I’m not sure why I’m so obsessed with pointing out anomalies in forty-year-old rock videos, but I figured that after all these decades, I finally have a soapbox from which I can make them known. These likely-high-on-cocaine directors thought that they were pulling the wool over our eyes, and we can’t let them get away with the ruse forever. A little while back, I looked at such a gross transportation inconsistency in a Huey Lewis video, but there are many more. One in particular involves a certain “heartland rocker” with imagery that seems quite at odds with the lyrics of his song, including an automotive enigma that at first seems to make no sense.
By his own admission, Indiana native John “Cougar” Mellencamp is a bit of an ornery sumbitch, but you can’t deny that his rock hits make up the fabric of our GenX Reagan-era youth. The videos also gave us East or West Coasters a glimpse of life in the center of the nation.
With songs like Little Pink Houses and Jack and Diane, he really doubles down on the blue-collar middle America visuals that appeared hourly on MTV at the time.
These images naturally included all sorts of domestic iron like Chevy “box” trucks and Camaros.
They’re well-done visuals of bucolic rural America that you rarely saw in rock videos, so much so that conservative political campaigns wanted to use them as promotional materials.
Obviously, staunchly liberal Mellencamp protested. Like Springsteen with Born in the U.S.A., he marveled at how they totally misinterpreted the song’s meaning about the seemingly futile plight of salt-of-the-earth middle America that missed out on much of the go-go eighties, particularly farmers that Mellencamp spearheaded “Farm Aid” for.
It’s not an overdone caricature: when I moved to Illinois years later, I realized that his videos were about the most accurate interpretation of this area that I’d seen (and that The Blues Brothers was the most true-to-life depiction of Chicago). Well, there was one notable exception.
His 1985 album Scarecrow is a collection of tunes primarily about the so-called heartland, including a track called “Small Town.” In fact, he sings that phrase 18 times in three minutes (actually “small” is uttered 19 times and “town” is sung 20).
Mellencamp hails from Seymour, Indiana, which is a classic small town in anyone’s book, but during the video, John and his band are posed in front of a sign outside of Bloomington, Indiana. This was where John was supposedly living at the time, and, just on population alone, it’s a bit of a stretch to dub this place a “small town.”
Big-city snobs often tend to unfairly characterize tiny Midwestern locales as culture- and diversity-free fly-over wastelands full of uneducated, low-skilled laborers. As a scenic home to the University of Indiana with a vibrant art community, Bloomington is very, very much none of those things. Seriously, within a three-block area in Bloomington, you could have a Tibetan meal (Anyetsang’s), maybe some Turkish pies (Turkuaz café), or even Burmese noodles (Kimu), just to name a few.
The fact that Bloomington might be a poor choice to show for an archetypal “small town” could have been hidden to most people on the American coasts who never ventured inland (like me as a kid in 1985), except for one mistake. During filming of the last scene of the video, the director cuts the scene with the absolute wrong car in the shot: a white US-spec Peugeot 504 sedan.
There are plenty of vehicles that are the antithesis of a “small town” car, but a French-built diesel sedan is on a different level that even surpasses Saabs. Typically diesel-powered with a sublime ride and excellent build quality, it was a prime choice for college deans or doctors who could afford a costly sedan but couldn’t justify the immense expense of a Mercedes. Despite the positive aspects, they typically floundered in America with sales of around 10,000 to 20,000 cars a year before throwing in the towel in 1991.
It’s absolutely the last car anyone in a traditional “real” small town would ever own and drive. You couldn’t even say that the car was someone “passing through” since Peugeot owners would likely never even venture off the freeway into a typical tiny hamlet for fear of the place lacking proper wine or imported beers.
Making the video, if they’d just waited a few more minutes for a Ford “Dentside” or a Nova to drive by instead, we never would have known that John was filming in a place with several Indonesian restaurants. Most people would have bought the whole “small town” thing; he could have gotten away with it if not for some pesky young car geek like me watching his video.
After forty years, the world finally knows the truth. Anyway, Mellencamp resides less than four hours from me; if I get my ass kicked in the next few weeks, you’ll know who probably did it.
Top graphic image: Riva/Mercury Records (screenshot)
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