I’m not sure why I’m so obsessed with pointing out anomalies in forty-year-old rock videos, but I figured that after all these decades, I finally have a soapbox from which I can make them known. These likely-high-on-cocaine directors thought that they were pulling the wool over our eyes, and we can’t let them get away with the ruse forever. A little while back, I looked at such a gross transportation inconsistency in a Huey Lewis video, but there are many more. One in particular involves a certain “heartland rocker” with imagery that seems quite at odds with the lyrics of his song, including an automotive enigma that at first seems to make no sense.
By his own admission, Indiana native John “Cougar” Mellencamp is a bit of an ornery sumbitch, but you can’t deny that his rock hits make up the fabric of our GenX Reagan-era youth. The videos also gave us East or West Coasters a glimpse of life in the center of the nation.
With songs like Little Pink Houses and Jack and Diane, he really doubles down on the blue-collar middle America visuals that appeared hourly on MTV at the time.
These images naturally included all sorts of domestic iron like Chevy “box” trucks and Camaros.
They’re well-done visuals of bucolic rural America that you rarely saw in rock videos, so much so that conservative political campaigns wanted to use them as promotional materials.
Obviously, staunchly liberal Mellencamp protested. Like Springsteen with Born in the U.S.A., he marveled at how they totally misinterpreted the song’s meaning about the seemingly futile plight of salt-of-the-earth middle America that missed out on much of the go-go eighties, particularly farmers that Mellencamp spearheaded “Farm Aid” for.
It’s not an overdone caricature: when I moved to Illinois years later, I realized that his videos were about the most accurate interpretation of this area that I’d seen (and that The Blues Brothers was the most true-to-life depiction of Chicago). Well, there was one notable exception.
His 1985 album Scarecrow is a collection of tunes primarily about the so-called heartland, including a track called “Small Town.” In fact, he sings that phrase 18 times in three minutes (actually “small” is uttered 19 times and “town” is sung 20).
Mellencamp hails from Seymour, Indiana, which is a classic small town in anyone’s book, but during the video, John and his band are posed in front of a sign outside of Bloomington, Indiana. This was where John was supposedly living at the time, and, just on population alone, it’s a bit of a stretch to dub this place a “small town.”
Big-city snobs often tend to unfairly characterize tiny Midwestern locales as culture- and diversity-free fly-over wastelands full of uneducated, low-skilled laborers. As a scenic home to Indiana University with a vibrant art community, Bloomington is very, very much none of those things. Seriously, within a three-block area in Bloomington, you could have a Tibetan meal (Anyetsang’s), maybe some Turkish pies (Turkuaz café), or even Burmese noodles (Kimu), just to name a few.
The fact that Bloomington might be a poor choice to show for an archetypal “small town” could have been hidden to most people on the American coasts who never ventured inland (like me as a kid in 1985), except for one mistake. During filming of the last scene of the video, the director cuts the scene with the absolute wrong car in the shot: a white US-spec Peugeot 504 sedan.
There are plenty of vehicles that are the antithesis of a “small town” car, but a French-built diesel sedan is on a different level that even surpasses Saabs. Typically diesel-powered with a sublime ride and excellent build quality, it was a prime choice for college deans or doctors who could afford a costly sedan but couldn’t justify the immense expense of a Mercedes. Despite the positive aspects, they typically floundered in America with sales of around 10,000 to 20,000 cars a year before throwing in the towel in 1991.
It’s absolutely the last car anyone in a traditional “real” small town would ever own and drive. You couldn’t even say that the car was someone “passing through” since Peugeot owners would likely never even venture off the freeway into a typical tiny hamlet for fear of the place lacking proper wine or imported beers.
Making the video, if they’d just waited a few more minutes for a Ford “Dentside” or a Nova to drive by instead, we never would have known that John was filming in a place with several Indonesian restaurants. Most people would have bought the whole “small town” thing; he could have gotten away with it if not for some pesky young car geek like me watching his video.
After forty years, the world finally knows the truth. Anyway, Mellencamp resides less than four hours from me; if I get my ass kicked in the next few weeks, you’ll know who probably did it.
Top graphic image: Riva/Mercury Records (screenshot)
There are plenty of eccentric people in small towns, availability of service be damned.
Maybe it’s a New England thing, but small towns are where I’ve seen the most non-exotic oddball cars. There’s always some iconoclast who refuses to buy one of the Standard Universal Vehicles everyone else has.
Stellantis/Chrysler owns Peugeot now, so it’s American now LOL
I dunno… I think it’s not that crazy to run into something like an old Pug 504 in a small town.
Truly improbable cars would be a Bugatti, Ferrari or Lambo.
That old Pug is… good enough for me…
In my vid there’s Peugot
Driving right thru my small town
Not even a small town, but it’s good enough for me
Hey, could be a retired NYC taxi.
I’ve lived in small midwest towns for most of my 55 years. I’ve never seen a Peugeot 504 sedan in my entire life.
I drove with my wife to visit her Grandfather in White South Dakota from Maine. We pulled onto his farm and he walked over in coveralls with his hands in his pockets and walked sternly around my 1995 GTI VR6 one full lap and then grumbled: “is the motor still in the back?” RIP Grandpa H. Love that guy! Total character and full of piss and vinegar. I learned where my wife gets her stubborn streak.
♫ I was born in a medium-size college town…♫
Taught to write theses in a medium-size college town…
Beware of Camp John Cougarmellen
He could have used a Cougar. It was right there [facepalm emoji]
Obviously a US serviceman bought it while deployed in Europe and brought it back with him when he returned to the small town he grew up in.
Yup – following Dad’s footsteps on the beaches of Normandy.
Plus you can run it on tractor fuel.
Our 1985 505 made its way from Colorado to rural Oregon, so not that unusual to see a Peugeot in the wild. Farmers loved the diesel Pugs and mercs because they could burn untaxed fuel from their own tanks.
I feel like the key here is Oregon.
You are correct , we pulled the 505 from a lhama pasture.
Geez. You just mentioned it’s not dim-witted and backward fly-over country, noting such things as the availability of Tibetan food and others, and you complain about a French car? That’s just more culture.
Okay, so you mention all these things that Bloomington has that make it not such an archetypal “small town”, like the Tibetan, Burmese, and Turkish restaurants, but do you know if those were there when this video was made? Someone from Bloomington should chime in here, because maybe they were there, but I’m going to guess probably not. What I do know is that seeing a Peugeot on any American road back in the 80s was probably not all that uncommon, considering they were actually selling cars here then. You’re much less likely to see them on the roads now, since the newest ones are 35 years old. I can count on one had the number of Peugeots that I’ve seen driving around in the last 10 years, and I live in a large metro area.
I must disagree. Plenty of midwestern small towns have small liberal arts colleges. those colleges have professors who favor quirky European cars, and they’re as much a part of the small town fabric as anyone else.
No mention of the Pink Houses contest – THAT’S how huge he was at the time (and how few adults there were in the room at MTV).
Let’s face it, it was some Indiana University professor, likely English department.
And I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight given who’s gonna be coming at you for “University of Indiana”
Nobody does contests like that anymore, seems like.
Back in the 60s in rural Minnesota as a farm kid getting ready to go to college, my dad briefly owned a Renault Dauphine.
I posit that, based on this admittedly small sample, weird little French sedans aren’t too out-of-character for a farming anthem video.
Did I read this article right that “It’s not authentic small-town American because there’s an imported brand here?”
I had a friend from the Appalachians (a half-hour from the nearby small town which, itself, was an hour from the next actual city) who, many years ago, proudly said that he owned the only Japanese brand car in the whole area and that people judged him for it (an old Nissan 240sx iirc).
My definition of “small town” is WAY different from some of you! I grew up in between towns of 87 and 234 people. The “big town” 30 miles away had a state university, and a population of 10,000! Bloomington would be a big city to me!
Grandpa ran a body shop in a neighboring small town (about 425 people at the time), and would NOT work on German or Japanese cars. He never talked about the war, but he was obviously still affected by it. I do recall a Volvo being in the shop once, maybe neutral countries were OK?
Small town represent! Back in the day my father came from a town of about 820 people – its highwater mark, actually – and my mother from a bustling metropolis of 2500, and they met in an even larger “city” of 5000.
Now I live in a town of 1600 people. I like it small. It’s quiet.
And, of course, in China, the definition of a small town is probably any place with less than half a million residents. They would likely see Pittsburgh as a bucolic country village
Where I live now is 1100 people. It’s just about perfect. We have a Casey’s, a Dollar General, a grocery store, a hardware store and a couple of bars/restaurants. Just enough to take care of needs. For culture, Lawrence, KS is 30 minutes away! 🙂
I wonder if he would have worked on a Chevy Metro, FWD Chevy Nova, Ford Festiva, Mercury Villager or Dodge Colt.
He didn’t really get a chance. He passed in 85. I was just 12 at the time. But, hanging out in that shop on Saturdays helped get me interested in cars.
Pre-’85 any Fiestas your dad might have encountered would almost certainly have been English or Spanish in origin. I don’t think second-gen Fiestas came over but I remember seeing two first-gen in the suburbs of Washington DC in the late 70s, early 80s.
I also grew up in a town of about 200 and have high [low?] standards about what constitutes a small town. Anything in the ten-thousands would have fallen into the “big city where we go once a month to stock up on groceries” category.
Yeah, having grown up in a town of 2,500, I feel like 10,000 is the cutoff after which you aren’t truly a small town anymore
I grew up in a small town in the midwest in the 80s and early 90s. This would have been an oddball for sure, but not unheard of. Someone’s weird uncle or cousin would show up with a “weird foreign car” they picked up under sketchy circumstances out of town. It would inevitably end up sitting in the driveway not running.
First of all, when the video was filmed I was living in central Indiana. Bloomington was a much different place then than it is now, and the tension between the “town and gown” was palpable (see the movie “Breaking Away” as an example). This was the case in any of the Indiana towns that hosted a university of any size. I went to university in a town that was even smaller than Seymour. And faculty members were driving Peugeots.
The 504 was on sale until 1991? Madness.
no, Peugeot was in the US market until 1991. “The last model year for official sales of the Peugeot 504 in the United States was 1983, after which it was fully replaced in American showrooms by the newer Peugeot 505.”
The 505s did pretty well, considering – but when the 405 was introduced in the US in 1988, the interior was a palpable step down in quality and design from the 505, and sales fell off a cliff.
The 405 wasn’t meant to replace the 505, it was downmarket of it in Europe as well. It’s main competitors there were the VW Passat, Ford Sierra, Opel Vectra. In America it flopped because it cost too much more than Japanese competitors like the Accord and Camry and didn’t offer much for the money; VW struggled with the Passat as well even though they priced the B3 more in line with those compared to having shot for the moon with the B2 (Quantum).
“The 405 wasn’t meant to replace the 505″
And yet it did.
Au contraire, the 505 remained on sale in the US alongside the 405 until Peugeot pulled out in ’91.
Sedan production came to an end in 1989 while Wagon production continued – similar to how 504 production came to an end.
Sedan sales – which were PRV V6s only by this time – continued in the US to 1990 – clearing out old stock.
4 cylinder DL, S and turbo 505 sedans were replaced by the 405 DL, S and Mi 16 models.
Yes, and the higher-end 505s were replaced by the FF 605, also using the PRV V6. Sort of like how Volvo replaced its RWD cars in the late ’90s by a host of FWD P2-platform cars.
The 504 was on sale until 2006 (in Nigeria)
Madness was on sale until 1986. THE Madness was on sale until 1988.
Madness was
on salebrilliant until 1986.This was not my favorite article. As a long time Bloomington resident and Indiana University grad, a few corrections/observations:
1. Indiana University. Not “University of Indiana.”
2. Bloomington is definitely a small town, especially in summer when the students are gone.
3. There’s a French restaurant in downtown Bloomington whose owners, for decades, drove two Peugeot sedans, which were typically parked out in front of the restaurant. So having a Peugeot in the framing shot for Bloomington rings remarkably true to the idiosyncrasies of this specific small town.
Overall just don’t get the feeling that a lot of fact checking went into this article. A shame, because Autopian usually does better.
As a Hoosier myself, there was way too much cringe to make it through all the way to the end.
I’m not about to argue whether or not Bloomington is a small town (then or now), I’m also not going to argue about whether or not Peugeots were a thing here in the 80s.
The video itself is perfectly cromulent.
Torch articles are often more op-ed than reporting. Whimsy and vibes over hard facts here, and I think that’s fine.
I don’t think any flagship university town is ever a small town. Saying it is when some of the 48000 or so students are gone for a couple of months is silly. Sure it’s small if you just remove a ton of people. Any university town has too much turnover of population, too many people from different places, and to broad a spread of jobs to really ever be a “small town”.
*edit: not torch! Sorry, read about an out of place euro car and just assumed. The bishop also is vibes and whimsy. He’s employed to literally make stuff up most of the time.
Having grown up with him, I can ASSURE you he is neither Vibes nor Whimsy. In general, only Mercedes is likely to give him a run for his money on research.
No Vibes at all in this article – that would REALLY ruin the setting anywhere if it’s supposed to be 1985, or anytime before fall 2001 (or was it a spring intro?).
I just wish we would have gotten the Isuzu Whimsy here in the US.
We did, just not under that name.
Chevy Spectrum 5dr – another attempt | This time the AI, as … | Flickr
I’m not sure why they felt they needed a different name for the 5-door hatchback when the 3-door hatch and 4-door sedan. Other than the fact there actually wasn’t one and this is a fictional car that didn’t exist (but should’ve).
Damn GM! They even badge engineer fictional cars!
I definitely stand corrected on the “small town” aspect! Appreciate all the perspectives provided in the many comments on that.
Do you REALLY want to piss off a guy with a wild big cat in his name?
He only called himself “Johnny Cougar” at the start of his career because he thought that “Mellencamp” was too hard to pronounce.
He was wrong.
It was his manager, Tony DeFries, who insisted on it, John Mellencamp always hated the name Cougar and used it reluctantly. DeFries thought Mellencamp was unmarketable
So was Johnny Cougar’s first album.
Did you hear what he did behind the Tastee-Freez???
Another Midwest misconception! A Chilly Dog is a frozen treat (Slush Puppy). A Chili Dog is a hot dog with chili on it!
Apparently Slush Puppy is also regional (we have Icee and generic “slushy” down here though) but that made me google it which lead me to this reddit refutation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theregulationpod/comments/1jezot1/sorry_eric_but_he_really_is_sucking_on_chili_dogs/
Looks like it truly is a chili dog and not a slushy.
Either way, it’s a food item, and not something dirty! Now, the Bobby Brooks line, that’s dirty! 🙂
I wish that I could like this more than once.