These may be Lawless Times, as John Mellencamp’s first song said at his concert Friday night at Affinity Place, but that doesn’t mean people can’t have fun at a concert.
Few seats were empty when the show began as Mellencamp went through new and old songs for over an hour and a half. Mellencamp and his seven-piece band worked through old and new songs from his over 40-year recording career.
Before the show, the concert backdrop showed a brief history of Mellencamp’s career, including him walking off the set of a television interview in 1982. As that faded out, the crowd on the floor jumped to their feet as members of the band came to the stage until Mellencamp showed up, predominantly dressed in black, to the crowd’s adulation.
His new songs helped open the set, including Lawless Times (from 2014’s Plain Spoken), John Cockers (from 2008’s Life, Death, Love and Freedom) before 1985’s Minutes to Memories, a hidden gem on Scarecrow, and then he and the band then ripped into the classic Mellencamp song like Small Town.
He and the band performed in a cover of Robert Johnson’s Stones in My Passway, recorded for Mellencamp’s 2003 album Trouble No More, he dug into a bluesy rendition of The Full Catastrophe (Ain’t looking for a fight/but you know I won’t run away) from 1996’s Mr. Happy Go Lucky.
His newer songs, like Easy Target from 2017’s Sad Clowns & Hillbillies, included some of the bite Mellencamp still has for the time he lives in (“Well let the poor be damned/ and the easy targets too/ All are created equal/ Equally beneath me and you”). While the front rows of the show seemed into the show, you wonder how many were waiting for the next radio hit.
It wouldn’t have been a Mellencamp show without some of the classic rock radio staples like and Paper in Fire, Rain on the Scarecrow, Crumblin’ Down, Lonely Ol’ Night and Mellencamp a solo acoustic version of Jack And Diane.
During that song, he chided the audience, who was singing along, for getting to the chorus early. “It’s two verses and then the chorus, guys,” he said.
A lot of Mellencamp’s most popular material looks at the human side of growing up and growing older, and the effect that the advance of time has on people individually and collectively.
For the longest time, Mellencamp has been able to do both poignant and radio-friendly.
Check It Out from 1987’s Lonesome Jubilee is possibly the best example of this, with lyrics such as: “A million young poets/ screaming out their words/ maybe someday those words will be heard/ by future generations/ ridin’ on the highways that we built/ maybe they’ll have a better understanding.”
His hair and beard may be more gray than he was when he wrote this over 30 years ago, but you could still hear the protest singer performing the pop song that he’s always been to many people.
The concert concluded with Cherry Bomb at about 10 p.m. before people went home, happy with what they heard and maybe with a new lyric or two to think about.
