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John Mellencamp knows how fortunate he is to have survived a rock star lifestyle and a heart attack.

“Very simply, luck is thinking you’re lucky, period,” the 70-year-old rocker told People Wednesday while reminiscing on his decades-long music career. “And you’re talking to the luckiest guy you’re ever going to talk to.”

Mellencamp quit drugs and alcohol in 1971. He said that unlike many of his friends and peers, he was able to simply mature out of using them.

“They couldn’t get off the party,” he explained. “There comes a time when you got to go, ‘OK, I’m done with this s–t.’

“It’s funny and attractive to be 25 years old and be someplace high and drunk. But when you get to a certain age, it’s not funny anymore. It’s not cute, not sexy. Nothing good about it.”

The musician admittedly still smokes but is mindful of his overall well-being after suffering a serious health scare in 1994 after a show at Jones Beach in New York.

“I had lots of doctors going, ‘John, your cholesterol’s way too high and you smoke.’ I’d go, ‘F–k it,’” Mellencamp, who began smoking at the age of 14, recalled. “I learned my lesson after I had a heart attack at 42.”

Mellencamp famously recalled the story of his heart attack while smoking a cigarette during a 2015 appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

“The [doctor] looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’ I went nuts,” the “Jack & Diane” singer remembered. “I called him everything in the book. … He said, ‘John, you can say whatever you want to me or act any way you want, but a first-year medical student can tell you you’ve had a heart attack.’”

He went on, “They’d been telling me for years to get on cholesterol medicine, and I would go, ‘Am I all right now?’ And they’d go, ‘Yeah.’ And so, I’d think, ‘Well I’m all right now…’

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“But if I would’ve done what they had told me to do in the first place. … My arms hurt, both arms hurt, and I was more grouchy than normal. I was more bitchy than normal,” he admitted at the time.

Today, the father of five is in a better place, finding the ultimate joy in the simple things.

“All I’ve ever needed was a guitar, motorcycle, some girl to put her arms around my neck and a stereo,” he told People. “That was it. That sounds like real success to me.”

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