Robbed hit of the week 2/11/19 - John Mellencamp's "Human Wheels"...

"Human Wheels" - John Mellencamp
from the album Human Wheels (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #48

This week's "robbed hit" comes from heartland rocker John Mellencamp, who started out the 1990s with his eleventh studio album Whenever We Wanted, which spun off five top-20 rock radio hits, with two of them, "Get A Leg Up" and "Again Tonight", both topping that list and reaching the pop top-40. In 1993, John returned with an even more eclectic and layered record, Human Wheels. The raucous track "What If I Came Knocking" was promoted as the first single in the summer of that year, and while it spent two weeks at #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, it never made the pop Hot 100. As the album release came in September, Mellencamp delivered a more restrained, radio-friendly yet deep track for mainstream radio in the title track. "Human Wheels", written by Mellencamp based on a eulogy poem by George Green, was an uptempo take on mortality and aging that wasn't found in the normal pop radio at the time...

While "Human Wheels" spent a week at #2 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, the song stopped just over the halfway mark on the pop Hot 100 in November of 1993. It did manage to slip in a week at #40 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio list as well. Internationally, the single was big in Canada, peaking at #3, while hitting #40 in Australia. Two more singles from the album, "When Jesus Left Bermingham" and "Junior", both made it to #35 on the Mainstream Rock chart, while missing the pop list altogether.

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Here's John performing "Human Wheels" live for a TV special that year...

and again in concert at Penn State in 2007...

Finally, John sitting with Jon Stewart before an acoustic take on the song...