‘Uh-Huh’: John Cougar Mellencamp’s Passionate Seventh Album
After the chart-topping ‘American Fool,’ Mellencamp delivered a raw, exciting heartland rock classic.
John Cougar Mellencamp’s seventh album, 1983’s Uh-Huh was a milestone release in more ways than one. His first long-playing disc to be issued adding his real surname (‘Mellencamp’) to his stage name ‘John Cougar,’ it also represented the first time he assumed total artistic control over his career.
Up to this point, Mellencamp’s output had largely been shaped by either his management or record company, but the success of 1982’s Billboard 200 chart-topping American Fool and its spin-off U.S. No. 1 single “Jack & Diane” allowed him to start calling the shots. This new-found freedom influenced the way his next album Uh-Huh was recorded, with Mellencamp and his band piecing it together in just 16 days in a half-built rural studio the musicians helped to complete before the sessions began.
Having transformed one corner into a vocal booth and erected a small stage for the drums, Mellencamp, his band and co-producer Don Gehman moved into the new complex (The Shack, in Indiana’s Jackson County) and went to work – with Mellencamp encouraging a spontaneous approach from the get-go.
“We got everything set up and we just started from scratch,” guitarist Mike Wanchic recalled in a 2023 interview with Ultimate Classic Rock. “John would come in and sing the melody from one of his new songs on an acoustic guitar and as soon as we had the song built up, we’d record it. There was a level of spontaneity on that record – you couldn’t get much looser or more immediate.”
The album featured a clutch of Mellencamp’s most impassioned – and transcendent – songs. It opened with a Top 10 hit in “Crumblin’ Down” – an unforgiving treatise on the illusory nature of fame – and continued with two stone classics in “Pink Houses” and “Authority Song.” A bittersweet song about North America’s rich and poor divide, “Pink Houses” followed “Crumblin’ Down” into the U.S. Top 10, while the rip-roaring, “I Fought The Law”-esque “Authority Song” (“I fight authority, authority always wins”) also made the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100.
To Mellencamp’s credit, even Uh-Huh’s deeper cuts maintained an equally high standard. They often rocked hard and either homed in on either social injustice or else the music industry’s shadier practices on the potent, Rolling Stones-esque “Serious Business,” though Mellencamp also showed his more tender side on the album’s affecting, country-tinged closing track “Golden Gates.”
The public agreed that Uh-Huh was a more than satisfying follow-up to American Fool and – with help from its three frontline hits – this heartland rock classic rocketed up to No. 9 on the Billboard 200 late in 1983. Going on to be certified platinum three times over, it helped consolidate John Cougar Mellencamp’s reputation as one of the era’s most incisive singer-songwriters.
“We recorded the songs as soon as we got them down, but John always said ‘paint fast, make mistakes, let’s roll,’ that was his way,” Mike Wanchic said in 2023. “But on Uh-Huh, what we ended up with was something we felt was a very clean, clear representation of who were. [By that time] we were actually doing what we set out to do as musicians. We were finally the best we could be.”
