Rock Legend, 75, Believes He’ll Be ‘Totally Deaf’ By the End of His Tour

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Veteran rocker John Mellencamp is coming forward with a stunning revelation about his health that could impact the future of his career.

During a recent interview, the 75-year-old rocker shared the admission about the severe hearing loss he’d been experiencing

‘I’ll Probably Be Totally Deaf’

Mellencamp and son Hud Mellencamp appeared on the “Nepo Baby!” podcast, where the singer opened up about his hearing.

“I’ll probably be totally deaf by the time the tour’s over,” said Mellencamp, who wrapped the U.S. leg of his Dancing Words Tour in August.

“I wear earplugs and stuff, but I do not ever, will I ever get hearing aids,” he said.

According to Mellencamp, he owes his disdain for hearing aids to his grandmother.

“She said, ‘John, don’t ever get hearing aids because once you get them, you can’t live without them,’” he recalled her once telling him. “She said, ‘If you think chasing around a pair of glasses is a drag, wait till you start chasing around a pair of glasses and some hearing aids.’”

Mellencamp revealed that he suffers from pulsatile tinnitus, which the Cleveland Clinic defines as a “rhythmic swooshing or whooshing noise” heard within one’s head.

“I don’t like going out [to eat] ‘cause I can’t hear,” Mellencamp said.

“Right now, my ears are ringing like crazy and I have pulsatile tinnitus, which is I hear my heartbeat,” he explained. “And we go into a restaurant and it’s just like, ‘Well, I’m out.’ Because I can’t hear anything, because I hear all this noise and stuff and you know, I’m sure people don’t want to keep [yelling] in my face or… so just add tinnitus on top of that and it’s impossible.”

His Early Career Was ‘A Slow Climb’

During his heyday in the 1980s, Mellencamp was a staple on MTV, racking up such radio hits as “Jack & Diane,” “Pink Houses” and “Hurts So Good.”

However, in a recent interview with CNN‘s Kaitlan Collins, Mellencamp recalled a time early in his career when he’d been written off by critics and was dropped by his record label after his debut album, “Chestnut Street Incident,” bombed.

At that point in his career, he was known as Johnny Cougar, the name given him by then-manager Tony Defries, who’d previously managed David Bowie (he later transitioned to John Cougar Mellencamp before dropping the “Cougar” altogether).

“I went through a stage where I was disliked by all the rock critics in the very beginning of my career,” Mellencamp recalled. I figured out that to get past the critics not liking me, I had to go above their head. So I learned how to write pop songs like ‘Hurt So Good,’ you know, or ‘Ain’t Even Done With the Night,’ you know, they were all pop songs.”

“So it was a slow climb,” he added. “I made, like, five albums before I had a hit record.”

It was his 1982 album “American Fool” that proved to be his breakout, but Mellencamp admitted his label had serious reservations when he was making it.

“The record company came down and said, ‘You spent a half-a-million dollars so far on this record, and how many songs you got done?’ And I went, ‘Three.’ And don’t forget, that was a lot of money back then. And so they said, ‘Let’s hear the three songs.’ And the were ‘Hurt So Good,’ ‘Jack & Diane’ and ‘Hold On To.’ And they hated them because they didn’t sound like everything else that was on the radio.”

Threatened with being kicked off the label if he couldn’t come up with a song that record execs deemed to have hit potential, Mellencamp wound up rejigging “Jack & Diane” to feature a drum machine instead of an actual drummer.

“People had not ever heard a song with that sound, except, you know, songs by the Bee Gees and stuff,” Mellencamp said. “They never heard a rock version. So it became my first No. 1 record.”