American rock is currently in one of its conservative troughs with both heavy metal and stadium rock re-establishing the stranglehold that punk only dreamed of disturbing. The US has its own alternative scene, of course, surviving on a small network of record stores, college radio stations and fanzines. Yet many young independents suffer the same disease as their British peers - an inward looking obsession with not competing with the top dogs that has led to a passive and incestuous approach to rock.
Only REM and 10,000 Maniacs seem capable of embracing the innocent values of college rock and making something rich and strange from their inheritance.
REM's Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs are the king and queen of American college rock, 1987 style. In another era, this shy, romantic pair would have been called hippies but the summer of love belonged to another generation and these two were barely walking when everyone went to San Francisco.
REM is currently the voice of America's young bohemians, a band that has gone from playing the pool halls of their college town Athens, Georgia to headlining basketball halls nationwide. Their fifth LP Document went gold upon release while the single The One I Love is about to take them into the alien land of the Top 40.
10,000 Maniacs are yet to command REM's kind of popularity despite Merchant's compelling charisma and a voice that appears to brim over with delight. This is possibly because 10,000 Maniacs are occasionally rather pedestrian in performance and a touch simple-minded in approach (anyone for a cover of Cat Steven's Peace Train?)
Yet the two bands tour together regularly allowing the two singers mutual admiration society to glow with a chaste enthusiasm.
Both singers suffer from shyness and yet are given to strange transports onstage. At the Hammersmith Odeon Stipe sports a baker's apron that makes him look like an Indian prince, while Merchant strips down to her slip, tosses her mane of black hair up and down with blinding vigor and dances with the kind of enthusiasm beloved by the idiot dancers of the Woodstock generation.
REM and 10,000 Maniacs began as a direct response to British punk before allowing their fascination with folk forms to create a particularly American pastoral. Natalie recalls 10,000 Maniacs beginnings in Jamestown rural New York. "There was this feeling that people with limited musical ability could just get instruments and play and not really be concerned that there was no one in the band who could play lead guitar. It was a rebellion against the people at the top."
REM shared the same mixture of enthusiasm and incapacity. "When we started out," says Stipe, "Buck couldn't really play the guitar and I couldn't sing. We were like a speed metal band when we started."
Both bands quickly replaced punk's speed and nihilism with a fascination with mood. "Both of us are capable of expressing completely opposite moods in one song," says Stipe. "A 10,000 Maniacs song like Scorpio Rising can be extremely violent live and yet extremely uplifting at the same time."
Both REM and 10,000 Maniacs are remarkably chaste groups who are rarely sexual in their music. Their genders are not the issue except when they describe male and female behavior. So Stipe regards Document as REM's "most male record" because it thrashes aggressively at American policies and values instead of escaping into a pastoral past. "There's a blind dumbness to this record that's really male to me."
As for Merchant, she sings increasingly of male violence, notably in Gun Shy a portrait of a brother who's joined the US Army. "Women aren't usually the ones who go out and kill. Traditionally women are still the ones who've given life rather than taken it. That's changing because a lot of men are adopting more pacifist attitudes. I felt so betrayed when my brother joined up because he's my baby brother and I felt he was ignoring all my teaching. I sent him the album including Gun Shy on cassette and told him to listen to every song without exception. He came to see us in Germany a couple of weeks ago and he told me the army was no life for him. But it's not just him, my stepbrother and sister are also employed by the US Government to murder people. It's a problem at holidays, we have some tense family meals."
The pacifist strains of these two groups echo in their respect for older American music.
"There's a man I know who plays the guitar outside of Columbus, Georgia, and has an Appalachian porch band together," says Stipe. "He's a 75-year old and he's probably been playing for 50 years. He's always been there and I respect anything that's absolutely genuine. I truly admire the primitive and raw compared to the kind of homogenized sounds we're inundated with. Groups like Eurythmics sound like they've robbed the past in order to homogenize it. We try to carry on the traditions of something simpler and felt, traditions that are lost like story-telling."