by: Bill Wyman

On the new album by 10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man's Zoo, there's a song that sounds as if it had been recorded last week.

"Someone's been a bit untidy and there's been a small spill. All that it amounts to is a tear in a salty sea. Someone's been a bit untidy, they'll have it cleaned up in a week."

The song is called Poison in the Well, and it leads off the second side of Zoo. But singer Natalie Merchant, who wrote the song with keyboardist Dennis Drew, said the song is nearly 2 years old and wasn't at all about the Exxon oil spill off the Alaskan coast. And to Merchant, the song wasn't prophetic, either.

"Anyone who's had their eyes open can see that this sort of activity is just a disaster waiting to happen," she said. Environmental concerns come naturally to Merchant: She and the other 9,999 Maniacs are quite familiar with Love Canal, the notorious toxic dump in northwestern New York. "Now, that has completely vanished from the national news, but it left an indelible mark on that entire region," she said.

Merchant and the Maniacs know that region well, because it spawned them. They are the only bona-fide rock stars from Jamestown, N.Y., a small city of 35,000 that is just a few miles from the Pennsylvania border.

Those origins contributed, at least in part, to the unique insularity of 10,000 Maniacs' sound, which, in turn, has contributed to the group's ever-growing success. Blind Man's Zoo, the band's best-sounding and most fully realized album, has been well-received, and a first single is charming both radio and MTV. (The album is on the Top 5 pop CDs list of Billboard magazine and on the Top 20 pop albums list.) And the Maniacs' biggest tour yet will hit in Chicago on Friday, when the band performs at the Arie Crown, 2300 S. Lake Shore Dr.

Though Zoo is the group's third major-label album, the band is a veteran of the college radio-alternative circuit, where the striking melange of Merchant's languid voice and the group's lilting atmospherics had been an open secret for years. But last year, with the album In My Tribe, the Maniacs produced an out-of-nowhere hit, About the Weather (an engaging ditty about being afraid to go outside), and gained mainstream notice. [webmaster note: of course, the song is really called Like the Weather.]

Blind Man's Zoo is a perfect followup. Trouble Me, the single, is the sexiest platonic love song of the year. It has a gorgeous call-and-response figure laced throughout, and Merchant's flawless intonation powers the song's honest feeling and relentless logic: "Why let your shoulders bend underneath this burden when my back is sturdy and strong?"

Beyond that, the album features a haunting song about an unwanted pregnancy, of all things. Merchant ably captures the scary mixture of desire and chance with lines like, "Risk the game by taking dares with 'yes.' " And her restless social conscience - she bristles at mention of the word "political" - is responsible for moving songs about the Vietnam veterans' memorial (The Big Parade), U.S. shenanigans in Central America (Please Forgive Us), families in poverty (Dust Bowl), the out-of-control concentration of wealth (The Lion's Share) and religious fanaticism (Jubilee).

Whew! That's a lot of stuff to tackle on one album. "That's what the title of the record refers to," Merchant said. "We think that if we keep all the wild animals in their cages, they won't hurt us."

Musically, Zoo is a pristinely produced (by Peter Asher, noted for his work with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt) mixture of elements that we now can see are classic Maniacs: lush, jangly guitars and tasteful keyboards, restrained drumming and that strange Maniacal "feel." Much of the 10,000 Maniacs' work has an odd, '70s sound: the approach is decidedly pre-punk, and if you don't pay close attention, you might dismiss it as throwback, middle-of-the-road pablum.

But there's a driving beat underneath, and with repeated listenings, you discover that that "feel" is a door to a world all its own. The Maniacs' music could have come only from a small town, a place without a big music "scene" to pollute the group's distillation.

Jamestown, N.Y., never has had anything like a scene. "It's a very remote industrial town," she said. "There were a couple of cover bands who did Led Zeppelin and Doors songs, and a few folk musicians, but that was it. There were no real clubs, either - we had to leave Jamestown in order to play."

Merchant met the other would-be Maniacs at the radio station of a community college. The station was small - "You could only get it if your toaster was on and pointed in the right direction," said Merchant, laughing. It soon transpired that others with similar interests to Merchant's looked to it as a musical oasis.

Eventually, the Maniacs came together: keyboardist Drew, guitarist Rob Buck, drummer Jerome Augustyniak, and bassist Steven Gustafson. They adapted the band's name from the title of a horror film, 2,000 Maniacs, directed by the infamous gore-trash master, Herschell Gordon Lewis.

"We'd had a few different names and were playing a Halloween party," Merchant said. "We picked 10,000 Maniacs (for the party) because it sounded like Halloween. Everyone really liked us (there), and it dawned on us that if we changed our name, no one would know who we were. So we stuck with it."

A crucial founding member was a rhythm guitarist named John Lombardo, a musical enthusiast more than a decade older than most of the other group members. The group looked up to Lombardo as "our musical dad," but, tired of touring, he quit the group in 1985, shortly after the release of the group's first major-label album, The Wishing Chair. [webmaster note: this is not accurate. John did not leave shortly after the album came out; he participated in months of touring after the album was released and left the band in the summer of 1986.]

When the Maniacs banded together in 1982, Merchant was not yet 20 years old. The radio station soon was left behind. "They shut it down after we left," she said. "There was no one to staff it."

For now, Merchant has an eight-month tour to contemplate; with the group, she will watch hopefully as Blind Man's Zoo and Trouble Me make their way up the charts. Trouble Me has a stirring background vocal by Jevetta Steele, a member of the Steele Family Singers, whom Merchant saw on Broadway in Gospel at Colonus.

Merchant is very pleased with the song, but can't explain its origins. "The music moved me and I just sang to match it," she said. "It happens sometimes: You just sing what comes to mind. Songwriting is really not that difficult."