The Untold Truth Of John Mellencamp

According to his memoir Sex, Drums, Rock 'n' Roll,John Mellencamp's longtime drummer Kenny Aronoff said that his boss built a home studio in Indiana and kept his side musicians "on a retainer so he could call us at any time and ask us to come down to record a song he had just written." A

According to his memoir Sex, Drums, Rock 'n' Roll, John Mellencamp's longtime drummer Kenny Aronoff said that his boss built a home studio in Indiana and kept his side musicians "on a retainer so he could call us at any time and ask us to come down to record a song he had just written." A random call to hit the studio for a few hours was nothing like the schedule Mellencamp instituted in the lead-up to the recording of the 1980 album Nothing Matters and What If It Did? According to Aronoff, the band worked on a strict rehearsal schedule: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., a break of two hours, then more practice from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., five days a week. For his 1985 album Scarecrow, Mellencamp again gave his musicians a big work load. According to Creem (via Rock's Backpages), he wanted the record to have '60s rock n' roll feel, so he made his musicians study about 100 vintage songs so as to learn them "almost mathematically verbatim." 

Mellencamp also tried to control how his band members cut loose. They played football in a regular game Mellencamp called the MFL for "Mellencamp Football League," although Aronoff said the other musicians called it the "Mandatory Football League" because they had to play. While it was intended to be a flag football thing, it descended into "tackle without pads," and Aronoff recounts that band members frequently hurt their "arms, wrists, fingers, ankles, or knees."

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