Sometimes it’s hard to reach into the dark, dank, spiderweb-glazed swamp of memory and grab something from 20 years ago, but this much I remember: In the 1970s through the early 1990s a few select artists like Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Def Leppard, Madonna, Metallica, and yes, Journey, could inspire such rabid devotion in rock fans that they’d flock to stores holding special midnight openings to sell a new record the first minute it was allowed.

Today, the music-biz is so fragmented, rock radio is so weakened, and leaked MP3s/digital streams make the concept of a “formal record release” a notion antiquated as the corset — or at least Valley Girl talk. People buy CDs not for the tactile experience but as a backup hardcopy. Hard to imagine staying up for a midnight record-release party for that.

While Popdose commenters might have their own recollections of when this particular Event-with-a-capital-E stuff died, my official day is March 31, 1992, the day Bruce Springsteen’s Human Touch and Lucky Town CDs hit stores. As a reporter for an indie record-store trade tab, ’twas my job to call a dozen stores and get the vibe for the turnout. While traffic was fairly steady during the first full day of release, store owners said, the midnight openings were lightly attended, and didn’t pay off for store owners.

Right below that top tier of 1980s “Event” artists was a fistful of all-stars who might not be worth camping out for, but we’d make time to get to a record store the day a new CD came out — or the next day, at the latest — so that we could rip it open, play it, and dig it.

John “Johnny Cougar” Mellencamp was one of those. 1989’s Big Daddy was the last in a string of five albums in which he dominated the charts. His success had come after he shed the pretty-boy rock star image shaped by his early manager Tony DeFries, followed his muse, and morphed into a midwestern poor-man’s Dylan. Once comfortable in his own skin, Mellencamp wrote lyrical themes and stories that hit home, served on a bed of tasty power chords with a side order of Kenny Aronoff’s never-too-intrusive precision drumming.

While some rock-ologists give much (deserved) credit to Uncle Tupelo and the Cowboy Junkies for advancing the alt-country movement in and around 1990, it could be argued that Mellencamp’s 1980s output at least provided some inspiration for it, with its folky leanings, featured fiddles and dobro, and its social conscience that stuck out — in the Reagan era, at least — like a milk bucket under a bull. The guy started Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in 1985, an annual event that’s bagged $33 million for family farmers to date. (more…)