Review: John Mellencamp digs into his past in energetic concert

What: John Mellencamp
Where: Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre
When: Monday, Nov. 12, 2018
Rating: 4 (out of 5)

John Mellencamp has a new album due in December, one that straddles the line between the intensely personal and the outright political.

It’s a delicate dance Mellencamp has made his own for the better part of 35 years. And it’s one he continued throughout his long-awaited concert at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre on Monday.

Mellencamp, 67, was playing his first date at the arena in a decade, and the passage of time was reflected throughout his two-hour set. It began with a feverish and fawning mini documentary that ran for 25 minutes — which felt a little heavy handed and unnecessary, to be honest. The film eventually drew jeers from the anxious audience of 5,107, but the singer recovered quickly soon after. And so did his followers.

He started with a selection of songs at opposite ends of a 20-year period, beginning with Lawless Times. “Well, you can’t trust your neighbour, husband or wife/can’t trust the police,” Mellencamp sang. “These are lawless times.”

It wasn’t long before he was back in his heyday, playing back-to-back songs from 1985’s Scarecrow — Minutes to Midnight and Small Town. While it felt a little early in the set for the latter, one of his biggest hits, the run of songs that closed his concert proved that front-loading his set wasn’t a problem.

If there’s one thing in the arsenal of this heartland rocker, it’s songs for the masses. Lonely Ol’ Night, Check it Out, Small Town and Jack and Diane were all off the books when the setlist was still in the single digits, which is impressive. Even a cover of a song by a long-forgotten blues artist — Stones in My Passway, by Robert Johnson — offered something special when Mellencamp was at the helm.

The Indiana native was in fine voice, which is not always a given. A longtime smoker, he’s lost a bit of his upper register, though some loss of range didn’t affect the outcome (he was never known as a balladeer). Mellencamp is a communicator as much as he’s a singer, and that requires a command of the stage — which he has to a greater degree than many of his peers.

“You need to build a wall about this high,” he said, raising his arm. “That would keep all the stupid people from coming up here and f—ing up your country.”

Politics didn’t overshadow the proceedings, though given his track record as the co-founder of Farm Aid, he certainly had lots to lambaste in the current climate.

Perhaps it was better that he focused on performing rather than proselytizing. The audience seemed fired up to party, and Mellencamp obliged — to a point. His ragged, solo acoustic version of Jack and Diane was a throwaway, even if it gave the crowd a much needed singalong at the midpoint of the evening. And his attempt at piano-bar milieu — during his channelling of Tom Waits on The Full Catastrophe — was out of place amongst the hit parade.

These were mere missteps. Mellencamp can’t fight his inner pop singer, and when he embarked on the seven-song showcase that closed out the evening with Hurts So Good, he let that flag — the same one that made him one of the biggest stars of the the 1980s — fly wild and free.

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