John Mellencamp in 1982. By the mid-80s, the rocker had become known as “the voice of the heartland.”

Hurts So Good

Once he made it to the top, the rough-around-the-edges, all-American rock star John Mellencamp found out he was really on the bottom

By Paul Rees

John Mellencamp seems to have stepped out from the pages of a Great American Novel. A grizzled patriarch conjured by Faulkner, perhaps.

Mellencamp, who is 70 this year and a three-times-married father of five, was born with spina bifida, which in the early 1950s was a terminal condition in the vast majority of cases. At six weeks, he underwent a pioneering surgical treatment that saved his life.