If you want to piss off a Springsteen fan, just tell them Scarecrow is the album Bruce would have made if he'd been raised in the Indiana cornfields instead of on the New Joisey boardwalk.
Why they find this suggestion so offensive is puzzling, but it never fails to get an adverse response.
This might help explain why Boss fanatics, despite the synth-heavy sloganeering of Born In The U.S.A., fail to see why Springsteen doesn't speak to everybody.
Meanwhile, after getting back to his Indiana Roots, Cougar first filled the jukebox with a good ten radio hits before almost single-handedly inventing the Americana genre.
Scarecrow was the culmination of that farm belt "zero fucks to give" attitude that had first reared its head on 1982's American Fool, been honed to a short, sharp shiv on 1983's Uh-Huh, and then refined like the final draft of a Steinbeck novel on 1985's Scarecrow.
From the opening salvo, "Rain On The Scarecrow", a suffocating darkness is now evident in Mellencamp's sound. While musically upbeat, "Small Town" and "Lonely Ol' Night" are barroom singalongs with untidy lyrical themes. "The Coug" is celebrating aspects of Midwestern life that have fallen into disrepair and these songs are the first hint of cracks in the foundation.
Side Two admittedly gets a bit preachy and heavy handed, but the only outright misstep is "The Face of The Nation", which has all the clunky earmarks of a song from the Iron Eagle II soundtrack.
There's even a Replacements-like rocker ("Between A Laugh And A Tear") with backing vocals by Rickie Lee Jones that gets lost among the radio hits, but leads one to believe that The Boss wasn't the only one listening to Mellencamp and taking notes.
It was R.E.M., after all, who tapped Cougar's producer, Don Gehman for their 1986 breakout Lifes Rich Pageant.
How deep was Scarecrow, you ask?
So deep that "Rumbleseat" gets buried nine songs in and the last song on the record is "R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A."
While 1987's The Lonesome Jubilee and 1989's Big Daddy are not without their moments, Cougar's music would never be as lyrically and musically potent and as on Scarecrow.