Right, MainMan (DeFries' management company) renamed John Mellencamp into Johnny Cougar and had him record a series of cover versions on his debut, Chestnut Street Incident -- then dropped him when the album flopped.
http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608000805/John-Mellencamp.html
Around this time Mellencamp decided to go to New York City to try to sell himself as a rock star. The demo tape he had been hustling around had not aroused much enthusiasm until it fell into the hands of Tony DeFries, head of MainMan Management, whose most notable client was David Bowie. DeFries saw the future in young Mellencamp. In Esquire, DeFries's associate Jamie Andrews explained it like this, "We felt there was a whole revival of small-town Americanism going on." As DeFries himself hyped it up, "He's so American, the most American artist I've seen since Bob Dylan, and I think he will capture the same kind of thing Dylan did." The one problem DeFries foresaw was that no one would want to buy an album by a guy with a name like Mellencamp. Andrews explained in Seventeen, "We wanted something uniquely American, something hot and wild. Johnny Indiana was one of our choices, Puma, Mustang--but nothing was as hot as Cougar!" Johnny Cougar it was, a name that made Mellencamp absolutely ill. He recalls in Rolling Stone, "I didn't realize it when I started, but when I thought about it--what a ... stupid name. I didn't want to be anybody but John Mellencamp."
