John Mellencamp gets a mural in his home town

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But there was still the big drum moment that Mellencamp desired. Aronoff knew what to play, but Gehman didn’t know how to deliver such a huge sound. That’s where the expertise of ex-David Bowie guitarist (and former member of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) Mick Ronson came in handy. Mellencamp knew Ronson from the ’70s, and asked him to help out for a day in the studio. It was then that the glam guitar hero gave Gehman a quick tutorial on how to apply an effect called gated echo to a drum recording – in a similar manner to what Hugh Padgham had done with “In the Air Tonight.” And Ronson’s help didn’t stop there.

“I owe Mick Ronson the hit song ‘Jack & Diane’,” Mellencamp reflected in 2008. “Mick was very instrumental in helping me arrange that song, as I’d thrown it on the junk heap. ... All of a sudden, for ‘Jack & Diane,’ Mick said, ‘Johnny, you should put baby rattles on there.’ I thought, ‘What the f--- does put baby rattles on the record mean'? So he put the percussion on there and then he sang the part, ‘Let it rock, let it roll’ as a choir-ish-type thing, which had never occurred to me. And that is the part everybody remembers on the song. It was Ronson’s idea.”

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For my money, Mellencamp is a much better American roots rock artist than Bruce Springsteen.

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