"I'm glad you guys made it where you've gone so far. That's really terrific. Probably the name is what did it, right? I mean, it's very catchy."

Late on a rainy Monday night at Joyce's Keg Room, in Jamestown, New York, Joyce's boyfriend, Paul, is trying to explain the success of 10,000 Maniacs, western New York's most celebrated export since the late Lucille Ball barreled out of nearby Celoron half a century ago. The Keg Room is a solidly working-class gin mill where between rolls of dice for free drinks at the bar, men in painters caps and women with teased hair are far more likely to spin a record by Patsy Cline or the Georgia Satellites on the jukebox than anything like the Maniacs' high-minded folk rock. Mention Like the Weather in here someone is apt to respond, "It hasn't been too bad."

But Maniac keyboardist Dennis Drew and bassist Steve Gustafson are conducting an alcohol-soaked tour of landmarks in the band's history, and the Keg Room figures prominently. The bar's small back room with its patterned, opaque windowpanes and carpeted door frame, was the site of some of the band's earliest gigs. Despite his absolute unfamiliarity with the Maniacs' progress since they last played the Keg Room years ago, Paul, a white-haired wag with a penchant for ribald jokes (at one point, nodding toward a house regular, he says, "Someone came up and asked Rose, 'Do you have two nipples for a dime?'"), continues to speculate on the role of the Maniacs' name in their eventual good fortune.

"All you have to hear that name is once," he says. "And you think, 'Who's that crazy bunch?'"

"Weren't you afraid when we came down that first night and said, 'We're 10,000 Maniacs'?" asks Gustafson, whose blond, curly hair and boyish good looks suit his mock earnestness well.

"I didn't know whether to open the door or what." Paul says. "Yeah, my God!" He pauses a beat for effect. "I said, 'Do they all have money?' Then you wonder: How do you get all 10,000 people on the stage?"

Such jokes - and, believe it or not, many worse ones have - followed the Maniacs since they took their name in 1981, after earlier incarnations as Still Life and the Burn Victims. The moniker is a mistaken borrowing from the cult horror film 2,000 Maniacs; Drew says it was chosen so that locals would know "that we weren't going to do Led Zeppelin cover." It hasn't always been an advantage. Radio programmers often ignored the Maniacs' records in the belief that they were a hardcore or novelty band. Even a sax player who was once in the group used to take the stage wearing pink slippers and a spaghetti colander on his head. According to Gustafson, he would say to the others, "We're maniacs, aren't we? I thought we were supposed to be funny."

The Maniacs - whose lineup, in addition to Drew and Gustafson, includes singer-lyricist Natalie Merchant, guitarist Robert Buck and drummer Jerry Augustyniak finally proved they were more than a joke last year when their third album, In My Tribe, propelled by the video for the near-hit single Like the Weather, took off, nearly six months after its July 1987 release. Before that, the band had put out a string of intriguing records - the EP Human Conflict Number Five (1982) and the album Secrets of the I Ching (1983), both released on the band's own label, Christian Burial Music, and, after the Maniacs were signed to Elektra, The Wishing Chair (1985) - all to resounding commercial indifference.

Now, with In My Tribe nearing platinum status, the Maniacs have released Blind Man's Zoo, a provocative album that includes songs addressing the legacy of the Vietnam War (The Big Parade), toxic spills (Poison in the Well), intervention in Nicaragua (Please Forgive Us), teenage pregnancy (Eat for Two), religious zealotry (Jubilee), Western imperialism in Africa (Hateful Hate) and the hard times that have hit once proud manufacturing towns like Jamestown (Dust Bowl). The lyric sheet, which Merchant designed, makes each song appear to be the chapter of a book, a specific drama in a chronicle of chaos. At 10,000 Maniacs' point of greatest professional optimism Blind Man's Zoo is a starkly pessimistic statement

"I think that was a conscious effort on our part - well, maybe more so on my part," says Merchant, 25, one afternoon in her kitchen. "A lot of songs were written, and I had in my mind this feeling that there should be a consistency between all the songs, that there should be some kind of thematic unity. And the songs that I liked the most were the ones that were heavier, more powerful lyrically and musically and, I'd say, darker than the others. The most uplifting song is Trouble Me, which seems like the antidote for all the rest of the album." The album's first single, Trouble Me is a striking ballad that was written while Merchant's father was in the hospital. In it, she pleads with him to share the weight of his illness: "Why let your shoulders bend underneath this burden," she sings, "when my back is sturdy and strong?"

Unlike many songwriters, Merchant does not hesitate to discuss or even interpret her work, and she offers a penetrating reading of Blind Man's Zoo. "The theme that I keep returning to with every song is betrayal," she says. "Eat for Two is self-betrayal. The Big Parade is a nation betraying its citizens. Please Forgive Us is a nation betraying another nation. Hateful Hate is a race betraying another race. Jubilee is, at first, a man who's betrayed by nature or God, he's deformed, and then he's misled and betrayed by the envoy of God, a mad preacher who's obsessed with retribution and vengeance. Poison in the Well is the question of corporate culpability when there's a toxic-waste dump that suddenly is seeping into the main water supply of a neighborhood. The corporation has betrayed those people."

Natalie Merchant lives in an apartment on the top floor of the house in which she grew up - her mother still owns it - on a residential street in Jamestown. In general, the apartment is plain, almost austere, but there's a sense of playfulness in the childlike touches like the Peter Rabbit china in which she serves tea and the honey bear that accompanies the service. The title Blind Man's Zoo itself is drawn from a game in a children's book - a genre well represented in Merchant's library.

Merchant herself plans to write an illustrated book for children later this year, after the Maniacs' tour is over. A note of single-girl self-deprecation sounds in one of her file drawers, which reads, SHE WAS UNLUCKY IN LOVE. (In fact Merchant is at the moment happily involved with an executive at Elektra.)

Although Merchant is not conventionally religious, her apartment is filled with remnants of her Catholic girlhood. Above the doorway of the room in which she designs the Maniacs' artwork and records demos on a portable four-track machine is a sign that reads, THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST CLEANSETH FROM ALL SIN. A crown of thorns is draped almost jauntily atop a framed portrait of a saint contemplating a crucifix. In the kitchen stands a statue of St. Anthony holding the infant Jesus.

Trying to recover from the cold she caught during the filming of the video for Trouble Me and a series of outdoor photo shoots, Merchant attempts to explain what the Christian iconography means to her. "I started collecting it mostly because my grandmother had a lot of it", she says, "and when she passed away, no one else in the family wanted it. It reminded me of her.

"I went to see The Last Temptation of Christ, and I cried hysterically when he was being tortured," she continues. "I couldn't stop crying. To me, Jesus Christ is the symbol of what is unjust in the world - from what I understand from the myth, he was a kind man who saw injustice in the world and he was also a political subversive. There was the Jewish hierarchy, and there was the Roman police rule, and he was against both. So he was a political and religious martyr.

"When I saw the torture scene in The Last Temptation of Christ, I was thinking 'I'm sitting in this theater, and what's happening to his is happening right now in the Middle East; it's happening in Central America and South America; its happening in Russia and the Eastern bloc. It's happening right here in America for all we know.' That's what struck me."

Merchant's fascination and identification with victim of violence, pain and disaster is reflected in her songwriting - from early songs like My Mother the War and Grey Victory to later ones like What's the Matter Here? and Please Forgive Us. The obsession goes back as far as her childhood reading. "I loved beautiful old picture books - we inherited some from my grand mother," she says. "But aside from that, I jumped right into reading Helter Skelter, the biography of Mussolini and The Hiding Place. I became very interested in atrocity at a young age, and I don't know why I was drawn to it. I read The Bell Jar when I was twelve... And a lot about the Holocaust."

She recalls watching war movies on television and confusing them with the images from the Vietnam War that she would see on the news. When a cereal company held a Stick Up for Breakfast poster competition, the young Merchant's entry was a collage of malnourished children under the slogan STICK UP FOR BREAKFAST BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE CAN'T. "I got a Tony the Tiger kite and 'Thank you very much, but you're not even a runner-up,'" she says, laughing.

Merchant's relentlessly acute sensitivity to political and moral issues - along with her general abstemiousness - sets her apart from the other members of the band. In a meat and potatoes region like western New York State, Merchant's vegetarianism and animal-rights activism are anomalies to say the least. Drew and Gustafson joke in a friendly way about how their views are far more conservative than Merchant's. In addition, the boys in the band will drink you under the table and blithely leave you for dead; Merchant steps into a bar with only the greatest reluctance.

"I feel close to them because of all that we've done together," says Merchant, who is also the youngest member of the band by at least five years. "But I don't feel like we have anything more than that experience in common. That's partially because I'm a female, the age difference, the environment."

Merchant has known the boys since summer 1980, when, as a precocious sixteen-year-old student at Jamestown Community College, she met Gustafson who ran the campus radio station with Drew. In January 1981, Gustafson and Drew joined Stiff Life, which included Buck on guitar. They invited her to sing with them at a party solely because of her great looks, her wild dancing in local clubs and her taste in music (she was a big fan of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and reggae). Asked about the venturesome choice, Gustafson says, "She had to be able to sing better than I could play the bass."

"I went with some other people, and we were all taking turns at the microphone," Merchant says, laughing at the memory. "I had just been to a thrift store, and I bought a social-studies book from the Fifties. There was a whole chapter on Lapland, so my first song was 'Reindeer Are the Cattle of Lapland.' I started improvising - Reindeer are the cattle of Lapland - and then I sang the whole paragraph. They said 'Great. We're going to play a gig pretty soon, and we want you to be there.'"

The band soon added rhythm guitarist John Lombardo, who would write music for many of the Maniacs' early songs and who, ironically, would quit the band just as they were beginning to work on In My Tribe. The band's sets were something like Jamestown happenings, with movies and slide shows running while the group played. Merchant would whirl and dance like a dervish. Her tenuous connection to what was happening around her seemed nearly autistic, though her very willingness to enact a fiercely private vision onstage made her an astonishing performer.

Drew and Gustafson, who have known each other since high school and have built up an inimitable, rapid-fire conversational style over the years, say that Merchant's impact on the band was explosive.

"She wouldn't officially say that she was in the band," Drew says, "but she never missed a gig."

"She used to sneak out of the house," says Gustafson. "Her mother hated us. She thought we were having all these orgies and selling drugs from our warehouse..."

"We were just buying them," Drew says, laughing.

"And we only had one orgy."

"Not with her, believe me."

"So she used to have to sneak out of her house," Gustafson says, "to come down to the bar at the Hotel Franklin to play. And her mother used to come down and drag her out. Her mother would come down and yell at her and make her go home."

"Natalie would leave m the middle of gigs quite often," Drew says fondly. "Oh, the time she slapped Rob? Did she slap him or pull his hair out?"

"No," Gustafson says helpfully, "she was pulling her hair out."

"She was pulling her hair out," Drew says. "We were playing at the Rusty Nail. She was an emotional young woman, of course... She doesn't like people who are drinking. She didn't like the bar scene at all. She went over to Rob while we're playing this song and boxed him right on the ears. And ran out. This was in the days when we've got to do three sets. She's gone, man. We're doing Motor Booty Affair, with John Lombardo singing. I had to sing Guns on the Roof."

Still the band offered freedom and excitement - and the possibility of a life beyond Jamestown. Human Conflict Number Five and Secrets of the I Ching - both recorded as projects for the sound-engineering program at the State University of New York at Fredonia - garnered the Maniacs attention from alternative radio in the United States and England. In an effort to capitalize on that attention, the band - which now included Augustyniak, who joined up just in time to record I Ching - briefly relocated to Atlanta, where a plan to record with the independent label that released R.E.M.'s single Radio Free Europe soon went awry; the Maniacs then traveled around the country on the New Wave club circuit.

"We used to live out of an old school bus," Merchant says. "We had to paint it, because it's illegal to drive a school bus, so we painted it Rasta colors. Then we wrote, SING OUT WITH JOY! on the side, because we said, 'Oh, no, we're going to the South. We'll masquerade as a Christian rock band!"

"In the wintertime it was great," says Buck, his voice laced with sarcasm. "Steve and I would do most of the driving. In the front of the van, you'd have to turn the heat all the way up. It would be like ninety-five degrees, and the driver would have a T-shirt on rolled up to his chin, sweating. And in the back seat people would, honest to God, be in parkas with sleeping bags wrapped around them. No matter how hot you had the heat up, in the back it was still below freezing."

While the band toured Drew assiduously worked the college-radio and rock-critic rounds in every town the Maniacs visited, making sure the band's records were being played and written about and that its gigs were being publicized. Peter Leak, an Englishman based in New York, started working as the Maniacs' manager in 1983 and quickly arranged for their first British tour. He eventually guided them to their contract with Elektra in early 1985.

To produce their first Elektra album, the Maniacs selected Joe Boyd, who had worked with the British folk-rock group Fairport Convention, whom the band idolized. "Elektra gave us a bunch of names, and we had a bunch of people on a list, and Joe Boyd was one of the main ones," says Buck, sitting at the dining-room table of his parents' house in Jamestown with Augustyniak as a tape of Caruso, Buck's favorite opera singer, wails in the background. "All of a sudden we found out he was available. 'Joe Boyd yeah, yeah.' Of course, the record company is going, 'No, no, please, no.' But finally they let go of it. They probably said, 'We'll let them go ahead for their first record. They'll learn.'"

The Maniacs spent nearly four months in North London recording The Wishing Chair with Boyd. Though the band still enjoys the album - and Buck, in fact, prefers it to In My Tribe - Boyd's easygoing work habits did not win admirers. "What I learned from Joe Boyd," says Merchant, "is that producers don't do very much but sit around, read the paper and say, 'It's your album do what you want.'"

"Joe, I don't know if I'd describe him as a record producer," Buck says, searching for the proper term. "He was, like, a good help at decision making. He didn't know anything about music, really, or songs or songwriting or arranging. But if there was a controversy, he was a good guy to say, 'Okay, how many votes do we got on this side?' I'd be doing my guitar overdubs, and he'd be in there on the couch, with the paper over his face, snoring. Or else, 'Hey, where's Joe?' 'Oh, he's out getting a curry.'"

Boyd views the Maniacs' dissatisfaction as the result of a misunderstanding of his "laissez-faire" approach to making records. He describes their attitude as "This is the great Joe Boyd producing our record: Well, isn't he going to do more than what he's dome."

"In no record that I've ever done have I changed arrangements or done what a lot of producers do in terms of restructuring songs," Boyd says. "The way I worked with them on that record is no different from the way that I've worked with any artist on a record, including all the records they liked that I did which is the reason they wanted me to do the record in the first place."

The Wishing Chair, a splendid folk-flavored album that captures the Maniacs at their most charming, was a commercial disaster. (Elektra, perhaps stinging from the band's insistence on using Boyd, did not exactly pull out all the stops to promote it.) The group was disappointed, strapped for cash and exhausted from touring - all pressures that contributed to John Lombardo's decision to quit the band. Because he had been one of the group's main songwriters, his departure generated a fair amount of anxiety.

Elektra also started getting tough. The company rejected the demos the Maniacs submitted for their next album, saying the group was lazy and uninspired. Elektra also wanted a big-time producer to give the band a more contemporary - read salable - sound. The label suggest of all people, Peter Asher - a mainstay in the LA mellow-rock mafia who was best known for his work with Linda Ronstadt (whom he also manages) and James Taylor, as well as for his recordings in the Sixties as half of Peter and Gordon. The Maniacs were philosophical, if skeptical.

"I didn't care much for Linda Ronstadt," Merchant says, "and it took me a little bit of concentration to get beyond her and the material she recorded and her voice to actually listen to the production. The only thing I really could notice about it was that it was very clean. You could hear every instrument very clearly, and the instruments had dimension. And the voice was recorded well.

"We were afraid of that LA - that slick sort of thing," Gustafson says. "We were really worried about that, but we thought that he's worked with singers - "

"He's worked with some mediocre artists and made them millionaires," interupts Drew, laughing, "so we figured, 'What the bell?'"

Asher wanted to work in LA, so the Maniacs to the West Coast for four months - an experience that deepened their dislike of LA, which shows up in the mournful City of Angels, on In My Tribe. No one was sleeping under the newspaper or slipping out for curry this time around. Asher and his engineer, George Massenburg, were far more comfortable recording solo artists and studio musicians than bands, and they made it clear that if the Maniacs were not prepared to play exactly what was asked for, in tune and in time, other musicians would be called in to play for them. Some of the drum parts on In My Tribe, in fact, are computerized. Asher's discipline was bracing and educational but the band can still summon up some bitterness about his intimidating ways.

"A lot of times he'd treat us like we were studio musicians, which got kind of weird," Buck says. "You'd be in there doing a guitar part, and Peter Asher would go, 'Hey, you're fucking up. What's wrong? Are you a jerk? Are you an asshole? A fuck-up? What the fuck's wrong? Are we going to have to call someone else in to do this?' He'd be yelling at Natalie, going, 'You keep fucking up. Are you an idiot? We're wasting time.' Then all of a sudden he'd realize what he was doing." While acknowledging the many arguments the band had with Asher, Merchant herself describes the producer as "diplomatic".

Seeking a hit single, Elektra pressured the Maniacs into recording Cat Steven's Peace Train which the band now refuses to play live. Earlier, Elektra had tried to have the band undergo an image makeover.

"The record company wanted to make us look like the Human League" Buck says, "They called in a stylist in England. This guy comes in with a leather dress on and a samurai haircut - he had a bald head with a thing coming out on the top. He walks into the room and he starts laughing and we start laughing at him. He was really nice about it. He's going, 'I'm sorry. There's obviously nothing I can do for you. You people are just hicks. The best thing you can do is accentuate the fact that you're hicks - and I can't do that for you'"

In My Tribe was slow getting out of the gate, but opening dates on REM's 1987 fall tour and appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night With David Letterman built momentum. When Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow attended a tumultuous Maniacs show at the Ritz, in New York, his enthusiasm for the band blossomed, and the company began to push the album hard. Like the Weather hit, the band toured endlessly to larger and more enthusiastic crowds, and, at long last, the Maniacs arrived.

Success has a way of setting things right and smoothing the rough edges of past experiences. Blind Man's Zoo shows every sign of being yet another breakthrough for the band, and at the very least, the Maniacs are all confident now that they can make a living making music. Merchant, who nearly quit the band herself after The Wishing Chair, says she never believed that the band would be her life before In My Tribe.

"When John quit," she says, "I told everyone, 'I think I'm almost done too. I think it's time for me to go to school and start my pension plan because I'm getting old now. I need an IRA account.'" She laughs. "I was getting encouragement from my family, too: 'Quit. Quit now. You had fun you learned a lot, but you can live a long time, and you need security.' And I was beginning to believe it!"

In their various ways, the Maniacs have settled into new relationships and new homes. Augustyniak has moved back to Buffalo, and Buck has relocated to Albany. Gustafson got married and bought a house last year. "I guess it was the ultimate being-an-adult thing to do," he says. "I called my dad and said 'Dad, I bought a house.' He said 'I never thought you'd buy a new suit!'"

Last year, when it came time to pick a producer for their follow-up to In My Tribe, the Maniacs chose, of all people, Peter Asher. With a gold record behind them, the band and Asher were able to meet as equals this time around. The Maniacs recognized how Asher had sharpened their studio skills, and on his end, Asher consented to leave LA and record at Dreamland, an unpretentious studio in Woodstock, New York, much closer to the band's turf.

The Maniacs will tour the U.S. this summer and then go on to Europe, Japan and Australia. After that, they'll take some time off. Merchant, who has written songs for a couple of benefit albums, will write her children's book and possibly another book of prose.

She also may record a solo album. "It's crossed my mind," she says, "because some of the favorite things I've done have been the scaled-down songs. I did a show in London, the only solo show I've done, and there's something really gratifying about a quiet evening of music, rather than a rock concert. There will always be another 10,000 Maniacs record, but I think it would be interesting."

The others seem to be content with the simpler rewards of success. "It's nice to be able to earn enough money so that we can actually live like thirty-year-old adults," Augustyniak says, "instead of saying 'I've got to get home before my mom locks the door.'"