Songoftheday 12/19/14 - All the leaves are green all my friends are gone, I'm livin' in my hometown I can barely get along...

John Cougar Mellencamp - "Rumbleseat"
from the album Scarecrow (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 4

Today's Song of the Day comes from Indiana-bred rock singer/songwriter John "Cougar" Mellencamp, whose landmark Scarecrow album had already generated four top-40 pop hits with "Lonely Ol' Night", "Small Town", "R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.", and "Rain On The Scarecrow". With that momentum a fifth pop radio single was issued from the album. "Rumbleseat", written and co-produced by the artist, wasn't one of his more remembered songs, but it has a simple charm of equating being stuck in a rural town to being in the back of an old car....

"Rumbleseat" became the fifth and final top-40 pop hit from Scarecrow in August of 1986, while climbing all the way to #4 on the Mainstream Rock chart in Billboard magazine. Internationally, the song only nicked the Australian singles chart at #84.

Scarecrow remains one of my all-time favorite albums (even more so than Born In The U.S.A.), and proof of that is some of the non-single album cuts were even stronger than the hits, with "Minutes To Memories" and "Between A Laugh and A Tear" and "Justice and Independence '85" shoulda-been top-tenners...

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Here's John live on the tour behind Scarecrow when the song was fresh...

Up tomorrow: the return of the Pre-Fab Four.