The setting in Terre Haute was subtle and relaxed on Tuesday for Kenny Aronoff.
The 69-year-old drummer — one of the world’s 100 best, according to Rolling Stone magazine — paid a visit to Indiana State University’s Tilson Auditorium as part of ISU’s popular Speaker Series.
Aronoff has a lot of stories, for sure, having performed with a who’s who of the recording industry from Elton John, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, the Smashing Pumpkins and Celine Dion, and in venues such as the Kennedy Center and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Thirty-five years ago, Aronoff sat behind his drum set with more than 9,000 boisterous fans listening in Hulman Center.
It was Oct. 30, 1987. Aronoff and the John Mellencamp Band kicked off the group’s “Lonesome Jubilee” world tour with a concert in Terre Haute.
Mellencamp’s songs “Paper in Fire” and “Cherry Bomb” hit the Billboard Top 10 and blared from car stereos in Hoosier cities like Terre Haute. Aronoff delivered the backbeat of those tunes and most of Mellencamp’s greatest hits during a stint in the band from 1980 to 1996.
The ‘87 tour came amid their pinnacle. In a 2005 interview with the Tribune-Star, Mellencamp recalled leading a motorcycle caravan from the band’s base of operations in Bloomington to Terre Haute every night for a week of rehearsals in Hulman Center to prepare. “I can still remember driving home from there and pulling in [to his Bloomington home] about 3 a.m.,” Mellencamp said then.
Aronoff remembers it much the same, but with one clarification. “I wasn’t riding a motorcycle,” Aronoff said. “I was driving my car.” Mellencamp and other band members rode the motorbikes.
The mission, though, was definite — to “rehearse for the first show of a big, nine-month tour here [in Terre Haute],” Aronoff said in an interview Tuesday afternoon before his lecture in Tilson. Hulman Center was an ideal spot for that kickoff, as a then-busy concert hall in a city 90 miles from Mellencamp’s hometown of Seymour. In the days when Mellencamp was known as Johnny Cougar — a recording-biz nickname he hated — Mellencamp performed in Terre Haute’s Indiana Theatre and at ISU frat parties.
By the “Lonesome Jubilee” tour a decade later, Mellencamp was the demanding leader of a versatile, skilled outfit that Rolling Stone called “the best rock band in the U.S. today.” They blended garage-band rock, R&B, folk and country, deploying mandolins and fiddle alongside electric guitars and Aronoff’s drumming.
Mellencamp guided the combo through rehearsals for three-hour concerts, minus a 15-minute intermission, Aronoff pointed out.
“From [1985’s] “Scarecrow” tour and onward, there were no opening acts,” Aronoff said. “So, it was a three-hour show. Just us. An evening with John Mellencamp. So that’s a lot of material.”
Their bandleader meant business.
“He was intense, very demanding,” Aronoff said of Mellencamp. “He was like working for the most demanding football coach. In some ways, I felt like I was Tom Brady and he was Bill Belichick from the Patriots. Just very, very demanding. And he was demanding of himself, too. He called himself the ‘Little Bastard,’ and he’s proud of it.”
That approach didn’t rattle Aronoff. He’s a pro and meticulous in rehearsals and performances, charting every beat and memorizing every passage by his fellow musicians.
“I was the perfect person for that band, because I know how to serve the band, serve the song, serve the artist. I’m a pleaser,” Aronoff explained. “I’m very competitive, like John. We were perfect for each other in that regard.”
Aronoff grew up in a music-filled household in “artsy” Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just a few hours from New York City, where his parents often visited to watch Broadway shows. They kept jazz, classical and show-tunes records on the family’s stereo turntable.
“Music was the soundtrack of my life,” Aronoff recalled, “but when I saw The Beatles [on the “Ed Sullivan Show”] on TV at age 10, that was like life-changing. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was that split-second that I realized, ‘I want to do that.’”
Fifty years later, Aronoff was enlisted to perform in the star-studded band assembled for the CBS special “The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles” in 2014. Among the performers in that show were McCartney and Starr.
“I get asked to do a CBS special … honoring The Beatles for that ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ I saw at age 10. And now I’m performing with the two remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr,” Aronoff said Tuesday. “And I was like, ‘Are you kiddin’ me?’ It’s like dreams come true. You couldn’t have written a better movie script and it was actually happening.”
Gigs such as that one, and as the drummer in the house band for the Kennedy Center Honors shows for seven years, have made Aronoff one of the most familiar drummers to average Americans. Still, Aronoff’s drumming on one particular record has etched his skills into the minds of most popular music listeners.
It’s the Mellencamp Band’s “Jack and Diane.” The “little ditty ‘bout two American kids growing up in the heartland” topped the U.S. charts in 1982. Its success caught Aronoff and his bandmates by surprise. It also required Aronoff’s creativity.
His hesitant yet funky drum interlude turns a pop song into a coming-of-age anthem, fit for an arena sing-along.
“I loved playing ‘Jack and Diane’ because that was my signatory drum solo,” Aronoff said. “That and maybe [Phil Collins’] ‘In the Air Tonight’ are the two most famous drum solos on pop radio. We had no idea that was going to end up being on the record, let alone being a No. 1 hit single. That was John’s biggest No. 1 hit single ever. It blew John’s career up and launched mine.”
“Jack and Diane” was the second single released off the band’s “American Fool” album. It became Mellencamp’s biggest seller. Eventually, “Jack and Diane” was named one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Replicating that solo and that song, again and again, through 17 years of concert tours with Mellencamp never got old.
“Playing ‘Jack and Diane’ was iconic,” Aronoff said. “When you see 20,000 people air-drumming the drum part you invented and created is pretty gratifying.”
That invention helped keep Aronoff’s job.
As Mellencamp and the band recorded “Jack and Diane,” the song was missing something in the middle. Aronoff was asked to fill the void.
“When I was recording that, that was the song that saved my career,” Aronoff said. “I thought, if I don’t come up with something spectacular on the spot, then I would be replaced. That was my fear, and it all worked out.”
Indeed, it did.
