The boy looked at Johnny and threw up But RockabillyBlues and SoulMan Steve Hooker keeps the faith 

"Oh, it's over, and it's not coming back," John Mellencamp told USA Today of Rock'n'Roll, in 2010. 

Per that paper, the cobbler of cookie-cutter Corporate Rock tedium likened the allegedly-fading Rock'n'Roll to the '20s - '40s Big-Band era. 

Just as iconic Big Band leaders are today largely absent from mainstream conversation, Mellencamp theorized, so too one day will be most Rock'n'Rollers.

"When they talk about Rock'n'Roll in a couple generations, they're not going to talk about me. They're going to talk about the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, maybe Jimi Hendrix."

Mr. Mediocrity didn't so much as acknowledge the recent-decades Swing bounce-back. It has seen legions of contemporary zoot devotees digging the hot/cold stylings of originals like Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey -- not to mention fresh practioners such as Les Greene, the Jive Aces, Si Cranstoun, and Jumpin' Up.

(Iron-poor-blood Mellencamp's assertion that he and his records would soon be out of the public consciousness was the sole time he was correct.)

I remembered that in the late '70s, Alex Harvey opined that one walking through a jungle would be more likely to come across a photo of Elvis than of the President. True.

At the time of Mellencamp's USA Today interview, I contacted English RockabillyBlues and SoulMan Steve Hooker. The singer/guitar specialist had championed living-out-loud Rock'n'Roll for decades, gigging and recording both on his own and with pegged personages like Robert Gordon, Wilko Johnson, Boz Boorer, Johnny Thunders, and Levi Dexter. 

I asked after Steve's perspective on Mellencamp's bleak prediction. He had at hand a thought arsenal:

"[Mellencamp is] wrong in the first instance," Steve began. "Because of the internet and other modern recourses, people today are far more aware of the origins of roots music than they were in the '50s and '60s. I doubt if many teenagers over here knew the Beatles and the Stones were covering Arthur Alexander -- or that Dylan dug Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps -- any more than some American kids realized Pat Boone had pissed Little Richard off big time!

"John wouldn't get that in the same way as I do. I can go out of an afternoon, sit in a bar, and talk to ordinary people about this stuff. I can tell you their taste and knowledge is in advance of newspaper writers and media personalities."

Steve was at that moment putting together 2010's Before the Rooster Crows. That disc proved a beat-trove of slide-guitared dirty fun, in the way taboo Rock'n'Roll (in its varied and thorny/horny countenances) sounded from its rumbustious genesis. 

And the way that, Mellencamp's dismalness to one far side, it can still come over.

(Somewhere, the boy looks away from Johnny Has-Been in perfectly appropriate disgust.)

From small dumb things Mama, big dumb things one day come