'Mellencamp' is a pretty out-there surname to begin with, but if both your parents already have it then you may need a little something extra to make yourself stand out. We wonder if 24-year-old Speck Wildhorse Mellencamp thanks his parents John and Elaine for going so far in pursuit of originality?
His father has been known to experiment with his own name, so it's no shock that he also took an unorthodox approach to naming his son - we may know him as 'John Mellencamp' now, but for much of his early music career he was 'Johnny Cougar.' Adding 'wild horse' to his son's name might have been something of a misstep; young Speck has certainly behaved like one in his formative years, running into repeated difficulties with the police. His most recent booking, for drunken and disorderly conduct in 2018, saw him sentenced to twenty-five hours of community service.