by: Jackie Fitzpatrick

Many a hotel manager must have cringed when he heard the band 10,000 Maniacs would be staying on while in town for a gig.

Here's a group that from name alone sounds like they'd trash a suite in a matter of minutes.

But the name, like the group, is an enigma.

"We don't even go out to bars after the gigs. Have we been to a bar?"' keyboardist Dennis Drew asks his girlfriend.

"Maybe a hotel bar," she answers.

10,000 Maniacs -- who play at San Diego State's Open Air Theatre tonight -- are just four guys and a lyrically gifted singer, Natalie Merchant, who hail from a small town in New York where they continue to live despite a near-platinum album and the new Blind Man's Zoo, which will likely get there or beyond.

The subjects they sing about -- poverty and child abuse, environmental ruin, the Iran-Contra scandal and the Vietnam War Memorial -- are hardly fodder for hits.

They become hits anyway.

For a couple of reasons, the music has an upbeat pulse to it -- and often the dark lyrics reveal themselves later, as if by surprise. The folk-inspired rock appeals to a wide spectrum of listeners, Top 40 and new wave, folk and rock 'n' roll. The music is crisp, the lyrics pungent.

Take The Big Parade, about the son of a vet who visits the war memorial. "He'll go live his mother's dream, join the slowest parade he'll ever see. Her weight of sorrows carried long and carried far. Take these, Tommy, to the Wall."

"These are issues we talk about among ourselves," said Drew in a phone interview from Vancouver. "Some of the best times I think I've had are the times we've sat around late at night and talked, not about the latest movie, but about serious subjects. Serious subjects and happy music aren't mutually exclusive."

Despite the topics, the songs don't ring false as so many "cause" songs do, probably because of the lyrical poetry.

"Natalie is a once in a lifetime writer," Drew said. "Dylan would sing lines that would get laughed at if anyone else tried to sing them. But from him they came across. It's like that with Natalie."

The most hopeful track on Blind Man's Zoo is its first hit, Trouble Me.

Merchant is the poetic force behind the band and its focus. She's said she writes lyrics in airports, on trains, anywhere the muse strikes. She seems to have a quiet eye recording the many injustices in the world, tucking them in her pocket and taking them out again on stage. The cover of Blind Man's Zoo is a montage of elephants; elephants being lifted by a rope to a circus, being ridden by kids, trying to move but chained. The animal is a symbol of the album which speaks of betrayal and victims. Onstage, Merchant is a distinct sight. She patterns her mode of dress after the Amish and twirls about in long dresses like a reflective Stevie Nicks.

"She lives in her own world on stage," Drew says.

She may be her own person, but the band is a tight unit. The other Maniacs are Jerome Augustyniak on drums, guitarist Robert Buck and Steven Gustafson on bass. They're buddies from way back, working at the Jamestown Community College radio station, purveyors of an eclectic mix of folk, rock and reggae. They were soon merging their own musical talents and backgrounds.

"My Dad loved swing music, and I grew up with that. Rob's grandmother sang white gospel," Drew said. They all grew up in musical homes, he said. Eventually 10,000 Maniacs became part of the artsy underground in rural upstate New York. Theirs is no overnight success story. They spent long nights sleeping on a van floor driving all over the East Coast in search of work. They'd find a bar and make $50 bucks a night and then have to split it with another band. Their dreams were modest at first -- they just wanted to play Buffalo.

"We just got out of town and went to work," Drew said. "We made phone calls to the clubs, the college radio stations, lived on about five dollars a day. We had an idea we could do it and we worked hard. We got some breaks, but we put ourselves in a lot of places to get those breaks."