by: Holly Crenshaw (page: L26)

It's midafternoon, California time, and the five members of 10,000 Maniacs are holed up in Irvine for a concert on this recent night, another in a seemingly enless string of tour stops. While his colleagues drift in and out of their hotel rooms or hang out at the swimming pool, bass player Steve Gustafson is on the phone trying to peice together exactly when it was that the band started this current tour.

"Let's see, I think we've been on the road about eight years now," he says with a laugh, only slightly exaggerating the regimen of continuous touring that's helped catapult the folk-rock musicians from college radio favorites to high-profile, Top 20 recording artists.

Actually, the Jamestown, N.Y.-based band has been diligently touring the country since May in support of its latest album, Blind Man's Zoo. And the payoff is obvious. The album, their third Elektra release, ranked No. 19 this week on Billboard's pop LP chart, with the first single, Trouble Me, coming in at No. 52.

For vocalist Natalie Merchant, guitarist Robert Buck, keyboardist Dennis Drew, drummer Jerome Augustyniak and Mr. Gustafson, the years spent crisscrossing the country in their van -- rolling out their sleeping bags on any available floor -- make both the physical comforts and popular response of this tour particularly welcome. The successive venues of their Atlanta appearances reflect their rise: from the now-defunct 688 Club in 1986 to the more upscale Cotton Club in 1987 and a slot as the opening act for Squeeze at the Fox in 1988 to, finally, an almost sold-out concert at the Fox Theatre on Monday.

"It definitely feels a lot more comfortable this time out," says Mr. Gustafson, 32, "but maybe not quite as exciting as it was a few years back. It gave things an edge when we never really knew if were were going to have a place to sleep or enough to eat."

If the band's lost its edge, there's little indication of it on Blind Man's Zoo. On the heels of its more pop-oriented 1987 breakthrough album, In My Tribe, the latest work is the most austere of the Maniacs' career. Much of its force is projected from Ms. Merchant's tightly controlled vocals, which dominate every song. The album's minimal, restrained melodies and instrumentation never overshadow the penetrating, confrontational lyrics.

Trouble Me, with its affectionate offer to share emotional burdens, provides the only soothing moment on an otherwise brilliantly disturbing album. More typical of the record's mood is the follow-up single, Eat for Two, which depicts a young woman's growing dread over her unwanted pregnancy.

In song after song, Ms. Merchant's lyrics eerily detail the uneasy secrets of the human heart -- the suppressed terror of a toxic spill in Poison in the Well, the impotent feelings of anguish over the government's foreign intervention in Please Forgive Us or the beaten-down hopelessness of a parent struggling with poverty in Dust Bowl. And in the record's most frightening song, Jubilee, she captures the rage of a misguided religious zealot who turns his racial fury into a Faulknerian act of vengeance.

Echoing Ms. Merchant's description of the album's motif, Mr. Gustafson says Blind Man's Zoo is tied together by its theme of betrayal. "Lyrically, it's certainly darker than anything we've done," he says. "There isn't anything lighthearted on it like there was on In My Tribe."

On each new album, it's become increasingly clear that Ms. Merchant is the soul of 10,000 Maniacs. It's her highly literate lyrics that inform the songs with a double-edged sensibility of wisdom and vulnerability, a curious mix of world-weariness and bracing honesty. It's her distinctly enunciated vocals that have gradually weighted the band's sound toward spareness and clarity. And it's her ethereal presence that creates the sense of mystery about the band.

At 25, she's about six years younger than the other band members. She's also more introverted, political-minded and openly spiritual than the guys in the band, who've witnessed the somewhat overwhelmed Ms. Merchant being besieged by requests for autographs and interviews.

"We've always treated her like our sister," says Mr. Gustafson, "with a great deal of respect. We've tried to give her a lot of distance but also shelter her from people as much as possible."

Mr. Gustafson says he immediately realized, when the 16-year old Ms. Merchant wandered into the Jamestown Community College radio station where he was a deejay, that she was exceptional. They swapped records and musical ideas -- Ms. Merchant had just enrolled in the college that year -- and she tentatively accepted his offer to sit in on a rehearsal of the band he'd recently formed with Mr. Buck. She hadn't done any singing at that time, he said, but when she stood up and started improvising vocal parts with the band, they were immediately enthralled.

Asked if he realized what a strong presence Ms. Merchant would eventually become in the group, Mr. Gustafson says, "I knew it from the first day. She was just very different, unlike any other women that we knew. I mean, there were some talented women in the area doing different things, but she certainly stood out the most. From the first day, we just kept saying, 'Please come back. Please come back.'"

With its six-person lineup in place, the band hit the road, playing small music clubs and building a following through constant touring. In 1983, they briefly relocated to Atlanta, hoping for steady gigs and a single on HibTone Records. Instead, they shivered in an empty rented house on Waddell Street in Inman Park and performed a mere five times during their four months here.

"It was really tough, really scary," recalls Mr. Gustafson. The low point came, he said, when the group was so broke that the musicians tried to earn money raking lawns around their neighborhood. They decided to return to Jamestown and start over again.

After putting out two independent releases, Human Condition Number Five and Secrets of the I Ching on its own Christian Burial Music label, the band was signed by Elektra Records and became a favorite of music critics and alternative radio stations with its first major album, The Wishing Chair. The folk-flavored 1985 release, produced by Joe Boyd (whose credits include Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction), featured an airy, looser-sounding Ms. Merchant singing over an eclectic mingling of guitar, mandolin and accordion accompaniment.

Despite its critical acclaim, the record wasn't a commercial success and eventually contributed to rhythm guitarist John Lombardo's departure. "There was some very severe internal fighting going on, and that was a pretty unbearable point of time," says Mr. Gustafson. "We weren't really sure what was going to happen, but when he left, it was like a weight was off our shoulders. And it made us think, 'Well, now we've really got to work hard.' And we did."

With veteran Los Angeles hitmaker Peter Asher signed to produce the band's second Elektra album, the Maniacs started reshaping its music into a cleaner, brighter style. In My Tribe (1987) started off slowly but was gradually boosted up the charts by its successful single releases -- Cat Stevens's Peace Train (its only cover tune), Don't Talk and finally the Maniacs' biggest hit, Like the Weather.

After In My Tribe sold 1 million copies, the Maniacs found themselves on more equal footing with Mr. Asher, with whom they'd had some tense moments during their initial recording sessions. This time, for Blind Man's Zoo, the producer was willing to leave Los Angeles and record the band where the musicians felt more comfortable, in upstate New York.

"We'd been trying ever since we first started recording to re-create our live sound," Mr. Gustafson says. "We missed it by a couple of miles on The Wishing Chair and got a little closer to it on In My Tribe. But even on that album, some of the music sounded a bit frail and not quite as warm as we wanted. This new one's the closest we've come to capturing the power of that sound."

With commercial success now firmly grasped, the Maniacs have started to relax a little and lead more independent lives. "We used to spend 24 hours a day, 350 days a year with each other when we were touring and rehearsing and just hanging out together," Mr. Gustafson says. "We were still living with our parents, and we didn't have any money and really needed each other's support.

"But we've grown up a little bit and taken on adult responsibilities now. And it's healthy to get away from each other, to do other things and have other interests. We'd drive each other crazy if we didn't."

Ms. Merchant has talked of making a solo album after this tour ends and also expressed interest in writing a children's book. Other band members have been approached about writing movie scores and other collaborative projects.

For now, though, Mr. Gustafson promises the Maniacs concert in Atlanta will be true to the performances the band's longtime followers have come to expect, including a display of Ms. Merchant's self-absorbed, otherworldly twirling dances.

"She started out dancing because she was afraid," he says. "Now she's not as scared as she used to be, but she doesn't have as much time to dance because she's got a lot of lyrics to sing. We keep her pretty busy up there, but she tries to squeeze in a step here and there."