Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Okay, cool. Why would I hate my tattoos?
Because you get older and they get all smudgy.
Mine are getting kind of smudgy. Yeah, look at this one. It's pretty smudgy. Pretty fucking smudgy.
I owned a tattoo parlor in, I don't know what year it was, mid-'80s, and they were illegal in Indiana. But because it was me, they said, okay, leave him alone.
Really? Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 2: Why do tattoos become less appealing as we age?
I remember when they were illegal in New York. I went to Connecticut to get my first tattoo.
Yeah, I— I didn't know it was illegal, but I met this guy in L.A., and he worked at Sunset, you know, where the Hyatt House is, and there was a tattoo parlor right across the street. Anyway, he was there. And so I brought him to Bloomington because he wanted to get out of L.A., and guess why they closed me down? Why? The fucking guy was a heroin addict. I know.
And he did this tattoo one time, and I went over. I just went over to the shop. I said, hey, let's do this little. And he was all fucked up. And it was just like, what's wrong with it? Because I didn't know.
Chapter 3: What challenges did John Mellencamp face with his tattoo parlor?
I don't know anything about heroin addicts.
There wasn't a lot of heroin addicts back then. That was a rare thing. Now, we think about how many people are, because of the Sackler family, think about how many people are hooked on opiates today. I mean, it's got to be. Lots. It's off the charts in comparison to what it was like in, you know, the 1980s. I knew one guy that had a friend who did heroin. That's it.
The first time I saw somebody do heroin was... I was in college and there was a place called Bull Island that tried to imitate Woodstock. And me and my then wife and my kid, my little girl, and my roommate who lived with us, we're just walking down there and we see this guy shooting up. So we just thought, well, we'll watch. Because he was just sitting right there.
I mean, there was like 200,000 people there. And he shot and he went out. And I looked at the guy I was with and go, we won't be doing this.
We're not going to do this. I had a friend who was a longshoreman, and he worked with this guy that every lunchtime he would go and score and sit in his truck and shoot up. And that's what he did every lunch. He was a functional heroin addict. And he would show up for work every day, and he did his job.
But during lunchtime, during his hour, he would do heroin and just fucking find his happy place and then an hour later go back to work.
And the one shot would last all day?
I don't know. I don't know if he did heroin. I didn't ask if he did heroin after that as well. I'm assuming he probably did. But he was a functional heroin addict. Guy kept a full job. He was in the union. And everybody knew. This guy would go on his break, chewed up.
Last time I did drugs was 1973.
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Chapter 4: How did the opioid crisis change perceptions of addiction?
You know, you would either find a girl or fight.
I figured you for the find the girl type of guy.
Well, you know, I did okay with that. But it didn't always work. So, yeah. Yeah, it was like, don't forget, Joe, it was like 1967, 66. You weren't even born yet.
I was born in 67.
Yeah, so this was like 1967.
Wow.
So, you know, so from that time on until I turned 21, I was 21 when I quit using drugs and quit smoking, quit drinking.
Wow. Nothing since then?
Not a drop.
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Chapter 5: What led John Mellencamp to quit drugs and alcohol?
Well, they have to cut your head off, for starters. You know, they had to cut my head and lay it open to get to my spine. And then they would push each individual nerve ending back down into my spine, drain the fluid off. sew it back up, and make sure that everything was working. And they told my parents, you know, look, here he is.
He's probably going to die, get encephalitis, and his head's going to fill up with water. We don't anticipate him living much more than six or seven months. And I was, fuck, I think I was in fifth grade. I didn't even know I'd had the operation. And some kid in my class said, hey, Mellencamp, what's that big scar on the back of your neck?
Don't forget, now we're talking, you know, 1957, 58, 60, maybe. I didn't even know there was a scar back there. You know? Wow. It wasn't like I was going. And my parents never told me. So I came home and I asked my old man, I said, Dad, what's with the scar on the back of my neck? And he goes, oh, don't worry about it. You had an operation when you were born. So I did it. I played football.
I ran track. I fought. You know, I did everything that every other kid did without a thought of that. Not until I got older and I started having panic disorder that I thought, I thought maybe the panic disorder was from that operation.
How old when you started having panic disorder?
I was just out of college. I couldn't leave the house. I became what they call, what's that called, agoraphobia?
Yeah.
Yeah. So I had agoraphobia for about a year and a half. And then I got a record deal. And I had to leave the house. I mean, I was married in high school. I got married in high school. And the girl I was married to was five years older than me, you know. How old were you? 18. 18? Yeah. You had a kid, right?
You had a kid real young?
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Chapter 6: How did John Mellencamp's music career evolve with the introduction of SoundScan?
Then all of a sudden you woke up one day and you didn't know, how does this song become number one? But the way that it was before SoundScan, each song had to work its way up the charts. So if you had, let's say, 20 plays, I'm just throwing out low numbers, but if you had 20 plays, that got added to the 20 plays that you got the next week. So now you have 40 plays.
So you might move up from 36 to 31. But Joe Rogan in Boston was hearing the fucking songs as they move up. Oh, I heard this new song. You talk to your friend. And they said, yeah, I heard that song. And then all of a sudden the song would build and build and build and build and build and build. And Michael Jackson would be number one or whoever.
And once SoundScan took over, if you were in a rock band, the record companies said, well, fuck this. We're not even going to advertise in Indianapolis anymore. The biggest... are R&B stations and they're playing rap.
Chapter 7: What impact did Napster have on the music industry?
And that's where we're gonna service those people. Because back then there was payola and all that stuff going on. So there was like no money coming into Indianapolis all of a sudden where there used to be. It was all going to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, to all these R&B stations. And then what was that thing called when you could download records for nothing?
Napster?
Yeah. Yeah. And then that started. And then that really put us out of it, put all rock guys out of it. It says, if you check the billboard charts right now, I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find two rock bands in the top 100.
Rock bands right now, just in general, are almost non-existent in terms of new bands. It's really weird. There used to be so many rock bands, and rock and roll is still a very popular form of music when you listen to the older stuff.
That's why I've decided, I don't mean to plug myself, but I... They have been asking me, because I got tired of going on tour and being a cheerleader, which is what I was. Let's do a rounding hit of Small Town. I was born, you know, and everybody would stand up and sing. I was playing to 20,000 people and everybody was drunk.
And I was just kind of the cheerleader, you know, the human cheerleader.
For people's good time.
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Chapter 8: How did John Mellencamp transition from performing in large venues to theaters?
Yeah, giving them the opportunity. I just thought... I'm here to be a musician. This is not being a musician. This is being a fucking clown. I don't want to be a clown. So I started playing in theaters, which pissed everybody off.
I said, and, you know, when you come to one of my shows, and this has been for the last 20 years I've been doing this, you come to one of my shows in a theater that says, please recognize.
Back then, pull that sucker up close to your face. What? The microphone. Oh. Otherwise we're barely here. You're very soft spoken already. How's that? There we go.
I am?
And?
I am soft-spoken. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. You know why? Why? Because I'm deaf.
Are you really? Oh, from all the singing? Yeah. All the music? Yeah. Oh, every rock star is deaf. I'm deaf. No one knew shit about hearing protection back then. No, I'm deaf. I can't hear. All my friends in bands and all my friends that are hunters. Deaf. Can't hear. Yeah. Guns and loud music.
Yeah. My kids would love it because they could walk up and say shit behind my back. I heard that. I got three girls and two boys. And how many kids you got?
Three.
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