00:00:42.000I remember when they were illegal in New York.
00:00:45.000I went to Connecticut to get my first tattoo.
00:00:48.000Yeah, I didn't know it was illegal, but I met this guy in L.A., and he worked at Sunset, you know, where the Hyatt house is, and there was a tattoo parlor right across the street.
00:02:01.000Well, I was at a, the first time I saw somebody do heroin was I was in college, and there was a place called Bull Island that tried to imitate Woodstock.
00:02:15.000And me and my then-wife and my kid, my little girl, and my roommate who lived with us, we're just walking down and we see this guy shooting up.
00:02:29.000So we just thought, well, we'll watch.
00:02:33.000Because he was just sitting right there.
00:02:35.000I mean, there was like 200,000 people there.
00:04:10.000couldn't whip anybody but i loved the contact and the the rush of like you know starting the fight But so anyway, I was in college and my roommate and I went to this downtown bar, which we'd never been to.
00:04:34.000And I sat at the bar, and I would start these fights.
00:08:14.000Well, when you were singing songs like Jack and Diane, it's like I was kind of realizing as I was a very young guy listening to those great songs that there's going to be a, like, this is a weird time in life, and there's going to be a time where you're going to look back on this, and it's probably one of the best times of your life, but even though it doesn't feel like it, it felt, you know, it felt confusing and weird.
00:08:42.000And I remember thinking at the time, like, my God, like, is this as good as it gets?
00:08:47.000You know, some people look back on this weird, confusing time of adolescence as the happiest moments of their life.
00:08:55.000I'm like, I can't wait to get the fuck out of this time of my life.
00:08:59.000And it's like, you know, you were singing from a position of like an everyman position of, you know, you were singing the star.
00:10:27.000So, you know, we're only on this earth for a few fucking minutes.
00:10:32.000Quit feeling sorry for yourself and quit being confused and accept your responsibilities and try to, you know, maintain some humility, which was a million miles away from me spitting on people.
00:10:46.000What didn't you enjoy about being this enormous rock star in the early days of MTV?
00:10:53.000I mean, you were a rock star when it became a totally different thing because it was like this visual thing that was in everyone's household now.
00:11:00.000It wasn't as simple as, no, you were on the tonight show and you would sing this musical segment and people would have to go see you live to go see you perform.
00:11:08.000Well, I know you got to see guys in rock bands were their album covers.
00:11:14.000You know, you would go to a record store and file through the records and if you liked the way a band looked, you would buy the record.
00:15:13.000Well, they have to cut your head off for starters.
00:15:18.000You know, they had to cut my head and lay it open to get to my spine.
00:15:24.000And then they would push each individual nerve ending back down into my spine, drain the fluid off, sew it back up, and make sure that everything was working.
00:15:41.000And they told my parents, you know, look, here he is.
00:15:46.000He's probably going to die, get encephalitis, and his head's going to fill up with water.
00:15:53.000We don't anticipate him living much more than six or seven months.
00:16:00.000And I was, fuck, I think I was in fifth grade.
00:16:05.000I didn't even know I'd had the operation, and some kid in my class said, hey, Mallenkamp, what's that big scar on the back of your neck?
00:20:55.000So I want to spend the last couple years of my life with my boys who are little teeny guys, which I want to tell you a story about them and you.
00:21:07.000And so I got to actually kind of not be in the music business, which pleased me.
00:21:19.000How old were you when you had your heart attack?
00:24:16.000But there's a supplement, like an over-the-counter supplement that's supposed to be able to eliminate arterial plaque in a very profound way that they're just starting to realize.
00:25:56.000I was always borderline and I'm still borderline and this was she get type 1 or type 2 Well, she started out with two, and then she paid no attention to it, wouldn't take her medicine.
00:26:08.000We'd drive by Krispy Kreme, and she'd go, don't kill your dad.
00:27:26.000Natokinase and arterial plaque reduction.
00:27:28.000Multiple clinical trials provide evidence that natokinase, an enzyme derived from fermented Japanese food NATO, has a positive effect on arthuriosclerosis, hardening and narrowing of the arteries due to plaque buildup.
00:28:08.000Well, a bunch of monsters decided to make more money, and the way they make more money is to throw a bunch of preservatives and bullshit and stuff into food so that it keeps their shelf life as long as possible.
00:28:19.000You've heard those stories about taking a hamburger that you would buy at a very popular store and just putting it in a box and leaving it for five years, and five years later, it's...
00:28:57.000I don't know what the fuck's in there, but it's not regular ice cream.
00:29:00.000The Burger King or the McDonald's hamburger thing is nuts.
00:29:04.000Because what is the longest that that guy, there's one guy that's had one on a shelf at his house for, God, I want to say it's close to 20 years or something crazy like that.
00:30:40.000Because it took a long, it took until Dick Gregory brought the Zapruder film on the Geraldo Rivera show, which was, I think it was 12 years after Kennedy's assassination, that people realized that he probably had gotten shot from the front.
00:30:56.000Because his head went back into the left.
00:32:09.000It's just hard to believe anything that anybody says because everybody's spinning everything in such a way that it's just like for their purposes.
00:32:33.000I mean, I don't know what it was like when you were a kid, but when I was a kid, there wasn't this polarization between people that were conservative and people that were liberal.
00:32:44.000Like, you could hang out and talk to each other.
00:32:48.000They just thought the other person was a fool for having a different opinion than them.
00:32:51.000But there wasn't hate like there is today.
00:32:54.000Well, here's the way you got to look at it.
00:32:58.000This is that when you used to vote, you would go inside a place and they would shut the curtains and you would vote and that was your fucking business.
00:33:44.000I mean, in the 60s, when I was a hippie, I mean, people think that this is like really bad.
00:33:58.000No, it was really bad when fucking Russia had missiles in Cuba, and it was really bad when kids with long hair were getting shot at Kent State.
00:34:10.000I mean, it was really the separation of adults and kids.
00:34:16.000You know, there was a change that was happening.
00:34:31.000Well, the change was because it was the first generation that realized that the war that they were being sold was bullshit.
00:34:37.000You know, the people that were involved in World War I, World War II, they thought they were stopping the world from an evil dictator taking over and just ruining the world.
00:36:28.000So you think that if they had just spread the wealth a little bit, that that would not have happened and slavery would have still continued?
00:37:21.000Abraham Lincoln never personally owned slaves.
00:37:23.000This is according to Perplexity, which is our AI sponsor, which is always very accurate.
00:37:31.000Either before or during his presidency, according to mainstream historical scholarship, claims that he had slaves through inheritance or marriage come from fringe or highly disputed sources and are not accepted by most professional historians.
00:38:30.000Some modern writers and websites argue Lincoln inherited or ordered.
00:38:34.000This is where the idea Lincoln had slaves came from.
00:38:37.000Websites argued Lincoln inherited or ordered the sale of slaves via the Todd estate, but these claims hinge on a small number of contested documents and are rejected by most specialists in Lincoln studies.
00:40:05.000I remember being at home once and I told my dad, I said, hey, dad, the people down the street have got like a changer and it's got a cord on it.
00:41:10.000Do you remember in the old days when the TV would sign off and the American flag would wave and it would just play music and then it would just go and then well the Indian would always show up.
00:43:36.000And you just hear it in the neighborhood, someone like rolling down their window, rolling up their window and just screaming out the kid's name to tell them to come home.
00:48:46.000And as time went on, and so as, and you had to do four sets back then, you know, four 45-minute sets, which was plenty of time for Dave to get drunk.
00:49:07.000And he would drink, and he was the bass player.
00:49:12.000And the fraternity guys already hated us, you know, because we weren't really any good anyway.
00:49:19.000So Dave's playing, and it's going along really good.
00:49:23.000And he was putting on a show and he leaned back and man overboard.
00:49:29.000He fucking fell off the ship and they had to stop fishing.
00:51:59.000I came into some money and I went there and I was afraid to come out of my hotel room for the first two days because New York in the early 70s was broke and there were prostitutes and pimps and everything everywhere you know, and homeless people, which reminds me you guys got a lot of homeless guys here.
00:52:28.000You can say that about anything Joe, that's true.
00:52:31.000Yeah, it's a lot better than it was during the pandemic.
00:52:34.000During the pandemic they allowed them to do the camping on the street thing.
00:52:38.000So you'd go down like Cesar Chavez and you'd see like 15, 20 tents where people were just hanging out and people were trying to jog and ride their bikes past them.
00:52:48.000It was, it was pretty bad, but uh, former former mayor uh cleaned it up and they have pretty good programs here to get people into housing.
00:52:59.000Everybody here, everybody here must love uh, and i'm not putting Austin down, i'm just I have.
00:53:06.000You know, I was, I played here about three years ago uh, but everybody must love graffiti here and that's the thing about graffiti.
00:53:16.000I I don't mind if you want to destroy somebody else's property, but at least do something original, because it all looks the same.
00:53:28.000You know, it's big letters and outlined, and it's done in black and outlined in yellow and it's.
00:54:19.000I went there once accidentally and this was in the 2000s.
00:54:23.000We were filming Fear Factor downtown in LA and I took a wrong turn and wound up in Skid Row and I was like I couldn't believe it was real, like it was like a zombie movie and that's.
00:54:37.000So you decided on Fear Factor, you go stay in here for three days and you win three days and do no coke yeah, you could do three days with no meth and you win.
00:54:48.000Yeah yeah, it was uh, it was sobering.
00:54:51.000And then we looked up the history of uh skid row and the reason why it's like that is they would take people out of Hollywood and Beverly Hills and homeless people then, and they would put them in Skid Row and force them to stay there and they they sort of built it as a place where they could deposit vagrants and homeless people.
00:55:13.000Well, there is a law in this country called vagrancy.
00:55:37.000This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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00:57:15.000And they just, they couldn't figure out a way to deal with the homeless problem, but they didn't want it messing up the beauty and glamour of Hollywood.
00:57:25.000So every time they would find homeless people, they would just ship them to downtown.
00:57:29.000Downtown L.A. is really the only downtown of any major city that I've ever been to where nobody wants to go.
00:57:36.000Downtown New York is fucking downtown.
01:00:40.000And of course, being me at that age, at 22, I went out to California and I met with a guy named Mike Maitland, who hated my new record but said I had great possibilities.
01:00:56.000And I told him, I just stood up and I said, motherfucker, you're an old man.
01:03:09.000And they had the National Front there at the time.
01:03:15.000I don't know if you know what that is.
01:03:17.000The National Front was, if you're not English, get out of our country.
01:03:23.000And a couple, my couple guys in my band got beat up because they heard, you know, some of the National Front guys heard their accent, and it wasn't English.
01:03:35.000So it was like dangerous to even go to the movies.
01:03:39.000Keep your fucking mouth shut and your head down.
01:03:49.000Yeah, the National Front was, you know, they were like all a bunch of skinhead guys and violent and did not want any foreigners in their country at all.
01:04:14.000And so you got out of there because of that?
01:04:16.000No, I got out of there because I got mad at the...
01:04:19.000I know it's hard to believe that I got mad at somebody, but I got mad at the manager because I never could get the cocksucker on the phone, you know.
01:04:29.000And then I came back to the United States, and he had a record deal based on the number one record in Australia.
01:04:38.000And I used to go, well, we have a number one record in Australia.
01:04:42.000And they would look at me and go, not many Australians in the United States, John.
01:04:50.000So, you know, and then it just kind of built.
01:08:08.000Well, one of my best friends was a guy named Tim White, who was the editor of Rolling Stone and the editor of Billboard magazine, and he died a few years ago.
01:08:21.000And you want to hear some inside baseball?
01:10:05.000That means that people who grew up in St. Louis and where rock took place, all of a sudden, you know, where I got played all the time, the points didn't amount to shit.
01:10:43.000I'm just saying that it was because of SoundScan.
01:10:47.000And my friend Tim knew this was going to happen.
01:10:50.000As soon as I signed this deal with SoundScan, and there was a magazine called Radio and Records at the time who was rivaling Billboard.
01:11:02.000And If Tim hadn't bought SoundScan, Radio and Records would have bought them, which would have made them the premier record company, because they were the most modern.
01:11:20.000So I'm sure that you remember that there was a time when you knew every song that was number one.
01:11:27.000Then all of a sudden you woke up one day and you didn't know what the what did what's how does this song become number one?
01:11:35.000But the way that it was before SoundScan, each song had to work its way up the charts.
01:11:42.000So if you had like, you know, let's say 20 plays, I'm just throwing out low numbers, but you had 20 plays that got added to the 20 plays that you got the next week.
01:13:42.000There used to be so many rock bands, and rock and roll is still a very popular form of music when you listen to the older stuff.
01:13:51.000That's why I've decided, I don't mean to plug myself, but they have been asking me, because I got tired of going on tour and being a cheerleader, which is what I was.
01:14:08.000Let's do a rounding hit of small town.
01:14:11.000I was born, you know, and everybody'd stand up singing.
01:14:15.000I was playing to 20,000 people and everybody was drunk.
01:14:18.000And I was just kind of the cheerleader, you know, the human beings.
01:18:52.000And like I said, you know, it was like All you really saw of guys in rock bands were the album covers, and you know, maybe on Midnight Special or something like that, or Don Kirschner's Rock Concert or something like that.
01:19:11.000But then with MTV going all the time, and not very many people made videos.
01:19:15.000But see, I was making videos because I had a hit in Australia.
01:19:20.000And like I said, Australia was way ahead of us.
01:19:23.000So it was the video that I just made in a club in London that was shown that made that record number one in Australia.
01:19:35.000And so when MTV started, there wasn't that many people making videos, but I was.
01:23:50.000It looks like, you know, I have to have somebody now, after I write a song, I have to give it to somebody right away and let them copy it and I'll read it to them so that we can read what the fucking, you know, what I wrote.
01:24:08.000Because songwriting is not what people think it is.
01:28:44.000And what is this sound in Jack and Diane?
01:28:47.000This it's not even, what is that sound?
01:28:52.000Well, the sound was I would walk by the Bee Gee studio and they had just invented drum machines.
01:29:02.000And the Bee Gees were using it to keep time.
01:29:05.000Because, you know, most drummers they speed up.
01:29:08.000You know, you start the song at this tempo, and all of a sudden they're like, no, By the end of the song, it's like, I can't keep up with you.
01:32:29.000And I love hearing, you know, guys your age talk about it because it's just like, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing.
01:32:38.000And the fact that that song today, I had somebody tell me, one of the nicest things anybody said to me was, is that, John, there was Romeo and Juliet.
01:33:08.000Now, who would have fucking thought that some dumbass like me would write a fucking song as a child when I first started writing songs and create those two characters that made such an impression on everybody?
01:33:24.000The only other one I think about is Brenda and Eddie from Billy Joel.
01:33:57.000Joe, look at, I don't know that much about your career, but look at your career and look at what suits have said to you and how wrong they were.
01:34:07.000Well, the most successful thing that I've ever done, nobody had any input on at all.
01:35:53.000Well, those guys, I'm sure, are out of business.
01:35:57.000And I have to kind of smile about the rock critics because it got to the point where I had such so many songs on the radio that they couldn't ignore it anymore.
01:36:37.000Because if you know that there's people out there that are just going to fucking hate on you no matter what you do, and you just got to come up with something that, listen, this will be undeniable.
01:37:35.000You had four really talented people in that band.
01:37:40.000And it showed, because some of the songs, hear me out, some of the songs, it was good for my generation because we went from cartoons to rock and roll.
01:37:52.000So in a town where I was born, lived a man who sailed the seas.
01:38:58.000If you're coming to my show, and this is when I started playing theaters, if you're coming to my show to hear all these hits, you're not going to.
01:39:06.000But that's why after 20 years, I'm going to go back out and I'm going to play nothing but hits for two and a half hours.
01:39:16.000That's how many hit records I've done.
01:42:59.000When you transitioned to John Cougar Mellencamp, and then eventually, like, how long did you John Cougar Mellencamp before you became John Mellencamp again?
01:43:12.000I think the last John Cougar Mellencamp record was a record called Scarecrow.
01:44:12.000Never wanted to, you know, have a manager hang out after the show.
01:44:20.000I just, you know, it was, I wanted to be a musician and not a clown, which, you know, if you remember back, Joe, and I'm putting anybody down, but there were a lot of clownish guys from MTV.
01:44:58.000And I remember talking to Sykes about it.
01:45:01.000Sykes, me, Don Henley, and somebody else went and did, they were going to drop MTV off a whole bunch of stations, and we got on a plane and went there, went to all these different stations that were going to drop MTV and talk to them why they couldn't do it.
01:47:06.000I remember watching Mick Jagger on stage, and my friend was talking to me, and I was watching him, and he's like, Isn't this fucking incredible?
01:47:13.000I was like, I can't believe it's really him.
01:47:31.000Everywhere he goes, works out every day.
01:47:33.000Every year, we started FarmAid in 1985, and every year, because you have at FarmAid, you have a press conference in the beginning, and then I don't go on until like 9 o'clock.
01:50:10.000I mean, how could you not look back at your life and not think, can you fucking believe it?
01:50:13.000Yeah, and you know, the thing of it is, is that I sometimes ask my audience, I go, where are you right now?
01:50:23.000And most of you probably say, I am at a John Mellencamp concert in Austin, Texas.
01:50:35.000And my answer is yes, but also where you really are, you're on a fucking rock that's going around the fucking sun that has been here for millions of fucking years.
01:50:49.000And so we are only here for a blink of an eye.
01:50:54.000So stop worrying about everything so fucking much.
01:54:02.000I can't even imagine thinking back to when I was like 35.
01:54:08.000That idea would be like, shut the fuck up.
01:54:10.000not doing that right but now at my age it's kind of like and i i was i did a thing with sean penn and sean and i were talking and he goes john just go do it Because I was on the fence about doing it.
01:56:43.000He told me, have as many kids as you can because when you get older, because see, I had, I don't know about you, but I had seven of my best friends die in 18 months.
01:59:02.000And he said, and this is two years ago, he said, well, I'd like to tell you you need to quit smoking, but if you've been smoking as long as I know you have, the only thing that's really happened is that your heart looks like a teenager's and your voice sounds black.
01:59:23.000Do you think it's because you smoke American spirits?
01:59:25.000I talked to a doctor that said that to me.
01:59:28.000Suzanne Humphrey, she was like, I think that one of the things that's killing people is cigarettes with all the additives in it, all the different chemicals that they put.
02:00:46.000I used to wake up in the morning and my parents had a great big house and I would go down in the basement, go into the fucking storm cellar and smoke, not knowing that I came out of that little area smelling like a cigarette ashtray.
02:01:09.000Well, maybe it's better than having the stress of not smoking.
02:01:14.000One of the things about smoking, and I'm not an advocate.
02:01:17.000I'm not telling people they should smoke.
02:01:19.000But maybe one of the things about it is that at least it relaxes you.
02:01:23.000I think one of the worst things for people is just stress.
02:01:27.000I was talking about a friend of mine who's going through something pretty heavy right now.
02:01:31.000And he's had a couple of heart attacks and there's nothing wrong with him.
02:01:35.000He's had heart attacks just from stress where his fucking arteries just lock up.
02:01:40.000His whole body is just locked up just from anxiety and stress.
02:01:44.000And he's had heart attacks because of that.
02:01:46.000Doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, takes care of himself.
02:01:49.000And just the problems in his life are so overwhelming.
02:01:54.000But it's got to be, there's a benefit.
02:01:56.000There's got to be a benefit to just relaxing, just enjoying something and relaxing and not having that overwhelming.
02:02:04.000Well, it's amazing how much cigarettes take you away from, because you've got to, you know, nowadays, if you're a cigarette smoker, you know, I'm lucky to be here with you that I could smoke in your area.
02:04:45.000Because, you know, I'm sick of fucking being here.
02:04:50.000So the next night we get up there and John comes and he introduces me to my friend John Mellingham.
02:04:59.000he started some I fell into I didn't realize that he had changed the fucking key from him smoking to a lower key so So I couldn't hit the note because it was I fell into, I fell, I couldn't find a fucking note because it was not the note the song was written in.
02:08:26.000Once Paul died, I became her boyfriend.
02:08:31.000And she and I would talk all the time on the phone.
02:08:36.000And whenever I was in New York or the town she lives in, north of New York, I'd take her to plays and we'd go to plays and we'd do stuff and I'd pinch her on the ass.
02:13:37.000But the problem is the comedy films, like if you go back and watch, you know, like Tropical Thunder or any of those kind of crazy movies that were like really outrageous and funny, like, you know, you can't make them today.
02:13:53.000Nobody wants to fund them and finance them.
02:14:48.000There's more comics now that are huge than I think have ever been alive in the history of comedy because of YouTube and Instagram and definitely Netflix.
02:15:03.000Because there's just more comedy to see.
02:19:39.000David Letterman, so many people had come from there, Robin Williams.
02:19:42.000And so they just talked about it with like hushed tones, like, man, you got to get to the comedy store.
02:19:47.000It was like a pilgrimage, like you had to get there.
02:19:50.000And I got there in 94 and never left, you know, until the pandemic.
02:19:54.000Yeah, I was friends with Letterman because he's from Indianapolis.
02:20:00.000And his mom used to come down to my house in Bloomington, and we'd have his mom and his stepdad would come down and have dinner with me at my house.
02:20:11.000And so Letterman, I did a couple things on Letterman where I cooked a cake with his mom in Indianapolis and brought the cake to David for his birthday.