Germano Stays in the Game by Playing It Her Own Way

Lisa Germano got her start in rock ‘n’ roll jumping around her house in Mishawaka, Ind., with her five brothers and sisters, strumming on a tennis racket for an imaginary band called the Jack Beany Benny Club.

Years later, after a lot of work on her follow-through, Germano finally developed the confident creative stroke that would allow her to play real rock on her own.

As Germano tells it, the problem wasn’t with her backhand or forehand (she had long since traded her racket for the violin she plays in John Cougar Mellencamp’s band) but with learning to follow through on songwriting and artistic commitment.

“I never finished anything,” Germano said over the phone recently from Vancouver, B.C. “I had this problem, staying stuck and denying that you’re stuck and that you’re afraid to finish things. I got over this hump, and felt, ‘Wow, this is what I always wanted to do.’ ”

Germano got over the hump in 1990-91 by taking time off from Mellencamp’s band and sinking her own money into her first solo album, “On the Way Down From the Moon Palace.” The do-it-yourself effort was a critical success and led to Germano signing with Capitol Records, which will release her next album, “Happiness,” on June 29.

Now, at 34, she is on her first extended tour as a performer in her own right, as part of the “In Their Own Words” series that brings together a panel of singer-songwriters to talk about their art and take turns playing their songs.

Joining Germano on the “Words” bill tonight at the Coach House are David Baerwald, the Los Angeles-based pop-rock craftsman who first gained notice in the duo David + David, veteran South African rocker Johnny Clegg, and Freedy Johnston, who, like Germano, is about to graduate from independent to major-label ranks.

Germano’s father played the viola in the Chicago Symphony and later made his living as a music teacher. She took up the violin at 7, also studied the piano, and grew up in a home where classical music shared time on the stereo with the Beatles and the Jackson 5. At 16, Germano began playing in bluegrass and jazz bands while nurturing a rock ‘n’ roll dream.

“I wanted to be David Lindley,” she recalled, referring to the jack-of-all-strings who emerged as one of the session aces of Southern California rock during the 1970s. Lindley’s dramatic fiddle intro to the Youngbloods’ classic, “Darkness, Darkness,” remains one of the all-time high points of rock ‘n’ roll violin.

“I thought, ‘I gotta go to Los Angeles and be in a rock band and meet Jackson Browne,’ ” Germano said, her husky speaking voice a fair indicator of a singing style that sounds like somebody coping (albeit quite melodiously) with the effects of a chest cold.

“But I gave up that dream and just quit playing music from 20 to 23.” Germano said she dabbled with painting and designing clothes during that period but kept running up against self-imposed roadblocks.

“I had decided I would never be good or successful at anything. I’d get very self-destructive and tear things up that I’d made,” she said. “I tried to be creative, but I kept stopping myself.”

She gravitated back to music and got a gig playing country music in the house band of the Little Nashville Opry in Nashville, Ind.--mainly because it paid better than her previous job as a waitress.

“I hated the job. I had to wear ‘Hee-Haw’ outfits and copy violin parts note for note,” she said. Then Kenny Aronoff, Mellencamp’s drummer, dropped in to spend a summer playing in a ‘Hee-Haw’ outfit so he could hone his country licks.

When Mellencamp needed a fiddler to record an acoustic version of his hit, “Small Town,” for the B side of a single, Aronoff led him to Germano.

“I showed up (at the studio) in my ‘Hee-Haw’ outfit after the Opry thing. They got a laugh. But John liked the way I played what he was hearing in his head.” Mellencamp invited Germano to join his band for the 1986 “Scarecrow” tour.

Being vaulted suddenly into such a high-profile gig might seem like the stuff of show-biz fairy tales--but for Germano it turned into an ordeal.

“It was a total nightmare, that tour,” she said. Mellencamp’s band wasn’t accustomed to having a fiddler in its midst, so she had trouble fitting in musically--a task complicated by the fact that she couldn’t hear herself on stage, due to the sound crew’s unfamiliarity with mixing fiddle parts. Germano said she didn’t fit in off stage, either.

“There was real hostility (between her and Mellencamp’s other backing players). We really didn’t like each other. I would go to John’s dressing room and just cry and cry,” she recalled.

“ ‘Nobody likes me, I can’t do this.’ He said, ‘You’re here for a reason, because I hired you.’ He would say, ‘I want you on the next record; that’s the reason you’re here.’ ”

Mellencamp’s faith was rewarded--and Germano’s place in his band was secured--by her prominent contributions to that record, “The Lonesome Jubilee,” (1987) and its successor, “Big Daddy” (1989), which both achieved a satisfying melding of bracing heartland rock and acoustic folk and country.

Germano said that she had been driven to seek psychotherapy as a way of coping with her dismal “Scarecrow” tour experience, and that one of the payoffs was learning to face some of the longstanding issues that had kept her from developing creative follow-through.

While Mellencamp took a long vacation from touring (1989-91), Germano joined Simple Minds for a long European tour, then set out to make her own album in 1990. After going a year without income and spending $12,000 to put out “Moon Palace,” she wound up working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Indianapolis.

“It’s a myth that rock ‘n’ roll people have a lot of money,” she said. “They get a lot of money when they (work), then they have almost nothing. There’s no security.”

Germano didn’t mind the restaurant job. “The only bad thing was that the owners were proud to have Johnny Cougar’s fiddle player, and they would tell people.” Germano didn’t care for the attention: “ ‘Just let me make a living and shut up.’ ”

At the time, during 1991, Mellencamp was working on his album, “Whenever We Wanted,” a stripped-down record he made without Germano. When he found out what she was up to, “he called me at the restaurant. He said, ‘What the (expletive) are you doing waiting tables?’ I laughed. ‘I have to make a living, and it’s nice of you to be concerned.’ ”

Mellencamp told Germano that she would have a spot in his band on his upcoming tour. With a steady musical income in the offing, she quit the restaurant job.

Shortly before setting out with Mellencamp last year, Germano landed her deal with Capitol. The resulting album, “Happiness,” explores the power struggles in relationships and traces a woman’s efforts to stand on her own.

She lightens the mood by injecting playfully sarcastic asides between lines or by recasting “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” as a grungy, punk-blues sung in a druggy voice.

“You feel happiness when you’re being yourself, and it goes away when you give up control,” Germano said, tracing the album’s core theme.

Musically, Germano defies the expectation that she might share a common sound with her famous boss. Only two tracks, “You Make Me Want to Wear Dresses” and “Energy,” have the straightforward, heartland-rock kick associated with Mellencamp.

On other songs, Germano ranges from an art-folk feel reminiscent of Suzanne Vega, to adventurous hues and vocal inflections that call to mind such college-rock faves as Belly and the Breeders.

Still, Germano said, her record company decided to emphasize the heartland-rock connection by choosing “You Make Me Want to Wear Dresses,” a deceptively cheerful-sounding song about giving up autonomy in a relationship, as the album’s first single and video.

“We did a version of ‘Dresses’ that’s more rocky (than the Celtic-hued album version). It was too pop. The A&R; guy was saying, ‘That’s the Mellencamp sound, and people will recognize you.’ But that’s not what I’m doing. The last thing I want to do is copy that. I had to beg to put the version I like on the record,” she said.

Germano, who recently finished studio work on Mellencamp’s next album and expects to tour with him again, said she has no thoughts of success on his level.

“I’m not going to be somebody real famous. I don’t even have a desire to do that. If I can do my thing and get lucky and have an audience, I’ll just always do it when I’m not working with John. If this record isn’t successful and I get dropped, I’ll just keep doing it on my own.”

* “In Their Own Words,” with David Baerwald, Johnny Clegg, Lisa Germano and Freedy Johnston, is tonight at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50. (714) 496-8930.