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After being repeatedly pelted with spit during a performance at the University of Birmingham, Mellencamp says, he stopped the show and told the perpetrators, "You guys got to knock that shit off." When they ignored him, "I just jumped off stage and the fight was on. As part of his cultural awakening, Mellencamp was also introduced to that uniquely British form of audience participation known as gobbing. "I moved to London to make a record in 1977, when all of London was ablaze with 'God Save the Queen,' and I'm bringing out an acoustic guitar, playing 'Taxi Dancer,'" he says, referring to an early, torchy ballad he wrote about a failed Broadway hoofer. But when he got there, he found that, once again, he was sadly out of step with the times. So the Seymour, Indiana, native dusted himself off and headed to England, aiming to redeem himself with a new record for a new label. When the record tanked, his label shelved the follow-up and, in 1977, dropped Mellencamp altogether. Johnny Cougar was dismissed as a bush-league Bruce Springsteen, along with his 1976 debut album, Chestnut Street Incident. With his smoldering Brando stare, Mellencamp may have looked like star material, but at 25 he was nowhere near ready for his close-up, and after DeFries pumped up his client with a preposterous load of hype, the critics shot him down. We are sitting in the rehearsal space at his Belmont Mall recording studio, near Bloomington, Indiana, and the singer-songwriter has just rewound the master tape of his life back to the mid-70s, when he recorded under the whiz-bang name of Johnny Cougar, given to him by his first manager, Tony DeFries. "I have always been at the wrong place at the wrong time," he says in a Hoosier twang.

Running a hand through his rooster comb of a pompadour, John Mellencamp lets out a raspy laugh. Mellencamp in his painting studio at his home in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives with his wife, Elaine Irwin-Mellencamp, and their two sons, Hud, 12, and Speck, 11 (in doorway).