With the help of Criteria Recording’s chief engineer, Ross Alexander, and staff engineer Greg Edward, Gehman gutted the Miami studio’s mobile unit and moved its equipment - an MCI console, 16-track tape machine and a few other items - into The Shack’s kitchen, which became the control room. and wanted to be close to his friends and family. The John Cougar-produced Never Kick a Sleeping Dog album by Mitch Ryder served as a test run for The Shack to see if recording on native soil would work better for the devoted Midwesterner, who felt too crazy and distracted in fast-paced L.A. Mellencamp agreed to lend them the money on one condition: that he could first use the space as a recording studio.
Mellencamp’s sister, Laura, and her husband-to-be owned the house and the hog farm it sat on, but ran out of money before they could finish renovating their home. Mellencamp, guitarists Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane, drummer Kenny Aronoff and studio bassists Willie Weeks and Louis Johnson (standing in at various times for newcomer Toby Myers) headed to The Shack, an unfinished, rundown farmhouse between Brownstown and Seymour, Ind. Propelled by this creative surge, he called up producer/engineer Don Gehman, who had worked on American Fool and the largely forgettable John Cougar album, to come and record his next album. Mellencamp, still learning the craft of songwriting and arranging, sat down with a tape machine and described the man, and didn’t stop recording until he had “Pink Houses” fully written. “He waved, and I waved back,” Mellencamp told Rolling Stone. The Interstate ran within feet of the man’s front yard, but he didn’t seem disturbed by the commotion around him. After seven years of playing to near-empty dive bars, dealing with shady managers and having his name changed behind his back, he had finally achieved quantifiable commercial success.Īs he cruised along an overpass, he looked down and saw a black man sitting with a cat in his arms on the front porch of his weathered, pink shotgun shack. He had won an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Male that year, as well as his first and only Grammy Award - Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male for “Hurts So Good” from his multi-Platinum breakthrough album, American Fool. And that’s sort of what ‘Pink Houses’ is about.Early one summer morning in 1983, a 32-year-old John Mellencamp, dba John Cougar, drove himself home to Bloomington, Ind., from the Indianapolis airport. I don’t mean to get political, but I do get wound up about these kinds of things because so many people see it as it’s really not. I’m not condoning what Russia did, but that’s bullshit! There’s so many things we’ve done, and then we expect them to apologize when we had a spy plane beside the plane that got shot down! Let’s see the deal as it really was! And the majority of the public is going to fall right in line with the way Reagan wants them to think. It’s like the Russians shooting down that plane, and we want them to apologize. It’s not rah, rah, rah America at all, and I think it puts America in its place. The American dream has pretty much proven itself as not working anymore.” John Mellencamp (223) “It’s saying the American Dream and all that shit is propaganda.
This one has been misconstrued over the years because of the chorus – it sounds very rah-rah. So I went with that positive route when I wrote this song. I thought, “Wow, is this what life can lead to? Watching the fucking cars go by on the interstate?” Then I imagined he wasn’t isolated, but he was happy. He was sitting on his front lawn in front of a pink house in one of those shitty, cheap lawn chairs. “I was driving through Indianapolis on Interstate 65 and I saw a black man holding either a dog or a cat.
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