Re: NBC Rank Top Mellencamp Albums
- From: jauzins <josh.auzins@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:11:05 -0700 (PDT)
Let me preface this by saying that I used to be a huge Cougar fan, but
that tailed off for me in the mid/late 90s as Bruce and others took
over. I still check out his albums, though I haven't had a chance
(yet) to hear the new one. I also have a penchant for his older stuff
and once shelled out big bucks for a vinyl copy "A Biography" on eBay,
his third album which was only released in the UK/Australia. 25+
years later we finally got that one released here.
My top five (no order):
Nothing Matters and What If It Did (vastly underrated in my opinion)
Scarecrow
The Lonesome Jubilee
John Cougar (this may acutally be my #1)
American Fool (his last album before he knew he was good, so this is
the last of his overy brash material, which I like)
And you won't go wrong with:
Big Daddy (his folkiest album from his high quality 80s)
Whenever We Wanted (his guitar album)
Uh-huh (3 big MTV hits on this one really cemented his stardom)
Rough Harvest (nice collection of retakes and some hard to find b-
sides)
I'm enough of a nut that I can even enjoy Chestnut Street Incident,
The Kid Inside and especially the above mentioned A Biography.
I can also recommend a couple of top notch boots. I got these in the
days when we would send an extraordinary amount of cash to strange
addresses in Germany and hope that you didn't just flush your money
down the toilet (or buy "Live in Troy"). I come back to these
regularly. I would assume that these are available these days in the
usual places like DIME.
- Lincoln, NB 1982 - sourced from a radio broadcast, so this has
stellar sound. The band just rocks. Only 10 songs here, but they are
blistering. The opening two-fer of "30 Days in the Hole" followed by
an excellent "Ain't Even Done With The Night" will get you up off your
feet, and it never lets up from there. Even "This Time" is turned
around from a ballad to an up tempo rocker.
- Bloomington, IN 1984(or 85?) - Not sure on the year of this. My disc
("Noisy and Violent") says '85 but there is no Scarecrow material
performed. John "warms up" with 4 killer covers, and throws in a
Richard Thompson song later on in the set. Again, great sound on this
one as it was professionally recorded (the live b-side of Pretty
Ballerina is from this show). 16 tracks overall and lots of songs from
Uh-huh are done as if they are still new and fresh since, well, they
were. They even do "Jackie O"!
Both of these shows feature a different kind of Mellencamp than what I
experienced through boots of his later years. I think it was around
the Lonesome Jubilee Tour that his concerts started to turn into
Greatest Hits shows. Since I tend to prefer the 70s and earlier 80s
material anyways these are two of the ones that I reach for often.
PS - I'm still waiting for a recording of that John-Bruce duet of Like
a Rolling Stone from LA (5/26/1988 according to Brucebase) to surface!
.
- References:
- NBC Rank Top Mellencamp Albums
- From: Peter
- NBC Rank Top Mellencamp Albums
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