NATALIE MERCHANT, the voice of 10,000 Maniacs, is sitting at her kitchen table telling me about her latest songs when she notices an ant crawling along her green jeans. "I've got ants in my pants", she says with a smile. Carefully, she nudges the insect into her left hand, carries it across the room, opens a window and sends it off into the night. "Tell all your little friends that there's nothing in here. Everything is closed up, and there's no food", she says hopefully.

This gentle soul is about to step back onto the rock treadmill with the release of Blind Man's Zoo, 10,000 Maniacs' third Elektra album (following an independent EP and LP). In the next 48 hours, she'll rehearse with the band, pack for a month long European tour, drive the three hours from the band's home in upstate Jamestown, New York to Toronto, meet the Canadian press, then fly on to London to bit the road. "The boys", as Merchant calls the other Maniacs - Dennis Drew on keyboards, Rob Buck on guitar, Steve Gustafson on bass, Jerry Augustyniak on drums - will meet her there.

Blind Man's Zoo and the United States leg of that tour should firmly establish 10,000 Maniacs as the second most famous performers ever to emerge from Jamestown (Lucille Ball grew up there and got out fast). The band went national with In My Tribe released in 1987. That album stayed on the charts for month upon month while 10,000 Maniacs toured, first as an opening act (notably for R.E.M.), and then as a headliner. By the end of 1988, when the band went back into the studio, In My Tribe was a gold album, and by now it has probably reached platinum - an unlikely achievement for a set of elliptical songs about illiteracy, Jack Kerouac's mother, militarism and child abuse (among other topics) in a Fairport Convention folk-rock style that most A&R men thought had reached its commercial peak by 1975.

Audiences, it turned out, didn't care about the band's lack of trendiness. Once 10,000 Maniacs reached the concert circuit, after years of playing biker bars and rock discos, Merchant's serene, smoky voice and the band's stately, ringing guitars won listeners over. So did Merchant's abstracted onstage demeanor, as she whirled and twirled in old-fashioned dresses. The songs' exact meanings might be elusive on first hearing, but the tunes were substantial, and a growing number of fans were willing to tap their toes and puzzle things out later.

With their formula-defying songs, their bookish lead singer and their unhurried timing, 10,000 Maniacs were in full command of their eccentricities and, at long last, so odd they were in. The combination of the unworldly-seeming Merchant and her down-to-earth band had jelled, but behind the assurance were years of false starts and a major shakeup. Blind Man's Zoo, band members say, was made with an attitude new to the band: confidence.

There's one rare and odd style of thinking...
the small step and the giant leap takers
got the head start in the racing toward it

Back O' the Moon

"I'VE GOT EVERYTHING somewhere," says Dennis Drew as he leads me into his basement. Sitting on the concrete are cardboard boxes with folders full of Maniacs and pre-Maniacs memorabilia. "I kept pretending I was going to file it all," he says. One box yields the Jamestown Community College newspaper that Drew and Gustafson ran, including the issue where Drew interviewed Ken Kesey. Another has an early band press kit, circa 1982, including a chapter called Blind Man's Zoo. "No charming stage banter distracts the listener from the basic message," reads the kit. "No boy-meets-girl lyrics pander to the lowest common denominator. This is, in fact, serious stuff."

There's the receipt for the show that yielded $51 for a night's work at a Philadelphia joint called the East Side Club in June 1983, along with gig posters and old, silly posed photos, back when 10,000 Maniacs were Jamestown's arty underground. There's a clip from the Associated Press wire describing 10,000 Maniacs as "a critically noticed band." And there's a barely decipherable postcard from BBC disc jockey John Peel, written after he received the independent album Secrets of the I Ching in 1983: "This is by way of being a fan postcard. Think your LP is the best I've heard this year."

Drew, clearly, is the band's packrat, and perhaps its biggest fan. On the walls of the keyboard player's house are the gold album for In My Tribe and various band posters, including one the band asked its fans to sign when they showed up to get albums autographed. In the closet of his office, a room that also holds an upright piano and a four-track portable studio, he finds a computer printout from the week In My Tribe went gold. "Here's the projected sales," he says, pointing out a column of numbers. "And here's a region where we sold 240% of what they thought we would. Now, those poor bastards who sell our new record have to go out with these figures and do better."

Drew also has stacks of videocassettes, tape cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes, including songs-in-progress, rehearsal tapes and live shows. "Here's a lesson to the wise," he says with a groan; "label your cassettes."

In its early days, Drew was the band's prime business mover and road manager. He was the one on the phone to clubowners, explaining that no, the band didn't have 10,000 members and would leave the place standing. Didn't he ever get tired of the band's much-misinterpreted name? "Never in the whole world would I ever change the name," Drew says. "I knew the name was unforgettable. I would call bars that wouldn't book us, but they always remembered us - 'Oh yeah, you're the Maniacs.' To me, the name is like a poster or a video, neither of which has much to do with the music. It's strictly a commercial tool to get you noticed. If we'd have been the Blue Daffodils, good luck, man."

By now bassist Gustafson has arrived. He and Drew compare their newly substantial bellies - "I always said we'd be huge", he says with a chuckle - and pop open the first of a series of beers as Drew chooses some tapes and videocassettes to jog memories.

At the turn of the 1980s, Drew and Gustafson took over their college radio station. They were postpunk Dead Heads. "We got in and kicked everyone out, as we have a tendency to do," Gustafson says. "Everyone hated us at that school because we were playing the Cure and Gang of Four mixed with Grateful Dead; the people who liked the Cure hated the Dead, and the other way around. They wouldn't even play the station in the student union."

One day Merchant, who was 16 and had just moved back to Jamestown with her mother, walked in with her Roxy Music and reggae records, hoping to get them played on the air. Gustafson encouraged her to get involved with the station, doing artwork for posters and ads. Drew and Gustafson, who had a fledgling band called Still Life, got the idea of creating a New Wave coffeehouse, and as it got under way two other local bands were falling apart. One included Rob Buck on guitar; the other was led by John Lombardo, a slightly older local guitarist and songwriter who had a warehouse rehearsal space.

"I said to Natalie, 'We got this neat rehearsal spot,"' Gustafson recalls. "'Why don't ya come down and jam with us?"' In summer of 1981, the new aggregation did its first - and last - gig as the Bum Victims. On Labor Day, the first lineup of 10, 000 Maniacs (minus Buck, who rejoined soon afterwards, and prior to Augustyniak, who joined in 1982) made its debut.

"Steve and I harbored ambitions of being owners of a radio station or film producers," says Drew, "but the music kind of fell into our laps."

"It was like a mistake waiting to happen," Gustafson says.

Tension makes a tangle
of each thought
becomes an inconvenience
sound as it never penetrates
as servile edges
break and
feint

Tension Makes a Tangle

IN THE EARLY 1980s, the American aftershocks of punk-rock were creating an alternative rock circuit where punk's do-it-yourself ethos met bohemian ingenuity and the remnants of collegiate hippiedom. The people who were aware of U-Roy or Delta 5 or R. E. M. gravitated to one another, united by nonmainstream tastes. Music, art, homemade films, booze and reefer energized hipster undergrounds across the country, among them the one 10,000 Maniacs and friends created in their rented warehouse. Drew gets a fond smile when he recalls performing on a weekend night at the warehouse, hanging out afterwards, then gathering with the band and a bottle to play back the soundboard cassette until dawn.

The Maniacs started out covering Gang of Four songs, and expanded the repertoire to anywhere two-chord vamps were found - reggae, punk, Earth, Wind & Fire. But they didn't stay a cover band for long. Except for Buck, they weren't highly proficient musicians, but Merchant's verbal gift led them to start writing songs. Then as now, "the boys" would write music and give it to Merchant; if she was inspired by it, she'd come up with lyrics. As the stack of original songs grew, Merchant emerged as the band's lyricist and the now departed John Lombardo as chief composer.

Lombardo, who had the band's largest record collection, began exposing the group to music they wouldn't hear in the clubs. "Rob liked bluegrass, Natalie really liked folk music, Dennis and Steve liked reggae," says Lombardo, 36, who now lives in Buffalo and leads a new band, the Hopheads. "Later, Jerry really responded to the pop stuff, like old Big Star. I tried to expand each of the areas they were already inclined to like."

Lombardo also introduced the band to the British folk-rock of Fairport Convention, an influence that would transform 10, 000 Maniacs. "We'd never heard of Fairport Convention," Drew says. "I thought they were Harper's Bizarre."

For a year, the band played the Jamestown area's colleges, bars and clubs, sleeping on friend's floors. "Our biggest goal in those days was to play Buffalo," Lombardo recalls. Soon after Augustyniak joined on drums, they made an EP, Human Conflict No. 5, then rented a leaky 1975 Dodge Traveler, formerly a school bus, and hit the road from the Eastern states north to Ontario. On rainy nights, a wave would roll from one end of the bus to the other. In September 1982, they drove to Atlanta, where they had heard about a burgeoning scene. The band rented a house and got to know the Athens bands (including R. E. M.), but after about three months went back to Jamestown to, as Drew puts it, "sponge off our parents." [NOTE: This paragraph is wrong. Jerry Augustyniak did not join the band in time to play on Human Conflict No. 5, nor did he travel with the band to Georgia in September 1982. He joined the band just prior to the recording of Secrets of the I Ching in 1983.]

"Going south was good for the band," Lombardo says. "We were playing for strangers all the time, and there wasn't that kind of hometown support, where everybody pats you on the back. The money was terrible - I remember one night we played in Atlanta and split $32 with another band. But all along there was just enough encouragement. Even if only 10 people were there, at the end of the night all 10 people wanted to buy our record or have us stay at their house.

"At the time it was becoming very obvious that Natalie was the show," Lombardo added. "In the early days, we sang a lot of duets together, but now it wasn't even a question of my ego being bruised. She was a genius. She could improvise lyrics off the top of her head that were better than songs by people I considered great lyricists. We started to acquiesce to just about anything she wanted."

"The music was pretty abrasive-sounding, and my stage persona wasn't the most friendly," Merchant recalls. "I turned my back to the audience almost all night. That was shyness, mostly. I would go in the audience and dance a lot, too, when John would sing. Sometimes I'd be the only person on the dance floor. We'd be in a club, and people didn't have the vaguest idea who we were, they came to the bar to drink, and we were something happening in the comer, so we'd have the whole dance floor to ourselves. I must have looked absurd.

"And sometimes I would scream, just scream in the middle of a song. It was anger, I think, and now it's channeled into words instead of screams."

With free recording time at State University of New York's Fredonia campus studio for an engineering student's senior project, 10,000 Maniacs recorded Secrets of the I Ching in 1983. Later, they had reason to regret the arrangement: While In My Tribe sat in the charts, the engineer bootlegged copies of I Ching and the band had to take legal action to stop him.

Give or take some very white-sounding reggae and a production understated by its budget, on both EP and album the band sounded like a slightly sped-up, slightly cluttered version of the 10,000 Maniacs to come - enigmatic lyrics (although slightly more future-shocked than later efforts), rich guitar countermelodies and all. Secrets brought the band to the attention of John Peel and BBC-1. Suddenly, they were local favorites-in London, where My Mother the War reached the independent singles charts.

That brought the record-company scouts, and the Maniacs signed to Elektra. Working with Joe Boyd, who'd made Fairport's best albums, the band lived in London's Muswell Hill section for a month while recording The Wishing Chair. Three songs were remakes from Secrets, and with Merchant's newer songs made up an American dreamscape of characters and situations from small-town homebodies to victims of history.

A major-label release didn't mean major-league acceptance. Although 10,000 Maniacs began landing a better class of opening-act slots, Elektra didn't push the album too hard. Boyd had captured the band without any glossy overlay, and perhaps the label couldn't think of songs about sitting around a cemetery (Lily Dale) or Indian genocide (Among the Americans) as hot commercial properties.

Meanwhile, tension grew within the band. "There were a lot of arguments," Gustafson recalls, "and John's political ideas were far from ours. Dennis is a pretty hard-core right-winger, and I consider myself pretty capitalistic, while John was very socialist, but for a socialist he was always so paranoid about money. Artistic arguments would lead to financial arguments, and then John and Dennis actually got into a fistfight before a gig here in town. We all loved John, and we had a lot of laughs and great times. But he just saw the band going in a different direction. Push came to 'fuck you,' and he left."

"The record was getting really good reviews, but the audience wasn't expanding," Lombardo says. "We had reached kind of a plateau, and in my naivete I thought it was the material, the approach. In retrospect, I think the record company was skeptical, not really behind the record.

"It's been an emotional nightmare for me, the last year and a half," he adds. "I'll be in a bar talking to a girl, and someone will come up to me and give me a Maniacs update or start asking me about them. For a long time I didn't listen to the music, because it made me sad. But recently I made a compilation tape of all the songs I'd written with Natalie, and I think some of them can stand up to anything around."

Last year, at a benefit for a friend in Jamestown, Lombardo sat in with 10,000 Maniacs, and talked things out with his ex-bandmates. "It's weird now," he says. "It's like running into an old girlfriend - after she won the lottery.

Now for the tricky part

Hey Jack Kerouac

WITH THEIR MAIN COMPOSER GONE, 10,000 Maniacs faced a nervous record company as well as their own uncertainty. "In My Tribe was a make-or-break album," Drew says. "The question was, was John right or wrong?" Elektra kept asking for more demos, unwilling to commit itself to the songs, until finally the band got a tape to Peter Asher, known for his meticulous folk-pop productions with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. "He said, 'This is great, they've got enough songs,"' Drew says. "And Elektra said, 'Uh, okay, go ahead."' Where Boyd had been what Lombardo called "a Zen producer," Asher was an activist. He was used to working with lone singers backed by studio pros; 10,000 Maniacs was his first production of a band, and he changed some of their work methods. Since the band no longer included Lombardo's rhythm guitar, Rob Buck had to cut back his spacier lead-guitar excursions and play more rhythm. Asher also refused to let him use his arsenal of effects in the studio, instead recording the guitars cleanly and adding effects later. Jerry Augustyniak, a solid drummer onstage, didn't have the rock-steady timekeeping Asher wanted in the studio, so some of the album's drum tracks were programmed on a Synclavier.

In My Tribe also included 10,000 Maniacs' first recorded cover, Cat Stevens' Peace Train. (After Stevens endorsed the Ayatollah Khomeini's "death sentence" against novelist Salman Rushdie, Merchant said the band would no longer perform Peace Train. "I wish we could take it off the album", she says.)

The songs had become more open, less involuted; there were fewer riddles and more stories. Merchant treated large problems on a personal level, her voice knowing and soothing as she sang about alcoholism (Don't Talk), illiteracy (Cherry Tree), child abuse (What's the Matter Here ), poverty (City of Angels). Merchant has made an effort to make her writing clearer and less self-indulgent. "At first, I was playing private games with words, and I wasn't even playing with other people," she says. "I think my desire to communicate more vividly, more directly, more clearly, happened with In My Tribe." Both melodies and beat had come into focus; instrumental and vocal sounds had a new luster. In some ways it was a more conventional pop record, spotlighting vocals and hooks against a strict beat, but it didn't sacrifice ideas in order to connect with a larger audience.

The band had also found a new equilibrium. "I started to face the audience when The Wishing Chair came out," Merchant says. Now she was facing listeners and twirling across the stage. "Spinning, my trademark, " she says. "I don't know why, I just did it, it just became sort of a meditative thing to do. That's going to sound like a hippie when it's in print, But it felt... I guess I could make up a reason for it. But it was something I was already doing.

"I wore ankle-length full dresses, patterned after the Amish ladies who would come to town. They wore very heavy boots, dark clothing down to their ankles, and I found their dress really beautiful. There was something about this uniform style of dress that hadn't changed for 200 years, the way it was always stark and dark and long, long sleeves coming all the way to the wrist. So I was wearing these kind of clothes and I was spinning, and that's the way the Sufis are, these men wearing long dresses and spinning, trying to imitate the motion of the world and reaching this transcendent state. I could get to the point where I wouldn't see objects in the room - they would become bands of color."

Meanwhile, it had become clear that Merchant was not one of the boys. "She probably liked us at first," says Drew. "And then after hanging around with us 24 hours a day every day of the year, she probably got sick of us. After we realized that, we just tried to give her as much space as possible."

"I certainly understand how obnoxious we can be," Gustafson says. "Sometimes we're like high-school boys, and she's not into being obnoxious like we are, for fun. We don't have anything really in common with Natalie except this band."

Michael Stipe of R. E. M. had sung on In My Tribe and as the two bands toured together Stipe and Merchant became constant companions. "They were two peas in a pod," says Gustafson. "They really helped each other. And they're both in the same situation-the rest of the people in both bands are just normal."

"It was really important for them to be together and discuss what they do," says Drew. "They both really reinforced the fact that they thought what they were doing was important enough to give themselves to the audience. They're both really shy people, and very literate - they're both also really sensual people, and they have the ability to exude sensuality without being blatant about it."

The audiences grew; the band stayed on the road, moved to the top of the bill, and the tour kept stretching out. It ended, eventually, when Merchant fell ill last year. Her brother had had spinal meningitis, she says, and she believes she caught it at the same time. But she was unwilling to endure the pain and possible complications of a spinal tap for testing.

During Merchant's two-month layoff, the rest of the Maniacs had a chance to step back and relax for the first time since the band started. The gold record proved they were on to something, and they were financially solvent, though still not flush. "You'd be surprised at how little the artist actually makes from a gold record," Merchant says. "If you took everything we've made from the band and averaged it out over the time we've been together, we'd be under the poverty line every year." Now, they were ready to consolidate.

Barking commands
loud and simple
we could all obey

Maddox Table

ROB BUCK AND JERRY AUGUSTYNIAK are the band's out-of-towners; Buck moved to Albany to be with his girlfriend and Augustyniak still lives in Buffalo. They've driven to Jamestown today to talk to Musician, rehearse and do a photo session.

A casting director would pick the big-boned Buck as the drummer and the slighter, quieter Augustyniak as the band's keyboardist or manager. Driving through town to a favorite restaurant, they point out their own Jamestown landmarks: the Rusty Nail, where they played too many gigs; the Hotel Franklin, where they worked regularly; Lucille Ball's childhood home. During the break between albums, Buck bought a new amplifier, his first since 1982, and worked on scales; Augustyniak practiced with a metronome, steadying his beat before the next recording sessions. "I could think about having hobbies, too," he says. "Two years ago, that wouldhave been an impossibility."

The break also made romance blossom; by the end of 1988, all the band members had found mates. Augustyniak's girlfriend convinced him to stop wearing the wigs he had used to cover his baldness.

For Blind Man's Zoo, 10,000 Maniacs worked with Asher again, but in entirely different circumstances. In My Tribe was recorded in Los Angeles, Asher's usual stomping ground; Blind Man's Zoo was recorded in a former church outside Woodstock, New York. "Rather than live in L.A. and record in a place where you might see Jackson Browne," says Buck, "we went to a place in the middle of nowhere where you might see a woodchuck."

This time, 10,000 Maniacs hoped to capture the impact of their live shows. Asher had only seen them perform twice before working with them in 1987; now, says Buck, "he got the gist of the live performance."

The band worked quickly on Blind Man's Zoo; bass and drum tracks, Augustyniak says, were laid down in three days, "with a lot of first takes." Buck used his own effects, and working with a new engineer (Frank Filipetti, who had engineered Foreigner and Pat Ben atar) the band got the stronger sound it wanted. The album is pushier than any of the band's previous recordings, and- as Merchant wanted - considerably more somber.

Trouble me, disturb me with all your cares and your worries

Trouble Me

MERCHANT HEADS FOR TORONTO tomorrow, but instead of packing she has been puttering. She's poring through a book she found in an antique store-a 1920 quasi-medical tome called Sex and Sex Worship. And in her kitchen, where an upright piano sits by the stove, there are two projects on the counter - a pair of antique candlesticks she has reglued to give to friends, and an old oak holder with a scroll that shows the Stations of the Cross. "I've been trying to fix it, and as often happens when I do, I made it worse," she says.

She has also been working on a more modem audiovisual display. For the last few days she has been re-editing the video clip for Trouble Me, trying to get the right, swirling rhythm in images of Merchant and old women gamboling on the grounds of a Victorian resort hotel. "I wanted to counteract what most people would assume the song is about," she says. "It can be about a man and a woman loving each other, but at the same time it's just about friendship and caring and trusting and love, things that I think so many people in the world want and need but don't have, or they want and need to offer to somebody else. Why exclude people who are old from this kind of love?"

Christian imagery shows up regularly in Merchant's songs, and her apartment holds the odd iconic artifact, like a statue of St. Anthony; the band's publishing company is Christian Burial Music. But Merchant does not consider herself a Christian.

"I'm still too selfish to be a Christian," she says. "People who work in AIDS hospices and people like that, those are Christians. Whether you consider Jesus a myth, or a person, or a prophet, or a saint, or the son of God, he lived his beliefs. He had no possessions, no home - he lived in the world, and mankind was his family. It's amazing to think that something that started as such pure theology has been turned by some people to such wicked ends. That's what Jubilee is about, that sense of religious fanaticism that makes people think they can decree a death penalty for someone else."

Merchant thinks a lot about responsibility. She wanted to have the album cover printed on recycled paper, an idea vetoed by Elektra; it bothers her that "everything I make is on plastic." On her last trip to a video store, she said, she was almost in tears at seeing shelf upon shelf of exploitation films and horror movies, full of images of sexual violence. "I can't imagine being an actress portraying a woman enjoying a rape," she says. "In a way, it's worse than prostitution, because it's so widely seen and distributed."

With 10,000 Maniacs now in the mass media themselves, Merchant is determined to send messages she cares about. "I kept suggesting that we make this a darker album," she says. "Maybe it was a kind of tyranny. Every time someone would come along with a cheerful song, I didn't want to write cheerful lyrics, so I requested that we write a song that had more power and more depth to it. Maybe the next album, we'll write a whole album of My Sister Rose songs, maybe it be the time to write something more uplifting. And maybe I was being very selfish. But I felt that I wanted a consistent album."

Her message doesn't always get through. Someone who heard Eat for Two , which opens Blind Man's Zoo, told Merchant she was being trendy since so many yuppies were so in love with having babies. "They didn't understand the song is about an unwanted pregnancy," she says. "You know, women's reproductive rights are a major battleground now, but that's not why I wrote the song. It's about a young girl who wants love and gets sex instead, and her whole life is changed: 'She couldn't stand the way he begged and gave in.' It's about children having children. Maybe I was too subtle."

Does she think about motherhood herself? "I don't know," she says. "It seems like such a hard world to raise a child in now, different even from when I was growing up. I wouldn't want to have a child who was filled with fear, but I understand that now a child has to know about things like sexual abuse and people touching them in the wrong places. It seems so sad that a five-year-old has to know about rape."

Is she hard to work with? "I work alone," Merchant says, and pauses. "But I'm very hard on myself."

Blind Man's Zoo is coherent and anything but cheerful. Aside from the comfort of Trouble Me, it offers troubles: pollution in Poison in the Well (inspired by the Love Canal toxic-waste disaster), teen pregnancy in Eat for Two, Nicaraguan contra atrocities and American complicity in Please Forgive Us, Vietnam in The Big Parade, hard times in Dust Bowl, colonialism in Hateful Hate, religious fanaticism in Jubilee. The music is somber, more connected to the lyrics than before. And while the songs threaten to become preachy, they don't; Merchant finds the details to make her vignettes stories first, social comment second.

"I don't feel like I'm improving my craft if I force myself to write. I write a lot in places like airports and trains, places where I'm surrounded by activity and people. Then I can come home and summarize journals, retype them and extract what's important in them. I don't do anything final away from home, but that's where a lot of the initial writing takes place.

"If there was any specific artist I learned songwriting from, it was probably Lennon-McCartney. My mother was real young when she had her first child, only 19 or 20, and she was still buying Beatles records when she was having kids. She played them over and over, and we learned those songs very young. One of my first memories was learning to sing I Want to Hold Your Hand when I was three years old."

Although she is only 25 years old, Merchant seems like a throwback to an earlier, more rural, more literary generation. "One of my favorite memories is running, as a child, through the cornfields next door," she says. "I know it doesn't seem like much, but it was an incredible sound, in the leaves, and incredibly beautiful, especially at night with a full moon. One time we were at a motel next to a farm, and I wanted to do it again. Jerry and I went running through a cornfield, but he ran into a stalk and lost a contact lens."

Her mother unplugged the family television when Merchant was 10 years old, and until a few years ago, she says, she wrote letters regularly to a dozen friends. "I think it's really therapeutic to write," she says. "People used to write letters, but most people now, if they write a telephone message down, a few checks a week, that's all the writing they do. It's rare to get a birthday card or a Christmas card with anything more written on it than 'love.' Maybe writing all those letters was practice for writing songs." Merchant has file cabinets filled with black-and-white composition notebooks and folders of her writing, some of which will eventually turn into songs; her television, a recent acquisition, sits in a closet. "I told my friends that when I start watching 'Mr. Ed' reruns, the television goes," she said. "So far, I haven't."

Somehow, she manages to stay immune to the temptations of rock-star vanity. In recent years, she changed her onstage costumes from $1-a-bag thrift shop specials - "I got tired of clothes that smelled like cat piss and mothballs, and that had to be sewn up every night" - to discreet modern copies of the old dresses she likes. At one point, she let herself be outfitted by a full-fledged fashion designer. "People told me I looked like a bombshell," she says, grimacing. "That was the end of it. Being a bombshell doesn't have anything to do with this music."

Despite Merchant's genuine concerns and the band's seriousness of purpose, for the moment 10,000 Maniacs seem immune to the dreaded syndrome whereby musicians start to see themselves as prophets and pretend world leaders. Rob Buck, who took guitar lessons around Jamestown not so long ago, says the hometown reaction to 10, 000 Maniacs' success has been rather muted. "People who've known us come up and say, 'It's great you guys made it, but you suck. But that's okay - I think it's great that someone can make it and suck.' Well, what can you say?"

What's the Setup Here?

Jerome Augustyniak plays a Sonor drum kit with a Drum Workshop high-hat and pedal and Avedis Zildiian cymbals. He programs one-bar patterns on a Korg drum machine. "And I practice in front of the mirror with a discontinued Robin guitar."

Rob Buck plays a custom Homer guitar "without a funny heavy-metal headstock. It has a one-piece hardwood body, triple-coil and double-coil pickups and a seven-pound solid bridge with no goddamn whammy bar, no obtuse angles." For bluesy parts, he uses a Robin guitar that he calls "a cross between a Stratocaster and a Telecaster."

His effects include a Roland SDE-1000 digital delay, an Alesis MiDiverb, an ART Multiverb and a Yamaha SPX90. "I use about two delays and three reverbs, and I shut off the reverbs on the amps." He also uses a Roland GP-8 multiprocessor, an E-bow and a volume pedal. It all goes into Roland JC-1 20 and Fender tube amplifiers, and into two Marshall cabinets with four 12" speakers each, one of JBLs and one of ElectroVoices. "It s MlDI-programmed with a Yamaha foot-pedal. I step on a switch and get the perfect sound. I use reverb the way a lot of other people use distortion. For me the idea is to take all those effects and make it sound like a guitar, only bigger. There's nothing better in the world than just the sound of a pick hitting a string."

Dennis Drew uses a Steinway piano in the studio. Onstage, he plays a Roland 300 digital piano directly through the P.A. system, and a Korg CX3 with MIDI retrofit, MIDIed to a Roland D-50. All that goes through a Roland JC-1 20.

Steve Gustafson usually plays a Robin bass, and occasionally a Hamer Chapporal, through a dbx 150 compressor/limiter, a Groove Tube preamp, a Carver 350-watt amp and clamshelf-design speaker cabinets by KK Audio.

Natalie Merchant uses "female Caucasian model 1963 vocal cords, with natural vibrato and sustain."