IN THE

Rocker’s longtime band members stick around for the love of music

By Gail Martineau

You might not have heard of them, but you’ve definitely heard Mike Wanchic, Miriam Sturm and Andy York.

The three are longtime band members for John Mellencamp, and have for years traveled alongside the cause-driven heartland rocker with decades of smash hits like Small Town , Pink Houses , Hurts So Good and Jack and Diane .

The group will play the Palace Theatre on Nov. 2.

Wanchic and York play guitar, and Sturm plays violin. All three have stuck with Mellencamp’s camp for so long because of the music, they say.

“This is until the day I die; this is never going to end for us,” Wanchic says. “This is what we do, this is what I do, this is what Miriam does. We’re not going to go back to vocational school and retrain.”

Wanchic, who has been with the band since 1978, got involved with Mellencamp right out of college. He moved from Chicago, where he attended DePaul University, to Bloomington, Ind., to intern at a recording studio. Mellencamp happened to be recording his first demo tape there at the time.

“After hours, I would go in with him (and play) … and I would dub guitar parts on that,” he says. “That ended up morphing into his first album.”

Thirty-three years later, Wanchic is still having the time of his life playing with Mellencamp and, during his down time, managing his Bloomington-based recording studio, Echo Park, and producing albums for the likes of Howie Day and the Black Crowes.

The current tour, No Better Than This, allows the band to expand musically, Wanchic says.

“We’ve rearranged every single song to fit the mode of the moment,” he says. “The hits aren’t exactly played the same. We’ve made it more interesting and updated some of the old licks. It allows us to be much more mature musically and creatively.”

Sturm, who was born in Logan and grew up in Cincinnati, has been with the Mellencamp band since 1996, when she got a call from Wanchic asking if she’d come over to a studio in Bloomington to play for Mellencamp. She recorded a few songs with the group and then was asked to travel to Hong Kong to record.

“To my surprise, they’ve been calling me ever since. … I’m still kind of surprised 15 years later,” Sturm says. “I think if someone had told me, I would have just started laughing.”

Her reason for sticking with the band is the same as Wanchic’s: the musicianship.

“The songs themselves are just … righteous. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to play John’s songs,” Sturm says. “I’ve tired of not a single note or song in 15 years.”

She does think it’s strange, though, that she was picked up for Mellencamp’s band during her one and only musical detour in her life – she studied Gypsy violin music.

York joined the team in 1994, having recorded a few times with Mellencamp and the band in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He has been playing guitar and singing backup vocals with the band since then, and he’s particularly excited about the band’s current tour, he says.

Above: Miriam Sturm and Andy York

Below: Mike Wanchic

Right: John Mellencamp

“It’s sort of an evening with John Mellencamp,” York says. “It’s a sort of different approach to the music.”

York and Mellencamp – along with renowned horror author Stephen King – are working on an entirely different approach to music right now.

York is working on music notation and writing the vocal pieces for Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a thriller-musical to be performed next spring in Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

“John has been writing the music for it for about 10 years now; I’ve been helping him with that,” York says.

Wanchic says it’s the side projects and varying backgrounds that make John Mellencamp’s band what it is and what it has been for 35 years.

“All these cool bands come into my studio,” he says. “I just stretch out and listen to different music to verse myself in new forms. … I bring it back to the fold and offer something new.” cs

Gail Martineau is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at gbishop@pubgroupltd.com.

With Dr. Phil Heit