by: Dan Craft

Talk about discrepancies.

On the one hand, you have the band's name: 10,000 Maniacs, a label that inspires Dante-like visions of hellbound heavy metal spawn pillaging and plundering the countryside.

On the other, you have the band's music: a laid-back, folk-like confection of melodic pop hooks, Caribbean rhythms and lead singer Natalie Merchant's ethereal lead vocals wrapping themselves around her evocative, socially aware lyrics.

There is no connection - repeat, no connection - to be made between name and music.

Just three days into the tour that will bring the Maniacs to Illinois State University's Braden Auditorium at 8 p.m. Thursday (seats are still available), the band's guitarist, Robert Buck, tends to agree.

Actually, he says, the group's label is something of an error.

On a list of potential names for the band was one that the musicians thought belonged to cult director Herschell Gordon Lewis' notorious 1963 splatter horror movie, 2,000 Maniacs.

At the time, he said, "none of us had actually seen the film. We were paying homage to the name, not the film. But we got the number wrong."

Oh, well. Maniacs are maniacs, be there 2,000 or 10,000 of them.

Actually, only five will be seen on the Braden stage Thursday: Buck, Ms. Merchant, drummer Jerome Augustyniak, keyboardist Dennis Drew and bass player Steven Gustafson.

In an unusual reunion, the band's former rhythm guitarist, John Lombardo, who left the group in 1985, will perform as the show's opening act, with Mary Ramses. [webmaster note: John left in 1986 and Mary's name is Ramsey]

10,000 Manics was born in the rural isolation of Jamestown, N.Y., in 1981, where the band evolved from various other factions from the local music scene, recalls Buck.

Early influences, he says, included such post-punk British bands as Gang of Four, English Beat, Joy Division and The Mekons. The band's mix of English rock, island rhythms, country, bluegrass, folk and balladry won it a cult following in the upstate New York area.

In 1982, the Maniacs released their first album, Human Conflict Number Five, followed a year later by Secrets of the I Ching. Both recordings were independently produced and released ("there were only 1,000 or 2,000 copies released at most," Buck says) and have since become collector's items.

Constantly touring, the band began cultivating an underground following both here and in England, where a cut from I Ching, My Mother the War, became the only American record to finish in a Top 50 listener's poll conducted by influential DJ John Peel.

The group's breakthrough album came in 1985 with The Wishing Chair, a major hit on college radio playlists, followed in 1987 by the platinum-selling In My Tribe and in 1989 by Blind Man's Zoo. The group's new release, Hope Chest, is a collection of remixed cuts from the two out-of-circulation independent recordings of the early '80s.

In the nine years since the Maniacs banded together, the musical sounds have become "more concise," says Buck.

He still feels the group deserves its "alternative music" classification. "We certainly are no Phil Collins or Madonna or Cher," he says. Though the group did score a Top 40 hit several years back, "we've never had a Top 10 hit," he adds. "If we had had a Top 10 hit, it definitely would be over. We couldn't be hip or underground anymore."

As ever, Buck says, the band's philosophy remains rooted in appreciation of strongly melodic pop and lyrics of meaningful depth.

"One of the things we do for fun on the road is to start singing every bad pop song from the '70s," he says. "Stuff like Baby I'm-A Want You, Cherokee Nation, Billy Don't Be a Hero, The Night Chicago Died - all that awful but brilliant stuff with the meaningless lyrics that don't move you in any way, shape or form."

The group's tongue-in-cheek affection for '70s schlock-pop is partly sincere, according to Buck. "We all like pop," he says. "But our songs have to say something." He also thinks that, regardless of how silly some '70s pop music got, "there was much more bad pop in the '80s."