by: Drew DeSilver; pages 54-60

There she goes again! Natalie Merchant, lead singer and lyricist for the group 10,000 Maniacs, is on stage at Chicago's Vic Theatre, whirling and waving her arms and dancing like a dervish in the throes of some indescribable ecstasy. Her long brown dress swirls about her as she spins, while the other Maniacs (only four, not 9,999) play behind her. When Merchant finally slows down and leans into the microphone for the song's next verse, the standing-room-only crowd settles back to take in one of the freshest voices in pop music.

Stage mannerisms, to be sure, are nothing new in rock. Elvis Presley's swiveling hips still define him to his legions of greying fans, and the Who just wouldn't have been the Who without Pete Townshend ritually destroying his guitar. But Merchant's gyrations are different from the more choreographed antics of other singers. She's more spontaneous and natural about it all; when she gets caught up in the music and the moment, her graceful pirouettes seem to be an attempt to merge herself into the song and become one with the guitars and the piano.

In between songs, though, the audience gets glimpses of a different Natalie Merchant - one whose speaking voice is closer to a whisper than a clarion bell. This Natalie is quiet, almost shy, as she reminisces about growing up in a small town in upstate New York or expresses wonder at her new-found fame. The baggy clothes combine with her small frame to make her seem more innocent, more vulnerable.

And then there's the Natalie Merchant that shows through her song lyrics which range from an open letter to Jack Kerouac (chronicler of the "Beat Generation" of the '50s) to a deceptively alluring song about a terminally depressed woman. ("Pull me out of this four poster dull torpor pulling downward. For it's such a long time since my better days. I say my prayers nightly this will pass away.") This is the Merchant who doesn't own a television but who reads voraciously, writes songs about illiteracy and is concerned about the decline of the American education system; the committed vegetarian who performed last summer at a benefit for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; the hometown girl who volunteers at the local Girls Club when she's not on the road.

Of course, all those Merchants are all the same person: the whirling dervish, the modest small-town girl and the well-read activist. Although several women artists have burst onto the popular music scene in the last few years, Natalie Merchant stands out as much for the strength of her convictions as for the quality of the Maniacs' music. It's reassuring to know that not every rock star (a term Merchant isn't quite comfortable with) is obsessed with filling bigger arenas and selling more records and T-shirts. After the release of In My Tribe in 1987, Merchant said: "It would be very nice if the album gets a lot of radio play, but I can't weigh my value as a human being on that. I think we're more. interested in moving people than we are in moving units."

Merchant, 25, is the antithesis of a brash young pop star. She is reserved, almost introverted at first, but as the interview progresses she sounds more comfortable and speaks more freely. Merchant is very much a storyteller, both in her songs and in person, and she likes to relate tales about her life and experiences (occasionally punctuated by a wry chuckle). Her short stature, bobbed hair and the long, baggy dresses she favors mean she is almost inevitably described as "waiflike."

Along with most of the other Maniacs, Merchant hails from Jamestown, N.Y., a city of 35,000 about an hour and a half south of Buffalo. For more than 125 years Jamestown has been a major manufacturing center of wood furniture; you can still get a degree in woodworking from Jamestown Community College. "When I was growing up, the town was the center of the universe, like home towns always are when you're a kid," Merchant recalls. "In 1974 we won an 'All-America City' award, and it made everybody in school feel proud."

Merchant's life never quite matched those picture-perfect images, though. Her parents divorced when she was 7, and as she grew up, she realized that Jamestown suffered from the same problems as every other city, compounded by rising unemployment as the furniture companies shut down or moved elsewhere. Years later, Merchant recalled those harder times in a song she wrote about one of those companies, Maddox Table. The retired worker in the song describes his job ("Then I was forever pulling slivers, rubbed the sawdust always deeper in my eye, varnish vapor that could linger on my skin"). Few of Merchant's songs are based on real people or events, and she wrote Maddox Table without anyone particular in mind. "But I met an old man who used to work at Maddox Table," she says. "I told him I'd written a song about the company, and I gave him a copy of the record. I never thought I'd meet someone like the person in the song."

In 1979, when she was 16, Merchant made several changes in her life. One was becoming a vegetarian. "I quit high school and went to college. I was liberating myself from a lot of the strict habits I'd been brought up with, and that included my eating habits," she says. Friends who were already vegetarians introduced her to the idea. "Since then I've discovered whole new worlds of nutrition and diet, ecology, medicine - traditions that have been built up through centuries and that all touch upon vegetarianism."

At first, her family wasn't thrilled with her conversion to a meatless diet. "They'd make meat dishes and say, 'Eat around it, Natalie,' " she says with a laugh. "They couldn't understand why I was so concerned about it." Since that time, however, Merchant's stepmother has become vegetarian, and her father has cut down on meat because of his heart condition.

None of the other Maniacs are vegetarians, which has caused some strains among them. "It's a strange schism," Merchant says. "My diet has been a bone of contention in the band for years. Robert (Buck, the guitarist) was a vegetarian when I met him, but now he eats anything. I've never understood vegetarians who go back to eating meat."

While attending college (she earned an associate's degree) and working a series of odd jobs, including a stint at a whole-grain bakery, Merchant joined her first band, Still Life. Three members of that band later went on to form 10,000 Maniacs. Merchant says the name was the result of a "frivolous gesture": "We'd had revolving names for a while." (Two of them were Dick Turpin's Ride to York and Men of the Arctic.) "We were doing a Halloween show and we decided to call ourselves 10,000 Maniacs after a '50s horror movie, and the name stuck."

From the beginning, Merchant recalls, the Maniacs differed from other bands playing around town. "A lot of local bands played covers [versions of other people's songs] of Top-40 bands or classic rock songs, and we weren't quite like that." The early Maniacs did covers, all right, but they played songs by "alternative" European bands like Joy Division and reggae groups like the Mighty Diamonds, groups that few in Jamestown had ever heard of. The college radio station passed a lot of imported and new-music albums to the Maniacs, who eagerly incorporated these songs into their playlist. But before long they began writing their own material: peppy, pop-folk numbers flavored with bluegrass and the Italian folk music Merchant had grown up with.

In 1982 the Maniacs recorded a minialbum, Human Conflict Number Five, on their own Christian Burial label and sent it to college radio stations; the band did shows wherever the record went over well. Most of the time, though, they stayed on the Jamestown-Buffalo club circuit and didn't seem likely to be anything more than a pretty good local band. "I was pretty green," Merchant says of those early days.

The first sign that the Maniacs' music might have some appeal outside the Northeast came in 1983, after the band released its debut album, Secrets of the I Ching. John Peel, an influential British dj, took a liking to one of the songs on the album, My Mother the War, and gave it heavy play on his radio show. The song became a moderate hit, and on the strength of it the Maniacs toured England. While there they recorded their first major-label album, The Wishing Chair, which included a remake of My Mother the War and combined lilting, neo-folk tunes with lyrics about economic injustice, mean older brothers and the pleasures of visiting cemeteries.

In My Tribe, which was released in 1987, spawned a genuine hit single, Like the Weather, and suddenly 10,000 Maniacs was a commercial as well as a critical success. The songs were tighter and more focused than on The Wishing Chair, the catchy melodies even more infectious, and Merchant's voice even more evocative. Part of that success was due to the band's pulling together after the departure of rhythm guitarist John Lombardo in July 1986, and part was due to producer Peter Asher, who has worked with pop singers Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. Whatever the reasons, In My Tribe has gone gold (Elektra Records does not release sales figures) and was No. 41 on Rolling Stone's list of the top 200-selling albums of 1988.

When I spoke to Merchant, she and the other Maniacs were holed up in a recording studio in Woodstock, N.Y., in the middle of recording their third album for Elektra Records. The album, which is scheduled to be released this spring, will have somewhat more of an edge than In My Tribe, although Merchant declined to be more specific. "It'll sound as different from In My Tribe as that sounded from The Wishing Chair," Merchant says. "The musicianship has progressed from album to album, and I've refined my lyric writing to make [the lyrics] more understandable at first listen."

When the Maniacs are on the road, Merchant likes to sit in the back of the bus with a large bag of rice cakes, apples, peanut butter and other snacks and munch all day. "The boys make fun of me and say, 'She's grazing again,'" she laughs. Merchant says she seldom has trouble finding vegetarian meals in strange cities. "I have a technique I learned from Mr. Stipe [Michael Stipe, the singer for R.E.M. and a former beau]. You get to a hotel. You find the Yellow Pages and look under H for health food stores. If the store's too far away you call and ask someone there where to get good vegetarian food. They're always very helpful."

Merchant and the other Maniacs enjoy their new-found success but haven't been all that affected by it. "It's made us all very proud," Merchant says. "It's like graduating from school and getting a job you respect and that you do well. We were always confident that what we were doing would be of interest to someone, and now we know who those people are. Some of us have bought houses, but we all still live in the same town and have the same friends and have dinner with our parents. It's not like material possessions have overrun my priorities.

"But it can be strange," she continues. "I opened up one of those catalogs that says 'Get 12 Albums For a Penny,' and there was 10,000 Maniacs in between Jethro Tull and Tina Turner. It's very odd, because I can remember my brother picking out Peter Frampton albums from those same catalogs. Now we're part of the American entertainment world."

The Maniacs may be part of the same world as Michael Jackson and other pop stars, but they follow more in the tradition of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Some songs deal with past events and how they continue to affect the present, like Grey Victory, about the dawn of the atomic age. Other songs present impressionistic slices of life, like the traditional Italian wedding depicted in My Sister Rose. Merchant gets a lot of song ideas from the newspaper, television (she doesn't own one but prefers Cable News Network when the band is staying in a hotel), and just chatting with people. "I like being in places where a lot of different kinds of people are thrown together - doctor's offices, hotel lobbies, airports," she says. "I listen to them talk and write things down. Everyone has a story, and some of the most ordinary people have the most interesting stories."

Merchant reads a lot, with history one of her favorite topics; our conversation kept veering off on tangents ranging from Australia's treatment of its aboriginal peoples to the origin of the phrase 'a moveable feast.' "I get really excited when I learn something new, the historical significance of something modern," she says. She worries about the decline of American public schools: "I think kids aren't instilled with a desire to learn, with a love of learning," she says. "They should take pride in learning."

She is also concerned about widespread functional illiteracy, and the Maniacs have recorded what is surely the prettiest, though maybe the only, song on the subject. The illiterate protagonist of Cherry Tree bemoans the fact that pride and fear have combined to keep her from learning to read. ("All those lines and circles just frighten me, and I fear that I'll be trampled if you don't reach for me.") Illiteracy, says Merchant, "is like being in a locked room with lots of windows. You can see what's outside but you can't reach out and touch it."

Merchant has a well-developed sense of right and wrong, which the new Maniacs album promises to display. One song, called Please Forgive Us, asks Central Americans to forgive the people of the United States who weren't aware of the Reagan Administration's secret wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Merchant says she's working on another song "that equates exploration with exploitation," but she can't decide what time frame to set it in. "It's like a pattern that repeats from age to age," she says with both sadness and disbelief.

Generally, though, Merchant avoids being too explicit in her lyrics. "I think the people of America don't need to be told what's wrong and what's right," she says. "If they're given parables and metaphors and allowed to make up their own minds, they'll do the right thing. I don't think people are inherently evil. They're driven to do what they do by circumstances. Maybe I'm becoming a more optimistic person - or maybe I'm just feeling optimistic today - but I think if people are given the opportunity they'll do good."

That's how Merchant feels about her vegetarianism as well. Rather than stridently making the case against eating meat, Merchant prefers to be a living example of someone following a cruelty-free diet. "Through example I've been responsible for about 10 people converting to vegetarianism," she says. "I think that works better than preaching at them; people get turned off by preaching. If someone asks questions, I put a book like Diet for a New America in their hands and let them make up their own minds. But Diet for a New America is a very frightening book, and I can't see anyone not being influenced by it."

Nonetheless, she believes artists have to use their celebrity status constructively. "If you have a voice, you should use it to do something good," she says. "It's really great when mainstream figures like Bob Barker speak out - people who are accepted by mainstream Americans. I mean, everybody's grandmother trusts Bob Barker because of The Price is Right. When he says something like 'People who wear furs are pigs,' it shakes things up a little. That's great. That's a good use of celebrity."

Last summer Merchant and Maniacs guitarist Robert Buck played at a benefit concert for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Merchant will also contribute a song to the new Animal Liberation album PETA is putting together - that is, she says, "if I can get myself busy writing the lyrics." Merchant supports PETA but thinks the many splintered animal-rights groups should work together more and agree on common goals and actions.

But not everything, she explains, has to be large-scale and highly organized to be effective. In Jamestown she works with handicapped children, volunteers at the Boys Club and Girls Club (for a while she was the "crafts lady") and is involved with a group called COOL that draws volunteers from college campuses to do community-service work.

Merchant and the Maniacs join a growing trend toward politically conscious music. For years, the main concern of most bands was whether there'd be enough beer backstage but several innovative artists have recently emerged to challenge mainstream commercial rock. Like 10,000 Maniacs, these artists - ranging from pop-folk singers like Tracy Chapman and Michelle Shocked to the Australian hard-rock group Midnight Oil (whose singer, Peter Garrett, is vegetarian) - combine popular appeal with intelligent, aware lyrics. Merchant is particularly happy about the success of labelmate Chapman, who opened for several Maniacs' shows last year and whose debut album has sold nearly 5 million copies. "It's encouraging to everyone who's trying to do something serious in music," Merchant says. "Tracy Chapman sells for very different reasons than Motley Crue. I just hope it's not a fad: 'OK, let's all be concerned.'"

Neither is the trend toward political music just another case of rampant '60s nostalgia, Merchant believes. "Most of the problems we had in the '60s are still with us. We even have a war - only it's covert, not overt. It always takes a disaster to shake things up. I was walking in London with [English singer] Billy Bragg, and he was telling me about how his auntie and his mum were reminiscing about World War II and how everyone pulled together. He said, 'Why does it always take a...war to bring people together? Why can't peace bring people together?'"

Back in Jamestown, Merchant lives in a cluttered apartment where she reads, jots down ideas for songs, and writes essays and short stories. Although many of her songs use poetic images and metaphors, Merchant has no desire to write poetry. "There's something intimidating about poetry, at least to me," she says. "Song lyrics are as restrictive as I want to get. When I write lyrics it's like fitting together pieces of a puzzle. I may know what a song is about, but I have to fit the words into the structure of the song the rhythm, the drums, the guitars." Unlike some songwriters, Merchant doesn't keep a notebook full of song ideas, but she says, "I've always got phrases and melodies floating around in my head. I also keep a log of my dreams, which are an interesting source of images."

As you might guess from the range of influences on a Maniacs album, Merchant has very wide musical tastes. "I'll listen to almost anything except rap music, which doesn't inspire me that much," she says. "I like concert music, Renaissance and baroque music - I guess what they call 'ancient music' - folk music and bluegrass. I like gospel music, both black and white, and I'm just getting into jazz. I guess I always felt about jazz the way I feel about poetry, like my head had to work too hard to listen to jazz."

Merchant had only recently moved into her apartment when we talked, and between touring and recording the new album, she hasn't had time to buy an oven. Instead, she has a piano in her kitchen and does most of her cooking over a hotplate. "I'm afraid that if I do [buy an oven] I'll have to get rid of the table or the piano - or get a bigger apartment," she says dryly. Carrot juice is "the paramount beverage" at home, and Merchant also makes a lot of soymilk shakes and popcorn. She doesn't claim to be a great cook; in fact, she laughs, "I'm glad I have friends who can cook."

She continues: "It's strange growing up in a house where dinner was pretty much meatloaf and baked potatoes, or occasionally pasta, and then having to learn a whole different way of cooking. People always say, 'If you're a vegetarian don't you get tired of eating carrot sticks all day?' but it opens you up to so many new foods."

Where does Merchant see herself in five years, at age 30? She'd still like to be making music but not touring as much. ("Touring is very draining," she explains.) She has thought about going back to college "after my 'musical intermission.'" She also would like to get some of her stories and essays published and work more with photography and graphic arts. "I'm real interested in film," she says. "I think I'd like to direct a film, rather than star in one. We've had a few film offers, but they were pretty laughable. I think the people who made them had never seen us perform and don't know what we're about."