Dan Hughes' Musical Journey - 2009

Indiana
Sept. 14, 2009

When you talk about Indiana, oddly enough it’s one of the few places, referring to Indianapolis, that I don’t think I’ve attended a concert.

What I have had the pleasure of doing is seeing their native son, John Mellencamp, a couple of times. I saw John Mellencamp perform at the Buddy Holly Tribute in Cleveland.

He brought his band, and the thing that stood out to me about Indiana’s native son was first of all his love for basketball. When Bobby Knight coached back at Indiana, he was a constant visitor to those games, he has a great love for basketball.

But when I saw him and his band perform at this Buddy Holly Tribute at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I was around enough to hear some stories about what he does with his band. I thought it was interesting that every year, his band is paid a certain amount more per player if they learned another musical instrument to play.

I’ve always been fascinated by that concept of improvement. It’s not just the band going out and performing the music with the instruments that they’re proficient in; he challenges them to take their musical abilities, and expand them out of the box a little bit.

I just thought that was so entertaining, I’ve heard of that a lot in music, but I think it’s just incredibly insightful.

Think about it, he creates music with these musicians over a lot of years, and he’s asking them to expand a little bit in a way that influences him. I just think that was an incredible, insightful, motivating thing for the leader of the band to do.

For this musical journey I may still be looking for that first concert in Indianapolis, but I certainly have been influenced by John Mellencamp’s philosophy as the leader of his band.