JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP SCARECROW SUPER DELUXE EDITION BOX SET

John Mellencamp was making waves. Saddled with the stage name "John Cougar" when he came onto the scene in the late1970s, once he began climbing the singles and sales charts, he asserted his artistic identity much more forcefully by crediting his hit October 1983 LP Uh-Huh to John Cougar Mellencamp.

- MIKE METTLER

He did so again on his full-artistic breakthrough album, August 1985's Scarecrow, before dropping the Cougar moniker entirely when the '90s rolled around.

Scarecrow is the LP that catapulted Mellencamp from being known as a brash hitmaker showing flashes of brilliance into the echelon of insightful, observational songwriters to be reckoned with, on par with the best scribes of the rock era-the likes of Robbie Robertson, John Fogerty, and, yes, Bob Dylan. If you paid attention to the Cougar mythos beyond all the MTV-era "Little Bastard" noise, you'd have already picked up the scent in pre-Scarecrow songs like 1979's "Great Mid-West" (from the self-titled John Cougar), the bridge section of American Fool's chart-topping 1982 hit "Jack & Diane," and the defiant slant of Uh-Huh's "Crumblin' Down" coupled with the melancholic, wistful verses of "Pink Houses."

My initial copy of Scarecrow was the 1985 Riva/PolyGram cassette-it was the height of the Sony Walkman era, mind you. The first time I cued up the ostensible title track, "Rain on the Scarecrow," I felt immediately attuned to a world I was learning about firsthand while attending college in a Midwestern city. I was surrounded by the very farmlands and personal hardships Mellencamp was describing. I'm forever transported to the feelings garnered during that firstimpression experience whenever I subsequently played the 1985 Riva/Mercury LP, 1994 Mobile Fidelity UDCD, and 2005 Mercury/ Island CD.