It's a hot summer night at Darien Lake and three girls in their mid-20s, dressed entirely in black, stand in a long line.
They're waiting for tickets.
When their turn comes, they step to the window, make their purchase, clasp tickets in hands and turn and scream at each other.
All this for a rock band.
All this for a rock band of considerable fame.
All this for Jamestown's rock band of considerable fame.
All this for the 10,000 Maniacs.
In bassist Steven Gustafson's words, the band's popularity is measured by the fact that "We can draw on our own anywhere up to 8, 9, 10,000 maniacs. ... We're all maniacs. Inside of everyone is a little maniac."
The five "maniacs" that make up the band are captive spirits.
In interviews, personalities, engaging and singular, leap forward.
First is singer Natalie Merchant.
Here there is much that nobody else can light a candle to.
In this package a voice of wonder, a musical talent of immense portions, a poet of depth, a mind of conscience, a personality of strength, the coyness of a woman and the movements of a child.
In the words of a jealous 19-year-old, watching her twirl and croon from afar above a sea of several thousand, "She's so darn cute."
Ms. Merchant is more, much more, than cute. In concert, she is at once intimate and reserved, flirtatious and supercilious.
She tells the audience anecdotes from her life, and sings, between Maniac songs, tunes from her childhood or her young adult life. And yet she is always there in the spotlight seeming alone, a cushion of light separating her from other, more mundane, souls.
One isn't sure if her audiences really understand or appreciate what she's all about, or even if she wants them to. Ultimately it is all beside the point anyway. The importance in the evening for everybody is the band's music, her lyrics, her voice.
Asked what it is she wants to achieve with her talents, she replies, "I think we've achieved it already. It's moving people with the music that we write." She says she is looking for music that really affects and infects people with her particular mood - be that joy, elation, introspection, brooding: "some kind of emotional change."
Ms. Merchant, however, also has things to say. Her greatest satisfaction in the band's success, she says, is that they have proved people are willing and ready to listen to lyrics that the record company initially considered too complex. "I think the most gratifying part is that now we can be respected by the company ... and now we can do as we please," she says.
What pleases her, apparently, are songs of import; she writes lyrics about child abuse, illiteracy, alcoholism, pollution, the army, war, the lost Kerouac generation. In fact, the few negative reviews of the band's music have centered around the seeming preachiness of those songs.
Ms. Merchant doesn't agree. "I think I'm pretty lax about being ... dogmatic," she says. "I think the subjects that I might have been a little bit more opinionated about, everyone has to agree with me. ... Everyone shares that opinion." No one can condone child abuse, she says; it is a problem for all of us.
Ms. Merchant insists, however, that what she is really writing about is love. The mainstay of rock and roll, the inevitable love song, seems strangely absent in much of the Maniacs music. "I don't avoid writing traditional man/woman love songs," she says, "I just think there are other things to write about," she said. Those other things, she says, are kinds of love, be it love for brother, sister, family, children, reading, writing, life.
At Darien Lake, Ms. Merchant sings her kind of love songs. And in the crowd, a girl hugs her boyfriend, looks into his eyes and serenades him. Not far away, teenagers raise their fists in jubilation and join in. And a few steps removed, a young man stands quietly, silently, hands deep in pockets, and mouths the words, every word, only to himself.
"Every time we play now, it's at a different level, " Ms. Merchant says. "We're becoming a better group and the audiences ... are more knowledgeable of what we're doing."
"I like it when we have all those songs with rather complicated (lyrics) ... and everyone still sings," says keyboardist Dennis Drew.
Drew seems to be the band's keeper of the flame, a man both humble - "I'm no genius musician," he says - and proud.
"We played cheap when we had to. We worked hard ... but we had talent. I think we proved you can succeed with brains, without selling yourself as a sex symbol, without selling yourself as a hedonistic symbol. That's what I'm proud of; we've succeeded and we've succeeded on our terms," he says.
Drew's terms are businesslike and, in his own way, efficient.
If Ms. Merchant is the band's musical center, he is its practical presence. This is the man who makes the contacts, hustles the press, remembers the names, the faces.
He is the politician, the gambler.
"We went out on a limb and we gambled all the way; borrowed money from our parents and everyone," he says.
"We were a little slow about it, but we were well organized," he says without a trace of irony.
In performance he is low-key to the point of obscurity.
At Darien Lake he wears a tie and sport coat, takes his place behind his piano silently and stays there through the evening, playing his songs, doing his job.
But in the greeting party after, he is Mr. Congeniality, roving through the crowd, shaking hands, making introductions, leaving kisses.
Asked if he and the other band members are jealous of Ms. Merchant's prominence, he replies, simply and quietly, "You have to be a fool to think (that)." She is, he says, the natural and articulate speaker.
"I think our personalities speak through our instruments," he says of himself and the other band members. "You can see our personalities through our actions in the group."
But underneath it all, Drew is a showman.
On a quiet mid-week night in the Rusty Nail in Jamestown, The Billups, a band that will open for the Maniacs tonight is on stage.
They have a small, intimate audience. Drew and Gustafson are there. There's joking between them and John Lombardo, a former guitarist with the Maniacs. "Come on up," says Lombardo. Drew and Gustafson do. There follows a 20-minute jamming session. First are versions of old Maniac songs. Drew is at the keyboards, Gustafson on the bass. But about 10 minutes into the act, the music dissolves into spontaneous song. Lombardo starts crooning in different languages. Drew abandons his piano and dances across the stage, adding sound effects through his microphone as he struts.
It's a nice sight.
Behind him is Gustafson, smiling, strumming.
In a sense, Gustafson will forever be tied to the Rusty Nail for a quote - that he claims was a misquote - in People Magazine in which he derided the people of Jamestown for not paying to see the band because they believed they could still see them for $2 at the Rusty Nail.
Gustafson says he didn't say it.
He says he is forever grateful to the Rusty Nail and other local bars that gave the band a forum in which to play. And he says he misses the friends, the smallness, the ease that he found there. "It was fun."
Those days, though, are over, he says now.
But Gustafson is at home here, in this small atmosphere. He is the real hometown boy.
And he is the one with the nerves. Before large shows, he says, "I always get very nervous and (an) upset stomach. ... you may find me in the bathroom, throwing up. "I always believe they're not going to like what we do. I'm usually presently surprised."
On stage, that nervousness transforms itself to a restless energy. Gustafson hops, waves. During the encore at Darien Lake, he even throws a towel to the crowd, and comes to the microphone to shout his thanks. It is a curious site for a normally calm, and quietly funny, house painter.
At a practice session for the band, Gustafson arrives in old paint-smattered khakis and a painter's hat. "I suppose if I didn't want to paint ... I wouldn't have to," he says from the vantage of his new-found financial success. But he does. "I paint houses for therapy," says Gustafson. "I get to sort of lose myself in the paint. You can see definite accomplishment when you're through. You have a nice looking house."
He and his wife, the former Pam Hallberg, are both from here, He takes pride in mentioning that he is one in a long line of Gustafsons who are graduates of Jamestown High School. "I have a definite feeling of roots here in Jamestown," he says.
Although the couple have recently bought a house in Frewsburg, ("in the country," he explains), "We're still Jamestownians."
That is not true of Robert Buck. He grew up in Chandler's Valley, PA, a tiny village between North Warren and Sugar Grove. "This was a big city when I lived in Chandler's Valley," he says from the dark depths of the Reg Lenna Civic Center.
He lived with his grandmother. "She started me with piano lessons when I was 5 or 6, " he says. His considerable music talent must begin with her. She was a gospel song writer, with more than 300 published songs. He remembers hearing her pounding on the piano in the middle of the night. Then she would come to his room and wake him. "'Angels just came into my room and gave me this song,'" he says she said to him.
From her home and the piano, he moved to the city and to the guitar, his instrument in the band. But it is not his only one. He still plays the piano and talks about taking up different stringed instruments, like the mandolin. And he speaks wistfully of the saxophone. "It's weird; a lot of my musical heroes have been saxophone players. It's all in my head - the sounds." It may be his grandmother speaking.
Buck is nearly non-existent in crowds, the seeming shy, or at least, semi-reclusive, one. He wanders around the edges of the party. At the gold record ceremony at City Hall, he is the last to arrive and the first to leave. But, like Gustafson, he's funny.
"I remember I used to tell everyone in first grade I was the young boy in Flipper - that I filmed it on the, weekends," he says when asked if he always wanted to be famous.
The band's first national television spot was on the David Letterman Show.
"You don't get nervous because you know there's 20 million people watching; you get nervous because you might make a mistake." he remembers. On the set of the Letterman show, he says, there were no cues, no direction. Someone told him he should be on stage, so he ran out. He wasn't supposed to be there. So, while David Letterman was talking, he crawled behind the screen that forms the backdrop for Letterman's set and separates the stage from the back stage.
Asked if his life has changed since the record's success, Buck replies, "Other people's perceptions have changed more than anything else. All of a sudden your relatives go, 'Oh, maybe he's all right.'"
His grandmother probably already knew it.
Jerry Augustyniak's family has always found him to be all right. This man has a swarm of relatives, who crowd around him like the workers in a beehive. They are his inspiration, his believers.
This man is the true childlike inspiration of the band.
On stage he is as light as a monkey, scrambling among his drum set, as if he hopes the music might never end. Midway through the show he throws his stick up in the air and catches it. "I just threw it up because I couldn't hang onto the things," he says after the performance. "It hit some lights and came down. That was the closest to jockdom I'll get."
Augustyniak is a small man, with a shaved head. Not too long ago, he always wore a stocking cap or a toupe over his balding spot. No more. Now he shows the skin with a forceful pride.
Someone comes up to him with a T-shirt with the Maniacs pictures on it. His cousin, standing next to him, admires the shirt. "Where do you get that," he asks Augustyniak. "I'd like to get one," he says. "I don't know," his cousin replies, "I'd like to get one too." He points to his own picture and laughs. "I look like ectoplasm with glasses."
He hugs his cousin. "Most of my nephews and nieces are taller than me and better looking, but I don't care - because I'm a rock star."
It is not stardom, however, which beckons him.
"I love to play if there's anybody out there who will hear me."
This, for him, is a love, not money or a job. "I figure if I were to get a real job. I'd probably take all my money and go to school for auto mechanics," he says.
With the money he has made from the band, Augustyniak has bought a '65 Ford. "It's like 23 years old and it's the most ridiculously simple thing," he explains. On the night of the concert at Darien Lake, it overheated on the way up.
Augustyniak is the only Maniac who doesn't live in Jamestown. He has lived all his life in Buffalo; he lives there still, in his family's house. They live near the east side railroad terminal, he says, a beautiful building that is now a lonely place. "I go there and just imagine guys coming home from World War II - guys dressed like Clark Kent - now they use it once in a blue moon for polka dances."
It was Augustyniak that wrote the music for the song My Sister Rose, a swinging polka-like tune for which Ms. Merchant wrote lyrics about a sister's wedding day.
Before too much talking at the after-concert party, Augustyniak excuses himself. Most of his family is there, he says. He wants to talk to them.
His is one of the last bright images of the concert. After the first encore he comes up to the microphone and sends a thank-you and a wave to his family.
And the lights fade.
Tonight 10,000 Maniacs concert-goers should expect blue and green, dark and light, stories and songs.
Members of the band describe In My Tribe as sky blue and light. And now they're talking about their new album, one that's going to be about the color green in tone, darker in mood and full of stories. Tonight will mark the debut of some new 10,000 Maniacs songs, ones that will be on their third major-label album they'll record in November.
After a year of promoting In My Tribe, the band seems ready to tackle the new fare, and excited about what it holds. "This one is extremely allegorical," says singer/lyricist Natalie Merchant. The message she said is "going to be masked by the story more than ever before." But, says she, "I think there's a lot of serious content."
Ms. Merchant says much of her inspiration comes from magazines and books, but "other times it will just be something I overhear in a bus station." She is entirely responsible for the lyrics.
But the rest of the band contributes to the music. "Everyone generally writes songs separately," says guitarist Robert Buck. "They're generally a song musically before Natalie writes lyrics." Buck said he expects more from this record. "We haven't made our best album yet," he says. "It's still two to three albums away."
Keyboardist Dennis Drew agrees, although he adds that "It's really impossible to tell until you get through. You have to believe.
"I think the last record was about being focused, clear," he says. "The last record was concentrating on the beat, the arrangement, the vocals - to get the point across; to be very clear about what we felt and thought." He said he is proud of the band's role in that accomplishment, "proud of the rhythm and the incredible precision." But this time, the album "is going to be strong, maybe a bit scary, hopefully a little more mysterious, at times musically - I don't want to use the words exotic - maybe daring."
In bassist Steven Gustafson's words, "the last record was sort of sky-blue and this next one is going to be a forest green."