by: John Hayes

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, the members of 10,000 Maniacs wondered what the band would have been like without the moody, pouty, predictably-shy Natalie Merchant.

Bassist Steven Gustafson pondered the advantages and disadvantages of working with someone totally opposite of Merchant, with someone, say, like Janis Joplin. Princess Natalie herself suggested that a hippie chick like Edie Brickell might have been better with the group. But keyboardist Dennis Drew hit the nail on the head: "We wouldn't be a band without Natalie."

10,000 Maniacs minus one Merchant would equal far less than 9,999 Maniacs. Despite the substantial musical integrity of the band, Merchant is the key figure in the equation of their success.

Now in her 30s, Merchant is the eternal college girl. [librarian's note: this is wrong, Natalie turned 30 in October 1993]. Still exploring the avenues of entry into any and every social group; still seeing a hazy, romantic vision of the world; still sympathetic to everyone and everything is oppressed as she feels herself to be. Her poems are like pages from a secret diary: painfully revealed, reluctantly released to an undeserving world.

During most of the band's nine-year recording career, their songs evolved through a two-step process. Music and melodies were the end products of jam sessions in which Gustafson, Drew, drummer Jerome Augustyniak and guitarist Robert Buck fed off of each other's ideas. When a tune was complete enough to stand on its own, Merchant was invited to give it a story. Frequently she carried the writing process into the studio, quickly scribbling lines between takes and changing the songs as she sang them. The musician's robust amalgamations of folk, reggae, country and rock were often the antithesis of Merchant's sour visions.

Sometimes the point/counterpoint approach worked particularly well. The Maniacs' second album, In My Tribe, broke through to mainstream radio with Like The Weather, a bouncing, rollicking song about a really, really bad day.

By 1989, however, the formula was failing to gell. Blind Man's Zoo, expected to live up to the success of its predecessor, died a slow and commercially painful death. The folky-pop songs were damned by the media and wilted on the charts. [librarian's note: this is wrong, BMZ actually got very good reviews when it first came out. It was only after it failed to match the sales of IMT that the critics turned on it.]

In lieu of an album of new material, Elektra released Hope Chest, a collection of remixed tunes from the hard-to-find Human Conflict Number Five and Secrets Of The I-Ching. The jangly songs sounded dated and weren't supported with the tour. [librarian's note: this is wrong, the band toured in the fall of 1990 to support HC. And the point is stupid anyway because clearly the album was not released to be a blockbuster hit. It was just meant for fans.] 10,000 Maniacs had to sink or swim.

"We were used to coming up with the music in private," Buck says during a recent phone interview. "Natalie would always write the lyrics in private. When the tours would start, though, we would see new dimensions in the songs through the audience. I have always wanted to approach an album from the other way around. My idea was to write the music and the words in a more public forum, and let the songs develop at their own pace."

The result was an unheard of mini-practice-tour in 1992, in which 10,000 Maniacs hit the road with an album's worth of unfinished songs. Avoiding the major venues, they performed in rooms where they could feed off the audience reaction to fragments of song ideas. [librarian's note: this practice tour took place in the fall of 1991. the band did another mini-tour in the spring of 1992 just before recording the album but by that point the songs were pretty much complete and they had chosen Paul Fox to produce]

"At the time, Natalie didn't have lyrics or she might have the chorus, but no verses," Buck explains. "For a few of the songs, we didn't have all the music ready, either. We waited to see which riffs would catch on with the people in the front rows, and then the next time they came around we'd play them louder. Natalie hummed the melodies into the microphones."

The intimate performances showed small, select audiences another side of the band. During the tour's smallest shows in Pittsburgh, Merchant opened up and actually spoke to members of the audience, a situation which would have been impossible in an arena setting. When she saw a group of school girls sitting cross-legged on the floor, she started an impromptu Kum Ba Ya, complete with the rolling campfire hand gestures, encouraging the audience to join in. Later, she invited the same girls to join her on stage in her trademark toe-touch-and-twirl dance routine. When Merchant hummed the chorus to an unfinished song, 400 followers hummed along.

"There was something very uplifting about that," Buck recalls. "The songs weren't finished, and they'd never heard them before, so we knew they weren't responding to the sales pitch on the radio. They were reacting to the mood and the melody in the same ways we reacted to them during the writing process. If we felt awkward about a particular musical hook and the audience just sat there when we played it, it confirmed our feelings that it wasn't going to work. But when we saw them light up over a song that was really just a song idea to us, we knew we had something."

After the tour, the Maniacs returned to their home base in Jamestown, New York, to sculpt and polish the material. When they felt the songs were ready, they drew up a long list of qualities they'd like to see in the producer.

"We wanted somebody who had things in common with us," Buck says "somebody about our age who came from the same direction as we did. He had to be a musician, a creative producer, a good studio manager. Actually there weren't a lot of people in the world who met our list. We actually approached George Harrison, but he said he didn't produce bands anymore. We probably set our sights too high."

Eventually, they settled on Paul Fox, a formidable studio musician who has produced the Sugarcubes, XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, the Wallflowers and dozens of R&B, bands. He didn't meet every checkpoint on the list but quickly bonded with the members of the band. He brought in the James Brown Horns, insisted on pristine tones and reworked the album's powerful bridges.

The result was Our Time In Eden. If Blind Man's Zoo was culturally myopic, Eden bites the apple of pop accessibility.

"We feel better about this album than anything we've done for a long time," Buck says. "It's more uplifting than Zoo and I think that's important. Our audience is one that tends to actually listen to the songs and think about them, and on this one, I think we give them a positive message."

Commercial radio is picking up These Are Days, a lush departure from the black-draped dirges on Zoo. Merchant gives reason to look to the future. Buck's unusual arrangement was inspired from an obscure Hawaiian guitar tuning.

"Every time we play it," he says, "I feel the energy that I felt when we played it unfinished. It really gets the message across that, by God, these are the days of our lives."

10,000 Maniacs will bring their "Time In Eden" to Blossom this Sunday, June 13. Nine years after their first release, the band's initial college-aged fans have long since graduated and started their lives. Today's freshmen don't remember the folk and reggae movement that splintered from the early '80s punk scene. How can a reclusive performer like Merchant span the generations and appeal to both camps?