Amidst stomping drums and cutting guitars, he sets the scene with brutal efficiency in the first few lines: “Scarecrow on a wooden cross, blackbird in the barn/Four hundred empty acres that used to be my farm.” That sense of heartbreak mixes with potent anger as Mellencamp inhabits the harried protagonist with uncanny authenticity in one of his most memorable vocal efforts. We did our research and wrote this song – Reagan had been using grain against the Soviet Union and all sorts of other things. We couldn’t figure out why they were disappearing. He said, “I don’t know why these towns are going out of business” – towns like Freetown and Dudleytown, Indiana. “Our songs always came about the same way: talk around the kitchen table,” Mellencamp recalled. Mellencamp wrote the song with frequent collaborator George Green, and he explained their process in an interview with Rolling Stone. The song, “Rain On The Scarecrow”, led off the album, and although it wouldn’t do much on the charts, it holds up as well if not better than any of those hits some thirty years after the fact. The album, Scarecrow, was released around the same time as the Farm Aid show and would be a massive hit with a bevy of smash singles. Earlier that year during sessions for his new album, he laid down a fierce, downcast track written from the perspective of a man pushed to the brink by the pressures of making a living via agriculture. But Mellencamp, an Indiana native, didn’t need Dylan’s comments to make him aware of the dire problems that farmers faced.
John Mellencamp was one of the organizers of that event along with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. In September of that year, the first ever Farm Aid was held in Champaign, Illinois. Yet Dylan’s appearance yielded something positive when he made a between-songs comment about the need to give some money to struggling farmers. At the historic Live Aid concert in 1985, Bob Dylan’s brief set was a bit of mess, a shambolic, out-of-tune effort backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
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