August 4, 2003

When in Doubt, Sing About Death

ohn Mellencamp made old songs rock and newer ones sound vintage when he performed at Town Hall on Thursday night. Mr. Mellencamp has just released an album, "Trouble No More" (Columbia), of old blues, country, gospel and pop songs along with a few recent ones, and he's performing them on tour, leaving most of his hits behind.

Many of the songs he chose tied in to Mr. Mellencamp's long-running themes of stubbornness and defiance. (At Town Hall he casually smoked a cigarette onstage.) But the old songs add situations he has not usually sung about: gunslinging, prison, Christian faith and the blues' calm acceptance of death. When he got around to singing his own "Small Town," in a slow, bare-bones arrangement for voice, drums and slide guitar, he repeated its last line — "that's probably where they'll bury me" — five times.

He also had some political points to make. Mr. Mellencamp's new song "To Washington," with an Appalachian melody by way of the Carter Family and Woody Guthrie, showed misgivings about the current Bush administration and war in Iraq. And when Mr. Mellencamp sang Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," with its verse about a roving gambler trying to create a next world war, he made it a "Texas gambler" and altered the last lines: "Just give Donald Rumsfeld about a million guns, and have it out on Highway 61."

Mr. Mellencamp said, "I feel very honored and humbled that I'm able to come and play these songs," but he wasn't daunted by them. Although he reached back to Guthrie, Robert Johnson Son House, and Memphis Minnie for material, Mr. Mellencamp didn't try to recreate any of their styles. His scruffy baritone and its deep-seated rasp are rooted in 1960's soul, and he treated the old songs the way he would treat his own: adding instrumental hooks and often using a broad-shouldered beat direct from the Rolling Stones. He was seeking the spirit of the music, not its original performance style.

Some songs were backed by just a few instruments, featuring the lunging riffs of Andy York's slide guitar — which was all he needed to get the audience whooping for the gospel song "John the Revelator" — and tapping the primal blues and rock impulse lately revived by the White Stripes. Dane Clark, on drums, switched off among a trap kit, hand drums, and a minimal stand-up kit with a foot pedal below the tom-tom.

The full band sounded like the one on Mr. Mellencamp's 1990 album "The Lonesome Jubilee"; it could tilt toward country or blues or rock. Miriam Sturm on violin and Michael Ramos on accordion shared the foreground with Mike Wanchic and Mr. York on electric guitars. The Hoagy Carmichael song "Baltimore Oriole" got an electric 12-string guitar hook out of a spy movie, and in Lucinda Williams's "Lafayette" the accordion added a touch of Cajun waltz.

The concert, like the album, didn't set out to be a history lesson. Its songs about ramblers, outlaws, hard times and heartbreak took up common human tribulations. "Seems like every place I go wants to do me some harm," Mr. Mellencamp sang in his adaptation of "Diamond Joe." There was little self-pity in the songs, just the matter-of-fact tenacity that Mr. Mellencamp has always prized in his songs, old or new.