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by Seth Rogovoy
STOCKBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 6, 1996 -- After 17 years as a member of the John Cougar Mellencamp band, Kenny Aronoff called it quits earlier this summer. But free agency didn't last long for the superstar rock drummer, who was quickly snatched up by rock singer Melissa Etheridge, one of the hottest hitmakers in heartland rock since the days when John Mellencamp perennially topped the pop charts in the mid-1980s.
Since mid-August, Aronoff has been on the road with Etheridge, on a tour that stops tonight at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany and tomorrow night at the Mullins Center at U. Mass-Amherst -- Aronoff's alma mater. For the time being Aronoff is an official member of Etheridge's band. The current tour lasts through the end of the year, and there is already talk about plans for more projects with Etheridge next spring.
"She's an amazing human being," said Aronoff about Etheridge earlier this week while visiting his parents and his brother in his hometown. "She's very kind. She's an old soul. If people treated human beings the way she treats people, there'd be no wars."
Aronoff doesn't say the same thing about other bandleaders he has worked with. His stint with Mellencamp, though artistically fruitful and commercially successful, was sometimes personally rocky, and with his departure he joins a long, ever-growing list of musicians who formerly worked with the mercurial singer-songwriter.
Over the last few years, Mellencamp has slowed down the pace of his recording projects to about one every two years. His tours have been even rarer. Aronoff was not on a retainer nor did he collect royalties from recordings he made with Mellencamp, so when he was not rehearsing or recording with his bandleader he rented out his skills as a top-flight session drummer to the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, Lyle Lovett, Jon Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, Indigo Girls, Neil Diamond and Elton John. Most recently he completed work on new albums by John Fogerty, Jewel and Joe Cocker.
Tour offers have also been coming Aronoff's way more frequently. He had gone out on the road previously for short stints with the Jefferson Airplane and Marshall Crenshaw. The first half of this year, he played behind Bob Seger on one of the top-grossing tours of the year so far. "I never had so much fun on tour," said Aronoff, who grew up attending concerts at Music Inn and Tanglewood. "There was no fighting. It was fun, totally fun. Everybody got along. The whole night on stage was just smiles between me and Bob. I never experienced that with Mellencamp."
That is not the reason that Aronoff finally left Mellencamp. What precipitated the final break, which fell somewhere between quitting and being fired, was a scheduling conflict. Aronoff had a commitment to work with someone else on a day when Mellencamp wanted him to play for a sales convention. Whenever these sorts of conflicts had come up in the past, the two had been able to work them out, usually in Mellencamp's favor.
"When I took the Seger tour, it was with the understanding that I would take a week off in the middle in order to be with John in the studio," said Aronoff, who plays on Mellencamp's just-released album, "Mr. Happy Go Lucky."
"They shut the whole tour down just for me," said Aronoff. "I also took three days off near the end of the tour to go to Hong Kong to help John promote his record. This one time I couldn't maneuver out of a commitment, and all of a sudden I'm the bad guy."
In the end, Mellencamp laid down an ultimatum: choose between them or me. With no plans for Mellencamp to tour in the short- or long-term, and only a few, sporadic paid dates he could guarantee for things like sales conventions or TV appearances, Aronoff realized it was finally time to make his move.
"After seventeen years, I thought he should at least treat me like a guy who has been there for him for seventeen years," said the Monument Mountain graduate, who studied percussion with Arthur Press of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and played as a student at Tanglewood under Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa among others. "I hung in there a long time with him."
"But I don't regret any of it, not one second. It was an incredible experience musically. I defined my sound. John's music allowed a lot of incredible things to happen for me. It made it possible for me to become who I am. But he's not the only reason I am where I'm at. Bernstein had something to do with it, too. I had something to do with it, too. All the hard work and the practice.
"So I don't regret it. I don't regret anything in my entire life. Everything leads to something. Even when I got kicked out of class at Berkshire Country Day School for being a wise-ass."
For now, Aronoff is thrilled to be working with Etheridge, whom he first met when he performed on four songs off her latest album, "Your Little Secret," recorded last summer.
"It's unique to be in a four-piece band," said Aronoff of his current bandmates, including guitarist John Shanks, whose parents live in Sheffield. "I have the opportunity to strech out and play and do things a lot of people haven't seen me do. And she allows me to do it. Her thing is like, I don't care if you make mistakes, just feel the music and feel the experience, song to song, night to night. It's incredible. It's the way music should be.
"John would get furious. Sometimes he would take all the fun out of it. Melissa is constantly putting the fun back into it. It's back to the high-school, garage-band thing. This is the reason I got into music, for the fun. It's totally fun now."
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