by Jonathan Van Meter (pages 45-48)
Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs is the singer who killed the pop star. - concerned, talented and passionately involved. When she talks, people listen. And listen.
An impurity has intruded on Natalie Merchant's prudent little world. A lone, gray trail of cigarette smoke is traveling straight up towards the corporate drop ceiling of the Elektra Records conference room on the 1st floor of a tall, bustling building in midtown Manhattan. The cigarette itself sits, unsmoked, in a huge ashtray at the end of a long, shiny table that overwhelms the room. Natalie has just walked in.
"Ohhhh. You can't smoke," she cries, stopping dead in the doorway. "No, no, no. You can't smoke. I'll die." This is followed by a long, weird silence, which is followed by her nervous, defensive laugh. An almost embarrassed laugh. The cigarette is mushed out, the pack is put away, and when the coast is clear, Natalie, in a forest green skirt and jacket and little black, ballerina-like shoes (which appear to be leather, but probably aren't), sits herself down in one of the abundant high-back chairs. A record company minion fetches her a small bottle of Perrier and a cup of ice. She drinks the water straight from the bottle, because, she says, the ice could be "polluted."
A year ago, in, say, a batik, flowery peasant skirt and T-shirt, Natalie Merchant would, have looked like you would expect the lead singer of a groovy-folkie-pop band to look in this environment-out of place. But today, wearing a few pieces of carefully selected, tasteful jewelry, and her hair in a chignon, all it would take to make her indistinguishable from the junior executives who march in and out of this building on urgent, business-obsessed missions is a pair of pumps and a briefcase.
This is the new, grownup Natalie. And this image change is reminiscent, if only vaguely, of the first time Madonna ditched her rags, French braided her hair, and donned a pair of horn. rims. Take me seriously, it seems to say. It is one of those things that newly successful pop-girls do. They evolve.
Natalie Merchant defends herself.
"I started singing when I was 16 with this group. And a lot of people who have been watching us for years have watched me grow up. But I feel like I'm finally being liberated from this child...this childhood...."
A long pause, a heavy sigh.
"...this folk-waif reputation. I would like to be liberated from that. And that doesn't mean that I would like to wear a leather jacket and start strutting onstage. It's just ... I think that ... I've matured. It sounds apparent on the new album. The lyrics, the instrumentation, the arrangement, it just sounds ... much ... older."
At 25, Natalie Merchant, in front of her band, 10,000 Maniacs, has become one of the more compelling figures of American pop music. Her big ethnic lips, kicky little haircut, insinuating alto (which seems to have developed its own not-of-this-hemisphere accent), and whirling dervish-child stage persona have become an obsession for sensitive white people everywhere, and caused boy critics, both here and in Britain, to gush. But for all it's worth, that's really just icing. What rivets is the band's music, and even more, the powerful short stories of Natalie's lyrics. On Blind Man's Zoo,the band's fourth LP, the lyrics are, among many other things, grown up. Not that 10,000 Maniacs ever dabbled in teenage subject matter, but this album (unlike the first three) is utterly without levity or humor. The song topics - toxic spills, South Africa, teenage pregnancy, the Vietnam War, US intervention in Central America-are the stuff of documentary series. 10,000 Maniacs are the public television of pop music.
Because of Natalie's obsession with religious iconography, childhood motifs and wartime themes, the music is loaded with some powerful imagery:
He's God's mad disciple, a righteous title, for the Word he heard he so misunderstood. Though simple minded, a crippled man, to know this man is to fear this man, to shake when he comes. Wasn't it God that let Puritans in Salem do what they did to the unfaithful?
"There ought to be a word for what we do," Natalie said last year, trying to figure out what to call 10,000 Maniacs' music. Today, she's still in a quandary. "We haven't made an album that deserves a folk description since The Wishing Chair. But are we pop? I don't know. Pop music has evolved quite a bit since ...oh God... since Buddy Holly. If that was pop. Or the Raspberries. Or K.C. and the Sunshine Band. What is pop music? I think pop is a three-and-half-minute song with verses and choruses, which is, I think, the only definition that could stand as the... what would you say? The omniscient definition for all those different groups."
Natalie Merchant is, basically, a hick at heart. She grew up in the rural-industrial town of Jamestown, New York, where, she has said (and sung), young guys join the military just to get out. Her Roman Catholic upbringing came to a halt when she was eight, when her parents divorced and her mother, excommunicated, married an atheist. Natalie dropped out of high school at 16 to work in a health food store - the Eighties equivalent of a head shop - and walked around threatening that she would commit suicide by the age of 25. Doesn't sound like the portrait of an artist as a young woman who would grow up to write songs about a myriad of global issues. But this is, after all, America. Anything's possible.
"Because my parents were fans of music," she says, "there was always music in the house. My grandfather played mandolin, guitar and accordion. He always claimed that back in Italy one of his cousins was a famous opera singer. My other grandmother on my mother's side claims her grandmother was named Byron and that we're related to Lord Byron. She'll swear to it until the day she dies. Byron had an incestuous friendship with his half sister so she always told us we were the bastard children of Byron, and don't forget it. My grandfather on the other side was Irish and he was a piano tuner and sang in a barber shop quartet. I took piano training for a while, and voice training, but I never really pursued it because it was too intimidating - the teachers and recitals. So I stopped everything, but I kept playing the piano."
In 1981, when she was 16, Natalie was invited to sing with a band called Still Life, which included three current Maniacs - bassist Steve Gustafson, keyboardist Dennis Drew and guitarist Robert Buck. Drummer Jerry Augustyniak joined a couple years later, and rhythm guitarist John Lombardo (who was the band's early musical force) quit while the Maniacs were beginning to work on In My Tribe. All of the current band members except Gustafson contribute musical arrangements to the albums. But it is Natalie who pens every concerned, self-righteous, at times pretentious, yet thoroughly engaging lyric.
This, from a formerly suicidal high school dropout:
Please forgive us, we don't know what was done in our name. There'll be more trials like this in mercenary heydays. When they're so apt to wrap themselves up in the stripes and stars and find that they are able to call themselves heroes and to justify murder by their fighters for freedom.
It is from a song on Blind Man's Zoo called Please Forgive Us. When asked, "What's it's all about, Natalie?" she launches into a litany that is, like the song and the woman herself, intriguing and repelling all at once.
"I've taken upon myself the obligation of making a public plea to Central America for forgiveness for what has been done to their country by all of the money that's been provided for military aid to rebel groups there. I'm not apologizing to the Sandinistas. I'm apologizing to the people who have been caught in the cross fire, whose lives have been permanently disrupted by the loss of family members, the loss of their homes, the torturing of their children. And all done with our tax dollars. And I just ... my heart doesn't bleed for either side. What I'm concerned about is the people who knew absolutely nothing in that country and just found themselves in the middle of a war zone......"
After 10 solid minutes of her talking full tilt on this subject, there is a break, and the diatribe appears to be over. She laughs that nervous, embarrassed laugh, and then defends herself.
"I don't like getting too involved speaking about politics because I'm sure that my knowledge of it is extremely limited. But it just seems apparent to me that it's ... wrong. It's really wrong."
There are other songs on the album that give rise to comparable lectures on current events. Take, for example, toxic waste: "Poison in the Well," she says, "is a very obvious song, especially now, with what's happening in Alaska. But I was writing about Hooker Chemical Company in Buffalo and the Southern Love Canal, which everyone looks at as ancient history now. And it's not ancient history where we live, because it's still very much in the press. It's a horrible event. Many people died of cancer. Many women to this day cannot conceive children, cannot stay pregnant. But who's responsible? Is it the government's responsibility to regulate where these people are dumping and how they dump and what's done with the site after they've dumped? Who's held accountable? Is it the company that buries it? Is it the company that manufactures this product that causes this waste? Who's responsible for the oil spill in Alaska? Is it the man who was stewarding the ship, or is it the company that allowed him to be the captain of that ship? Who's responsible? Is there any way to compensate for the wildlife that's being destroyed and all the water and coastal areas that have been destroyed and the livelihood of the people who depend on them?"
It is an impressive monologue, made all the more so coming right after her claim that she hesitates to talk politics. She is very aggressive in conversation: looking at you, talking at you, pausing not to invite dialogue but to announce that the subject is exhausted. Then, prompted, she launches into the next manifesto.
On teenage pregnancy: "Eat For Two is about a young woman who doesn't think that being pregnant is her best option right now. But she's five months along, so I avoid the abortion question, which is something that I didn't really want to write about in a song. It's a warning. Because the last verse is, Young girls should run and hide instead of risk the game by taking dares with yes. She's saying, 'Don't be like me. Look at what a mess I've made of my life.' And now it's going to be the most public mistake she could ever make. I hope people don't misinterpret it as a pro-life song."
Or South Africa: "Hateful Hate is about the situation in Africa and its historical context - what led up to what's happening there today. There's this intolerance of the differences between races and cultures that the colonial Europeans express towards Africans - that they were primitive and savage. But this is all tired. Everyone knows what their attitude was."
All through these quietly possessing orations, Natalie Merchant sits comfortably, legs up underneath her, in the rich corporate halls of the record company that pays her bills - the very symbol, she might argue, of what is wrong with the world. She fidgets, running her finger along an imaginary groove on the top of the huge, sleek table that miniaturizes her. As Natalie admitted to her friend/peer Michael Stipe of R.E.M. when they interviewed each other for Musician magazine last year, "There are times when I am humiliated by who I am and what I do"
I'd like to be able to do more than just write songs about all of this. I think that's the frustrating thing. I really care about the quality of life universally. What can I do to improve it? Right now, all I'm doing is the occasional benefit in addition to writing these songs, which I think is pretty important. Raising other people's awareness. But some day I hope there's going to be something - something that won't involve the music industry, something that I could do. That could be so many things. Which doesn't necessarily mean going on marches either. Or putting on telethons. It's ... it's ... it's something else. Something direct.
Onstage at Radio City Music Hall this summer, flanked by tapestries of an elephant and a crescent moon, Natalie stopped between songs to say, "There's a room backstage, it's called the Animal Room." The audience roared, just as they had earlier, when Natalie turned around and shook her backside at them. "It's nothing to applaud," she said. "It is a room without any sunlight or any ventilation. It is where the animals wait to come out and perform. Think about it." It was classic Natalie.
Here is a woman who is encouraging people to merely think about the problems she so eloquently writes, sings and talks about. And she truly seems to care - deeply - herself. But is that enough? One can't help wondering if, perhaps, she has some regrets about the chosen vehicle for her social work.
"I remember when I was 15, I worked as a volunteer for a handicapped children's summer program. And a lot of the children that I was working with were older than I was, but had mental and physical handicaps. And there was something very fulfilling about being ... needed by the administrators of the camp and also the teachers in the classes, and the kids themselves after a while when they got to know me and depend on me. For a while I thought I would go into special education as a field."
Her voice fades to a whisper, and then, almost inaudibly, she says, "But ... I didn't."