*** John Mellencamp

THE BEST THAT I COULD DO 1978-1988

(Mercury)

Listening to the first greatest-hits collection by the artist formerly known as Johnny Cougar is a lot like listening to retro radio any given day of the week. I could certainly survive without hearing "Pink Houses" ever again, but stacked end-to-end these 13 tunes (not counting one new track) offer an impressive reminder of just how hard -- and often -- the Coug hit the charts during the Big '80s. And most of it is pretty fine stuff, too, even if archetypal rock-and-roll rave-ups like "Lonely Ol' Night" sound a tad shopworn after all these years of hourly airings on FM radio.

Initially dismissed as a Springsteen wanna-be penning bubblegum anthems like 1979's insipid "I Need a Lover" (included here), Mellencamp showed remarkable growth as a songwriter as the '80s progressed, learning how to make emotionally mature albums to go with all those hit singles. In fact, nearly half of the tracks here are culled from the singer's two best back-to-back efforts, 1985's Scarecrow and his 1987 masterpiece The Lonesome Jubilee. A decade later, Mellencamp's guileless, autobiographical portraits depicting small-town life and big-time dreams in the American heartland have lost little of their resonance. Maybe that's because these songs aren't rooted in specific circumstance so much as they are universal myth. Either that or it's his killer backing band.

-- Jonathan Perry