Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs enter a dark period
by: Harold DeMuir (page 32, 51)
"Elephants are very similar to us," says Natalie Merchant of the diverse assortment of pachyderms who populate the cover of the new 10,000 Maniacs LP, Blind Man's Zoo. "They're very social, and they have the ability to alter their environment to the point of destroying it. A lactating mother elephant has two breasts, like a woman. Elephants are very gentle, and they have no natural enemies in the wild. Their size protected them for years, until we started killing them for their tusks. I'd hate to be an old woman and have to tell a child what elephants were like when theystill existed,and l'd hate to have to explain that dinosaurs and elephants didn't live at the same time."
As Merchant makes clear on Blind Man's Zoo, however, elephants aren't the only ones who suffer as a result of human callousness. Indeed, the album (produced, like its predecessor, 1987's breakthrough In My Tribe, by Peter Asher) is a tuneful catalogue of inhumanities, with the childlike wonder of earlier discs supplanted by a sense of outrage, empathy for the victims of imperialist oppression (Please Forgive Us, Hateful Hate), economic inequality (Dust Bowl), environmental irresponsibility (Poison in The Well), and religious zealotry (Jubilee).
"The only thing that everyone agreed on," says singer/lyricist Merchant, "was that we wanted this album to be darker. It's a very eyes-open look at the world - there's more bitterness, there's more betrayal, there's more anger than there's ever been on one of our albums before. It just felt like something we needed to expel from ourselves - maybe the next album will be extremely pleasant."
Blind Man's Zoo's opening track, Eat For Two, is a decidedly unsentimental account of an unwanted pregnancy. "It seems so obvious to me, but people seem confused by that song," says Merchant. "One journalist said, 'Your band appeals to yuppies, and babies are a yuppie phenomenon, so it's a pleasant little yuppie song.'"
But it's Please Forgive Us - a heartfelt plea inspired by the Iran-Contra affair - that's bound to emerge as the disc's most controversial track. "Elektra seems anxious about it, because it's definitely an opinion that a lot of people don't hold," Natalie confirms. "I think that we as Americans must be held accountable for what is done with the money we give to other people's armies. We're responsible for what happens to children in villages in the jungles of Honduras when the Contra rebels arrive.
"The people that I'm asking to forgive us - and who I swear will never forgive us - are the people who are caught in the crossfire, people who are completely innocent but find their lives devastated by these wars that we as taxpayers have funded. The Iran-Contra scandal revealed that so much happens that we are never meant to be aware of, and I was trying to address that feeling of powerlessness and bewilderment in the song."
It's a bit of a surprise to find the soft-spoken Merchant, often pegged as a shy eccentric, growing comfortable with her role as an artist/advoate, as 10,000 Maniacs have aligned themselves with various humanist causes (as well asking its label, Elektra, to delete the band's cover of Khomeini supporter Cat Stevens' Peace Train from future pressings on In My Tribe).
"I can speak this way about these issues with you", she says. "But I could never get on stage and try to express these opinions to an audience; I'm frightened just thinking about it. But I can sing about these things, and I can write about them in the privacy of my own home, where I can think clearly and make a statement. The force behind it is to choose something that's really infuriating me at the moment, defining what infuriates me about it, and asking myself how I can bring this into human terms that everyone will be able to understand.
"Things happen when people organize and voice a strong concern. If you mentioned the animal-rights movement five years ago, people would laugh at you, and now many countries have passed animal-rights bills and it's front page news in The New York Times. There was no Amnesty International 30 years ago, and now Amnesty International gets people released from prison. There was once slavery, and at one time women had no right to vote, and that's changed through the efforts of people who thought they could make a change and then worked very hard to change what they felt was wrong. And if people don't try, nothing will change."
Jubilee, the six-minute epic closes Blind Man's Zoo, compellingly presents a narrative of religious intolerance and racial bigotry, using an arrangement reminiscent of In My Tribe's Verdi Cries, with Merchant backed by seven classical-musicians rather than her bandmates. "Jubilee originally had 30 verses," she explains. "It was the whole side of a tape, just me playing piano and singing for a half hour. The verses l didn't use [had] more imagery, more description, more action, but eventually they became irrelevant.
"When I write lyrics, there's always pages and pages, and then I become more specific and cut it down to what's essential. I keep reminding myself it's just a three-and-a-half-minute song, and that I don't want to interfere with the melody or clutter up the song with so many words that people can't digest it."
The combo of musical misfits from the remote upstate New York burg of Jamestown first made underground waves with the sprawling, rough-edged folk-rock of the EP Human Conflict Number Five and the album Secrets Of The I Ching (both released on the band's own Christian Burial label), before broadening its constituency with the more focused The Wishing Chair. But it was the immaculately recorded In My Tribe that brought the group (which also includes guitarist Robert Buck, bassist Steven Gustafson, keyboardist Dennis Drew, and drummer Jerome Augustyniak) to a mainstream pop audience.
Merchant sees no contradiction between her band's idealism and the materialistic lifestyle of their new yuppie followers. "I think it's important," she says, "for people who have all they need materially to hear a song like Dust Bowl and understand that some people can't even afford the essentials in life."
Nor is she concerned that fans may not take to the downbeat subject matter of the new material. "My understanding is that people will feel a kinship in the songs, because a lot of people who are listening are being victimized in the exact same way. Maybe those people can use it as a kind of therapeutic exit from what's happening in their lives, and maybe it will help people who aren't suffering to under stand people who are.
"People seem to find some thing about the music that's realistic and has some validity in their lives. I got a letter from a woman who said that after hearing What's The Matter Here? (from In My Tribe) she thinks twice before spilling her rage onto her children And several people who heard Don't Talk wrote me letters saying that they came from alcoholic households and that it made them feel less alone to hear a song about it."
In addition to broadening the band's following, the sales success of In My Tribe helped reverse the financial straits that kept its members (all of whom, aside from the 25-year old Merchant, are 30ish) living with their parents until recently, which led to the pre-In My Tribe departure of founding guitarist/writer John Lombardo.
"John found himself 33 years old and borrowing money from his father to put gas in a car that he couldn't afford to make payments on," Merchant explains. "I never looked at it as too much of a sacrifice, maybe because I was younger than everyone else. But the day we all moved out of our parents' houses was a major turning point. Everyone's a lot happier now - we finally feel like we're professional musicians. Before that, we didn't know what we were. We were ex-students trying to be musicians.
"When I lived with my mother, she had very mixed feelings about that. I think she was vicariously enjoying my freedom, that I was 20 years old and seeing the world and coming home and telling her about it, because she never had the chance to do that. But she thought, 'Is she going to live with me forever?' I think she worried that I'd never become an adult, and she teased me all the time that I'd never had a checkbook or a credit card or a car."
Though Jamestown's other famous native, Lucille Ball, hightailed it to Hollywood and didn't look back, the Maniacs still reside in their hometown. "I still live in the same drafty apartment, which is a bedroom, kitchen, and a bath on top of an old house that was built in the '20s. There's something very comforting about that - that so many other things in our lives have changed, but we've remained close to our families and the people that we grew up with. We travel so much that when we come home, it's soothing to see that nothing's changed.
"I feel very satisfied with what we've done and the way we've done it," Merchant concludes. "We promote the music, because we think it's valid and because we think people should hear it, but we're very much against things like our faces being on album covers and posters. It's unbelievable that this industry has only existed for a few decades and there are already such rigid formulas - you put your picture on the cover and you put your faces in the video and you become a little weary of fighting all that. You keep saying, 'The music's more important than I am, and what I have to say is more important than the way I look. We don't need to be styled...'
"I think we'll survive all the hype, just because we're not self-promoters. I think it would make it easier for Elektra to sell our albums if we'd just give in, but I think they've come to begrudgingly accept that we want to do things on our own terms. Unfortunately, when you're doing things on your own terms and you make mistakes, then they're your mistakes and you have to live with them. But if you put yourself in the hands of a record company and say 'Do with me what you will, make me a pop star,' then you have to live with what they make you. We'd rather live with ourselves."