by: Marc D. Allan

In a country where men run almost everything, 10,000 Maniacs keyboard player Dennis Drew likes that he's in a group led by an independent, intelligent woman, singer Natalie Merchant.

"Natalie is a terrific role model and a hero to young women all across the country," he says in a telephone interview to promote the group's show tonight at Deer Creek Music Center. "And thank God. They need real role models. They need somebody who doesn't get rich taking their clothes off, which is all you can ever find.

"That's all Madonna or Sharon Stone or all these people do. They don't have enough talent to do anything else. So it's great that there's women out there that women can look up to - Natalie or Hillary Clinton or the whole new crop of powerful, strong women who used their minds to succeed instead of their bodies."

Drew says he learned to appreciate Merchant even more during the group's three-year gap between 1989's Blind Man's Zoo and 1992's Our Time in Eden albums. During that time, he got married and became the father of a daughter, who's now 14 months old.

Thought-provoking

That, he says, made him "more concerned than ever about women's issues."

Meanwhile, Merchant spent her time away from the band working in a Harlem day-care center for homeless children and remixing the band's early, independently released albums, which were reissued under the title Hope Chest.

Until the break, 10,000 Maniacs had been on the go almost non-stop since forming in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1981. After Blind Man's Zoo, the band had achieved enough success (and earned enough money) to take a break in 1989.

"We were tired," Drew says. "We all had enough money now to have our own apartments, because up until '88 or '89, we were living with our families. Finally, when we got off that tour in '89, we all had a chance to have our own houses or apartments and start to live an adult life, assume some adult responsibilities."

When the band got back together, it decided to try a different approach to songwriting. Rather than writing individually or in smaller groups, the members created Our Time in Eden "in workshop fashion."

"We got into a room and jammed, really," he says. "Every day was about playing and learning. When songs crept up out of that stew, we would run with it and finish them.

Half-million sold

"But we didn't push ourselves. We just played, relearned how to play, how things fit together. We tried to experiment a little and to grow up. I think it paid off."

Commercially, it certainly has. The record has spent 35 weeks on Billboard magazine's Top 200 chart and has sold more than 500,000 copies on the strength of the hit single These Are Days, its cheery melodies and insightful, personal lyrics.

To support the album, 10,000 Maniacs returned to the road in April. (The Indianapolis show will be its first here since 1988.)

They've been playing mostly theaters and amphitheaters, but one stop took them to a middle-school cafeteria in Elmira, Ore., to play a concert for the winner of a nationwide lyric-writing contest.

Merchant chose the winner from 16,000 submissions. The entry, called I'm Black and Blue, told of a woman picking up scraps from a Christmas tree lot because she couldn't afford to buy her family a tree. The woman's daughter was a crack addict.

Drew calls the contest and subsequent concert "one of the greatest things we ever did."

For this tour, 10,000 Maniacs is carrying five extra members, including horns, backup singers and another piano player.

Drew says this helps the band appeal to "the MTV generation."

"You have to put on more of a production because people are anesthetized now," he says. "There's so many bands out there that do so many outrageous things and it's all on TV all the time.