Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
The duality of pleasure and pain, of comedy and tragedy, or of life’s highs and lows is fertile territory for songwriters. And John Mellencamp has created some great songs out of those and similar themes, including “Hurts So Good,” “Down and Out in Paradise,” “Sad Clowns,” and especially “Between a Laugh and a Tear” from 1985’s Scarecrow. Rickie Lee Jones’s backing vocals add something special to Mellencamp’s wry, bittersweet lyrics, but they didn’t record together in person. Apparently, Mellencamp was such a fan that he was nervous to meet Jones in person, and opted to have her record in Los Angeles rather than fly her out to his newly built Belmont Mall Studio in Indiana.
Of course, Mellencamp was a pretty big star in his own right by 1985, and Scarecrow was his third big multi-platinum hit. It was also the album that finally won over rock critics who’d been lukewarm on the heartland rocker, landing him on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll for the first time—in third place right behind more established critical darlings Talking Heads and the Replacements. Seven different songs from Scarecrow charted on rock radio, but “Between a Laugh and a Tear” wasn’t one of them. A 2022 reissue of Scarecrow featured a brief demo of the song that doesn’t have all the words, but features a beautiful rendering of the song’s vocal melody in a slightly different tempo.
Mellencamp hasn’t played “Between a Laugh and a Tear” much on tour since 1986. But he revisited it for 1999’s Rough Harvest, which was recorded live in the studio by Mellencamp and his band, once again in Belmont Mall. The collection of covers and new arrangements of old Mellencamp favorites, mostly popular singles, fulfilled his contractual obligations to Mercury Records before he signed a new deal with Columbia. “Between a Laugh and a Tear” stands out as one of the lesser known tracks on Rough Harvest, and also one of the more dramatic reinventions, hauntingly quiet and a full 90 seconds shorter than the Scarecrow version.
Three more essential John Mellencamp deep album cuts:
“Cheap Shot”
Mellencamp was known as Johnny Cougar or John Cougar on his first six albums, finally dropping the Cougar in 1991. His 1980 album Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, however, ends with Mellencamp thumbing his nose at the man who discovered and renamed him, Tony DeFries: “Well, the record company’s changin’ my name now / Well, the record company’s goin’ out of business!”
“Jackie O”
When I interviewed Mellencamp a few years ago, I asked about his friendship with the late great John Prine, and he was self-deprecating about their collaborations: “He would come to Indiana and we’d sit around and write stuff, but we never wrote anything very good, to be quite honest.” The two songs they wrote together that did get released are gems, though: Mellencamp’s playful 1983 song “Jackie O” and Prine’s wistful 1995 track “Take a Look at My Heart.”
“Brothers”
One of Mellencamp’s two brothers, the late Ted Mellencamp, was his tour manager. It’s not clear if the dark tale of sibling rivalry that he tells in “Brothers” is in any way autobiographical, the song includes some of the most compelling lyrics on 1994’s Dance Naked.
