks, such as the aforementioned “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself),” appeared in Dumb and Dumber. He also wrote the title song for the movie Beautiful Girls, “Two of the Lucky Ones” from Zombieland, and contributed “Small Time Blues” to the film Almost Famous, where he even managed to get a little screen time.

Droge has also been a collaborator (with The Thorns, featuring Matthew Sweet and Shawn Mullins), a producer, and a general musical handyman, staying busy even when out of the spotlight. With his new album Fade Away Blue, he returns to the spotlight and proves, decades later, that he’s still at the top of his game. Droge continues to write with the kind of plainspoken emotional clarity that outlasts trends.

And there’s a lot of emotional clarity on Fade Away Blue.

I don’t want to give away too much in the preamble here, but Fade Away Blue is a deeply personal album about dealing with some of his experiences around his adoption, growing up, his chronic fatigue syndrome, and depression.

Lest you be concerned, Pete is much better now.

As a bit of an album sequencing nerd, Fade Away Blue is sequenced to tell a story, almost like a musical documentary. I won’t reveal too much here, but we covered a lot of ground in a short time, and our conversation was both candid and upbeat.

During our conversation, I forgot to ask about upcoming dates, so if you are in the Seattle and Portland areas, you can check Pete out here:

October 10, Friday - The Triple Door at 7:30 PM
Seattle, WA

October 11, Saturday- Aladdin Theater at 7:00 PM
Portland, OR

October 12, Sunday - Music Millennium at 3:00 PM
Portland, OR

October 13, Monday - Pete Droge on KINK fm at 12:00 PM
Portland, OR

October 16, Thursday - Pete Droge on Live Wire Radio at 7:30 PM
Portland, OR

October 18 Saturday - Pete Droge at The Frosty Badger at 7:00 PM
Ontario, OR

Oct 19 Sunday - Pete Droge at Churchill School at 6:30 PM
Baker City, OR

TICKETS VIA PETE’S WEBSITE

LINKS

Pete Droge on Bandcamp

Pete Droge on Substack

Pete Droge on YouTube

Pete Droge on Spotify

Pete Droge on IG

Sam Phillips’s The Indescribable Wow isn’t just an album; it’s a jailbreak. After shedding the Leslie Phillips moniker that she used for her four Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) albums (which netted her one Grammy Nomination), she adapted the name Sam. It turns out she had also grown tired of the derisive “Christian Cyndi Lauper” label that was attached to her.

Signing with Virgin Records, she again partnered with T-Bone Burnett, who had produced her last CCM album, The Turning.

Oh, sure, now Burnett is a legend, but in the late ‘80s, he was still hustling like a man possessed, both as a musician and a budding producer. It would be in his vintage-pop workshop that he helped Phillips transition to the secular world. A world that would allow her to trade hymns for hooks and sermons for sighs.

Phillips’ secular debut, The Indescribable Wow, produced by Burnett, is part Beatles and part Brill Building. The songs with the orchestrations of Van Dyke Parks help give the record a dash of Burt Bacharach, for good measure.

There is an attention to detail on this album that adds a layer of texture to the songs themselves. They’re subtle but present. This texturing would soon become something Burnett would be known for: his ability to capture the essence of the artist.

The resulting album is a smart, self-conscious record that wears its Beatlesque ambition like a new coat. The Indescribable Wow sonically fits the mold of ‘80s CCM, but what it really does is introduce and shine with flashes of the restless artist Sam Phillips would become.

The album opens with Phillips sharing two strong statements, “I Don’t Want To Fall In Love” and “I Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye To You.” Don’t be fooled by the playful vocal stylings of Phillips; these songs, like most of the album, are hand grenades designed as little pop ditties. Her voice could make it easy to overlook the depth and power in the lyrics, which are often both beautiful and potent.

Phillips eschews typical song structure in favor of something more closely resembling poetry.

The key ingredient to any good pop song is relatability, and “I Don’t Know How to Say Good-Bye to You” has that tenfold. If you’ve ever been on either side of a break-up, then you know the sentiment of not wanting to, but having to say good-bye.

Sometimes you don’t want to say goodbye, but they do.
Sometimes you want to say goodbye, but they don’t.
Sometimes you have to say goodbye to save each other.

The song “Holding On to the Earth” recasts faith as secular yearning, and “I Can’t Stop Crying” almost convinces you that it’s fun to hurt so much.

“Remorse” is one of the more powerful songs, and while it’s open to several interpretations, I read it as a California noir tragedy.

The setting is the late ’50s, somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. A small house, and in the kitchen sits a young couple. The kitchen is loaded with Formica and bright, happy colors. The man sits leaning on his elbows as the woman stands, leaning against the counter, looking down at her husband. The heaviness in the air is palpable as the young couple comes to terms with the man's indiscretion.

They made something poignant and profound while making it sound so bright and simple. The songs shine, grin, and then sucker punch you with lines that stick like glass in the skin.

Critic Jason Ankeny called her “a pop marvel”. He said that the songs on the album “conjure the spirit of prime girl-group-era pop, but her mature, pointed lyrics — largely devoted to sophisticated dissections of modern relationships — shrug off such easy comparisons.”

The Indescribable Wow doesn’t shimmer because it tries to transcend; it resonates because of its craft. Sam Phillips stepped out of CCM and into herself, and in doing so, she gave us a debut that still feels startling, confident, and alive.

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Drummer/composer Gabriel Rowland and singer-songwriter Victor “Bad Vic” Benavides started the band in 2017, and what began as a nod to old-school Chicano soul has evolved into something bigger - a little movement called souldies.

It’s rare these days to catch something early enough before it evolves into something larger, so we were lucky to have a conversation with Los Yesterdays when we did.

Their 2024 record Frozen in Time plays like a love letter to Motown, Latin soul, and Philly R&B, but with barrio fingerprints all over it. Horns, Spanish guitar, and the gentle scraping of a güiro (among other percussion instruments) lend texture; harp, piano, and a slow, emotional vocal delivery give it heart.

Their music feels rooted: stories of longing, love lost, memories of cruising and porch lights, barrio life, and family. The imagery is vivid - summers in South-Central or East L.A., kids playing on blacktop, vinyl spinning in garages, communal heartbreak in whispered Spanish and English.

You don’t have to be Chicano to feel the feels with Los Yesterdays, but it helps if you’ve ever grown up in a place where music blared from garage speakers all summer.

Songs like “Nobody’s Clown” reminded the world that heartbreak never really goes out of style. Los Yesterdays carry that “old soul” warmth in service to romantic heartbreak, yearning, and cultural memory.

The trick Los Yesterdays pull off is simple but rare: they honor the past without embalming it. This isn’t retro cosplay - it’s alive. Frozen in Time might sound vintage, but it sweats, sighs, and breaks your heart right here in the present.

For fans of classic soul, Latin influence, and deeply felt nostalgia, this is a band that embodies both tribute and originality. Los Yesterdays don’t imitate the past - they extend it into the present.

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Coming off the heels of the multi-platinum Leftoverture, this would be their fifth album in three years. Consider that for a moment: three albums in five years is an impressive output, especially for a band known for its progressive rock tendencies. By way of comparison, contemporaries Genesis released three albums during the same period (four if you count the double album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway as two) and Yes released two albums.

Just as they had with the previous album, Point of No Return finds the band continuing to grow and fire on all cylinders. This is a record very far from the, at times, bloviating masturbatory world of trad progressive rock. Of the ten songs on PONR, only two clock in at over five minutes; it’s clear that the band had found a more compact voice.

The taut and self-referential “Point of No Return” is a standout track. In hindsight, it could be seen almost as an allegory for the band’s career. Interestingly, even though the band continued for years afterward, a documentary about the band Kansas: Miracles Out of Nowhere conspicuously stops after PONR.

All three songs chosen as singles, “Point of No Return”, “Dust in the Wind”, and “Portrait (He Knew)”, are the standout tracks. They harken back to a different era in music, one where singles got chosen by gut instinct, merit, and, given the era, maybe a fair amount of cocaine, rather than based on marketing PowerPoint presentations and ones and zeros.

“Dust in the Wind” is the track we all know. Like other great riffs (I’m looking at you, Joe Walsh), this one began as a finger exercise for songwriter Kerry Livgren, who wanted to learn fingerpicking. It was at his wife’s urging that he brought it to the band. And the rest is history.

Given Livgren’s spirituality, it’s a safe bet that “Dust in the Wind” has its origins rooted in some religious setting. It could be:

“A meditation on mortality and the inevitability of death, the lyrical theme bears a striking resemblance to the biblical passages Genesis 3:19 ("...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.") and Ecclesiastes 3:20 ("All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.").”

The third single, “Portrait (He Knew),” was about Albert Einstein. Lyricist Kerry Livgren is said to have written the lyrics while undergoing a conversion to Christianity.

While the version on the record is indeed about Einstein, it’s not much of a stretch to see religiosity in it. So much so that Livgren later re-recorded the song with his Christian rock band and changed the lyrics to be about Jesus. I can’t profess to have heard that version, but the version about Einstein is an album highlight.

Make no mistake, PONR, while perhaps not traditional prog rock, the record is prog adjacent. The instrumental “The Spider,” penned by lead singer and keyboard player Steve Walsh, is a track that you’ll thank for its brevity, although it does serve as a quirky segue into “Portrait (He Knew)”.

Side two is where Kansas stretches their prog muscles—sometimes effectively, sometimes indulgently. Some of the songs seem longer than their run time. Clocking in at over seven minutes, the album’s closer, the Livgren-written “Hopelessly Human,” could test your patience.

I won’t profess to be a huge fan of prog-rock, or even art rock, and I have a hard time ascribing either label to the band. For my money, they’re simply a rock band, albeit one that is prog-adjacent. Considering the radio-friendly length of the tracks, it may be that they were aiming for that terrain.

For all the prog comparisons to Yes or Genesis, Kansas always felt different. They were Midwestern rockers who happened to lean arty, not lofty British stars. Robert Christgau dismissed them as “dumber, slower, and fatally unconvincing,” but that misses the point.

Point of No Return might live in Leftoverture’s sales shadow, but it’s Kansas at their sharpest - ambitious, most accessible, and undeniably Midwestern. Proof that prog rock could be radio-friendly without losing its soul.

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