The song started with “a little joke about Jack and Diane”, but then the music stopped abruptly. John Mellencamp had just finished the second verse of his smash hit and was clearly nervous about his interaction with the heckler.
“You know what?” he told concertgoers in Toledo, Ohio, last month. “The show is over.”
A video of the singer exiting the stage has been making waves online for weeks. A flurry of right-wing chatter on social media has fueled speculation that Mellencamp may have brought it upon herself by promoting President Biden on her show.
But that wasn't the case.
According to an audio recording provided to the New York Times by Mr. Mellencamp's representatives and an interview with a reporter who covered the March 17th concert of The Blade in Toledo, the exchange appears to have been overshadowed by the heckler Mellencamp. It is shown that the incident began when he became irritated after hearing Mr. Camp's lengthy reminiscences. About his late grandmother. A representative for Mellencamp returned to the stage and resumed the concert minutes after leaving, but declined to comment further.
Mellencamp is an unabashed liberal who has banned several Republican presidential candidates from using her songs at political events and criticized Congress for its response to gun violence. But the interaction with the heckler in Toledo didn't stem from any political commentary happening on stage.
“The words Biden and election never left John Mellencamp's mouth that night,” Jason Weber, the Blade's music director, said in an interview.
Mellencamp, 72, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, shared an anecdote about how his grandmother, who lived to be 100 years old, once warned him: If you don't quit this swearing and smoking all the time, you'll be in heaven. ”
Not everyone appreciated his storytelling. “Play some music!” one concertgoer yelled, prompting a reprimand from Mellencamp, who berated the man. The audience began to murmur, some expressing displeasure at the man's interruption, and others sounding impatient.
At that point on stage, the singer called for help from the security team. “Hey, Joe, please find this guy and meet him after the show,” he said, pointing to one of the security guards. It's unclear whether some of Mellencamp's critics misinterpreted the reference to the Guard as a reference to the president.
Mellencamp suggested cutting the concert short because of the heckling.
Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, harshly criticized the situation online.
“He's been an asshole for a long time,” Walker said of Mellencamp in a social media post Tuesday.
Walker linked to a social media post from Citizen Free Press, a right-wing news aggregation website, that falsely claimed that Heckler and Mellencamp's response was about politics. The site later deleted the post from X and acknowledged the error in its content.
“Corrected,” the paper wrote in another post about X. “The John Cougar Mellencamp video currently going viral has nothing to do with politics or Joe Biden.”
A representative for Mr. Walker did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Even after Citizen Free Press published a correction, right-wing voices continued to criticize Mellencamp for X, and her name continued to trend this week.
On Tuesday, before the correction, one commenter on What you say is true,” he wrote. “They didn't pay to listen to John Cougar Maddow.”
Blade reporter Weber said he shook his head at the level of misinformation online.
“He wasn't preaching politics there,” he said.
Webber said he would be surprised if Mellencamp had any significant following on the far right. “A right-winger who goes to a John Mellencamp concert is like a left-winger who goes to see Ted Nugent,” he said.
He estimated the concert was suspended for about five minutes before Mellencamp returned to the stage. However, the singer did not pick up where he left off.
“He's never done 'Jack & Diane,'” Weber said.
