…John Mellencamp recently announced the Dancing Words tour, a summer trek through America in July and August that’ll focus on hits he’s not played in a while to audiences in outdoor amphitheaters. A few months before that, Cherry Red’s Lemon imprint issue an exciting new compilation that takes things back to the beginning of Mellencamp’s career – under a different name, and with some enticing unreleased material.
American Dream (The Mainman Recordings 1976- 1977) is a 2CD set that’ll feature both albums he recorded for the MCA-distributed Mainman under the somewhat confounding sobriquet “Johnny Cougar.” Chestnut Street Incident (1976) and The Kid Inside (recorded in 1977 but unreleased for five years) will be accompanied by…