A social conscience marks the bottom line for 10,000 Maniacs
by: Gary Graff (Knight-Ridder Newspapers)
Feel sorry for Natalie Merchant. The singer/lyricist for the pop group 10,000 Maniacs writes songs worthy of attention; in fact, a new album's worth of them, Blind Man's Zoo, was released a few months ago.
But now, Ms. Merchant and her bandmates are spending a great deal of time talking about their version of Cat Stevens' Peace Train, which appeared on their 1987 album In My Tribe. The group, with its liberal leanings and songs about social and political issues, stopped performing the song after Mr. Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, backed the late Ayatollah Khomeini's death crusade against British author Salman Rushdie.
Ms. Merchant and company, who will be in Dallas Friday night, are also trying to get their label, Elektra Records, to drop Peace Train from future copies of In My Tribe.
"I don't think Cat Stevens will be silenced just because we don't perform his song,' says Ms. Merchant, 25, "but I just couldn't sing it with a pure feeling anymore. He's divorced himself from his past and the way he once thought of the world. I don't see any reason to embrace it."
Not doing the song, Ms. Merchant says, is "also a way to let the audience become aware of the situation. Sometimes you'll hear someone from the audience yell for Peace Train, and the person next to him or her will say, "Are you crazy? Don't you know?'
"So in a way, it's informing people who aren't aware of his statements what those statements were and why we're not playing the song anymore."
'Informing' may be the perfect word to describe Ms. Merchant's musical mission. Since emerging from Jamestown, N.Y., in 1983, she's written songs that explore issues from personal and human angles. On Blind Man's Zoo, her stories include: a youth who travels to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to remember his father (The Big Parade); the trials of a single mother who can barely afford to feed her children (Dust Bowl); a woman dealing with an unwanted pregnancy (Eat for Two), and a racist who burns down a dance hall where he saw a biracial couple dancing (Jubilee).
Ms. Merchant cites a variety of inspirations for these songs, ranging from books to sheer speculation. "It's just from observing life, which is pretty simple," she says. "Eat for Two came from seeing a teen-age girl pushing a baby carriage down the street in the middle of a school day. You take those observations and you can come to a pretty close conclusion as to what she's thinking."
Then there's Poison in the Well, which started as a lament about the condition of the world's water supply and became more sonorous after the Exxon oil tanker crash last winter.
"I just felt like, "I told ya so,'" Ms. Merchant says.
"It's a dark world," she adds. "Nothing outside of my little world has changed too much, but these problems still exist. Writing the songs doesn't solve the problems. I know that things are going well for 10,000 Maniacs, and that's all very pleasant, but that doesn't mean that my frame of mind has to go into pleasant seclusion."
Besides, Ms. Merchant and her bandmates -- guitarist Robert Buck, bassist Steven Gustafson, keyboard player Dennis Drew and drummer Jerome Augustyniak -- figure those challenging, relevant songs are what's attracting an audience. In My Tribe has sold almost a million copies, while Blind Man's Zoo, one of the summer's hottest sellers, seems certain to pass that mark.
Meanwhile, the group's concerts are attracting diverse audiences that include teen-agers, office workers "who show up still dressed in their suits and ties" and intellectuals.
This, Ms. Merchant says, is "a crowd of dormant record buyers who just go out and buy albums when they're really moved by them." And that, she says, is 10,000 Maniacs' goal.
"Music should move you in some unspeakable way,' she says. "I think we've done that, especially for some of the younger kids who haven't really been exposed to that. There's so much music that the industry releases that the sole motivation is profit. They might as well be selling detergent or shoes.
"10,000 Maniacs is product second and music first. As long as people enjoy the music and buy the albums, the company is happy and stays off our backs. And then we're happy, too."