to midnight, they recorded “Pink Houses” in one day and finished the entire album in 16. Wanchic’s amp and the bass amp also went into separate isolated rooms elsewhere in the house. Crane stayed in the control room, but his amp was miked in the bathroom. The engineer set up Aronoff’s drums in the opposite corner, and Wanchic and the bassist on opposite sides facing the kitchen/control room.
Mellencamp sang with the band in his isolated corner, probably into a Telefunken or a Neumann, as Thoener recalls. The backing vocals were an overdub, but recorded in the same room, so the ambience on those vocals is also the living room.” One instrument bled into another in the ramshackle recording environment, giving Mellencamp the raw, Rolling Stones-influenced sound he wanted. He stood there looking at Kenny and the entire band. We used gobos with Plexiglas windows, put John in a corner of the room and made a triangle. “John’s tracking vocal was recorded in the same room. “There is no reverb on the drums that sound is only the living room,” says Thoener. “Pink Houses,” thank goodness, featured the inner ambience of The Shack. Thoener remembers eating lunch outdoors while the pigs milled around and breaking for dinner at a nearby greasy spoon. “The smell was unbelievable!” recalls Wanchic.
“You had to just pick your spot and plant!”īy recording in this underdeveloped home studio (a precursor to Mellencamp’s professionally built Belmont Mall recording facility, also near Bloomington) in rural Indiana, the group could isolate themselves from society, but not from the animals in the back yard. “The control room was so small you literally couldn’t turn around,” adds Wanchic. “The air-conditioning ducts were hanging out of the ceilings it was quite a sight. “Since it was being taken apart after recording, there was no need to make it pretty, and it wasn’t,” recalls Grammy-winning engineer David Thoener, a 29-year-old New Yorker at the time, who was called in to engineer and mix alongside Gehman.
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They blew a hole in the wall so that they could see into the living room, now the live room, put up a little bit of drywall to create a drum room and iso booth, and away they went. With the help of Criteria Recording’s chief engineer, Ross Alexander, and staff engineer Greg Edward, Gehman gutted the Miami studio’s mobile unit and moved its equipment - an MCI console, 16-track tape machine and a few other items - into The Shack’s kitchen, which became the control room. and wanted to be close to his friends and family. The John Cougar-produced Never Kick a Sleeping Dog album by Mitch Ryder served as a test run for The Shack to see if recording on native soil would work better for the devoted Midwesterner, who felt too crazy and distracted in fast-paced L.A. Mellencamp agreed to lend them the money on one condition: that he could first use the space as a recording studio. Mellencamp’s sister, Laura, and her husband-to-be owned the house and the hog farm it sat on, but ran out of money before they could finish renovating their home. Mellencamp, guitarists Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane, drummer Kenny Aronoff and studio bassists Willie Weeks and Louis Johnson (standing in at various times for newcomer Toby Myers) headed to The Shack, an unfinished, rundown farmhouse between Brownstown and Seymour, Ind. Propelled by this creative surge, he called up producer/engineer Don Gehman, who had worked on American Fool and the largely forgettable John Cougar album, to come and record his next album. Mellencamp, still learning the craft of songwriting and arranging, sat down with a tape machine and described the man, and didn’t stop recording until he had “Pink Houses” fully written. “He waved, and I waved back,” Mellencamp told Rolling Stone. The Interstate ran within feet of the man’s front yard, but he didn’t seem disturbed by the commotion around him. After seven years of playing to near-empty dive bars, dealing with shady managers and having his name changed behind his back, he had finally achieved quantifiable commercial success.Īs he cruised along an overpass, he looked down and saw a black man sitting with a cat in his arms on the front porch of his weathered, pink shotgun shack. He had won an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Male that year, as well as his first and only Grammy Award - Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male for “Hurts So Good” from his multi-Platinum breakthrough album, American Fool. Early one summer morning in 1983, a 32-year-old John Mellencamp, dba John Cougar, drove himself home to Bloomington, Ind., from the Indianapolis airport.
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