When I objected it to it, he said, 'Well, either you're going to go for it, or we’re not going to put the record out.' So that was what I had to do. I was totally unaware of it until it showed up on the album jacket. I went to New York and everybody said, 'You sound like a hillbilly.' And I said, 'Well, I am.' So that's where he came up with that name. Mellencamp confessed in a 2005 interview: "That (name) was put on me by some manager. Mellencamp reluctantly agreed, but the album was a complete failure, selling only 12,000 copies. DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, Chestnut Street Incident, a collection of covers and a handful of original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, suggesting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market. Music career Performing as Johnny Cougar and John Cougar (1976–1982) Īfter about 18 months of traveling back and forth from Indiana to New York City in 19, Mellencamp finally found someone receptive to his music and image in Tony DeFries of MainMan Management. At this time, Mellencamp, who had given up drugs and alcohol for good before graduating from Vincennes University, decided to pursue a career in music and traveled to New York City in an attempt to land a record contract. Upon graduating from Vincennes University in 1974, Mellencamp played in a couple of local bands, including the aforementioned glitter-band Trash, which was named after a New York Dolls song, and he later got a job in Seymour installing telephones. There would be four or five days like that when I would be completely gone." I would lie there, listening to Roxy Music, right next to the record player so I wouldn't have to get up to flip the record over. During this time he experimented with drugs and alcohol, stating in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview, "When I was high on pot, it affected me so drastically that when I was in college there were times when I wouldn't get off the couch. Mellencamp attended Vincennes University, a two-year college in Vincennes, Indiana, starting in 1972. His daughter Michelle became a mother at age 19, making Mellencamp a grandfather at 37. He eloped with his pregnant girlfriend Priscilla Esterline at the age of 18 and became a father in December 1970, six months after he graduated from high school. He formed his first band, Crepe Soul, at the age of 14 and later played in the local bands Trash, Snakepit Banana Barn and the Mason Brothers. He was born with spina bifida, for which he had corrective surgery as an infant.
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