By: Tony Paris
American music is in a curious situation. It has its mega-stars, video creatures like Madonna, Prince, Tina Turner, Van Halen and others who share the top of the charts with multi-million selling LPs and SRO world tours (which, through guilt by association, lumps Springsteen in with them) that have become household words. Yet for all of their popularity (excluding Mr. Springsteen's) there's not much there for their fans to care about. These acts have become just as disposable as Glad Bags and even less useful. When the media blitz spotlights a caricature image ala Cyndi Lauper, the people who rushed out to buy records by last week's "People" magazine cover story, will do the same with whomever the publicists manage to place on this week's.
It's no secret that the bands making inroads, offering something meaningful, songs of substance that make statements, are those nurtured on the independent circuit that has grown in the United States. Bands like R.E.M., The Replacements, Husker Du, Zeitgeist, 10,000 Maniacs, have all grown musically and spiritually, from starting at the basement level, usually forming as a means of entertainment at a party, never thinking that it would go any further, then making it their lives. Sincere and honest, these bands are bound together by the commitment to make music, to give their audiences more than three-minute, high-gloss, commercials devoid of feelings, emotions or any other elements upon which the prinicples of music are built, and to have fun.
Up until their October performance at 688, 10,000 Maniacs had not played Atlanta for a year. At that time, the Jamestown, New York band (which had called Atlanta home for a short time) was close to signing a major label deal. So close, they joked, there was no turning back. In the ensuing 12 months, the sextet signed to Elektra Records, recorded an LP with famed producer Joe Boyd (whose credits read like a definitive listing of traditional English folk groups: Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, Fotheringay, Nick Drake, John Martyn, the Incredible String Band) and toured Europe to rave reviews.
At the sound check before the Maniacs most recent Atlanta appearance, little seemed to have changed in the band's attitude and demeanor, despite the benefits reaped in the past year. There were a few physical differences though - two new vans in which they now travel, the new equipment with which they play and the sound man and technician who travel with them. Yet these were mere necessities, rather than excesses, for a band who used to live out of an old school bus and play used instruments salvaged from second-hand stores. Guitarists Robert Buck and John Lombardo, bassist Steven Gustafson, keyboardist Dennis Drew and drummer Jerry Augustyniak, were still themselves, battling sound problems trying for the seemingly chaotic perfection which is their trademark. Vocalist and lyricist Natalie Merchant sat offstage on the bleachers reading a book while the guys worked things out.
The band may make up the big picture of 10,000 Maniacs - their music is a cross-fertilization of wide ranging musical styles: parts pop and reggae with R&B punk combined with traditional English folk and the force of rock, not to show their influences, though to create a totally new sound - but Merchant is the focal point. A whirling literary dervish of words and movement onstage, she sings in a somewhat indecipherable patois that's not meant to cover up the words, it's just that sometimes their sounds are more important than their meaning. Yet, were that the case no lyric sheet would've been included in the group's LP The Wishing Chair. Reading through Merchant's observations, it's quick to see everything she says has its place.
Offstage, Merchant can be intimiding in her silence and pensive stares, or fun and comical with her keen sense of humor. It's obvious from her aside jokes that she's enjoying the band's new-found involvement in the record business but doesn't take it seriously. There are more important things than success and she's found them with the other 10,000 Maniacs.
Creative Loafing: What inspires you and your lyrics?
Natalie Merchant: Inspiration originates from many places. I guess I'd have to take each song and deal with it individually. Every song I approach differently - some songs I research before I delve because I want to have facts. I don't want some wild surmises.
CL: Once such song, for example.
NM: Among the Americans. I had no intention of writing a song about American Indians. I thought it would be really trite to write a pop song about American Indians. But after I studied it last summer...."
The greatest inspiration for that wasn't even from printed material, literary material, it was from photographs by Edward Curtis. Have you ever heard of him? He traveled through America at the end of the 19th century. About 1920, he died. He photographed strictly American Indians, on reservations mostly, because at that time there weren't many left on their own lands. His photographs are just incredible. Pierpoint Morgan gave him funding and the originals are all in the Morgan collection. There are only about 15 copies of this main book with hundreds of photos in them. There's one in the New York Public Library.
CL: Do you usually try conveying emotions or stories?
NM: I like narratives. I like using dialogue in songs, like in Puzzle Lover, the answer of my grandfather. That's all fictitious. My grandfather didn't smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. But just him saying, "there's a nonsense in all those heaven measures, it's a heathen creed, so your grandma says. Better to live by drink it all before it's dry." So the way I approach a lot of the songs is more like they're small short stories or small plays, which is pretty unusual these days.
CL: It is unusual. People today want quick, short, pop songs. It surprised me when you referred to your stuff as pop songs. I've always thought of the pop song as real shallow, unlike your material.
NM: Yeah, we have a hard time defining exactly what type of music we play. I say pop songs just for lack of any better (term). I don't want to say "folk" songs, but, I don't know, I think any kind of song can be a folk song.
Lots of the ballads that are written these days, if you strip them down to the barest chord progression and barest melody, it's essentially all folk music still. I guess you could say blues is another kind of folk music and that's what a lot of rock 'n' roll is, is just the fusion of folk and blues.
CL: You seem to have a good knowledge of music. Did you study music, or does it come natural?
NM: I studied music when I was a little girl. I quit, which I really regret. I got lazy about age 13.
CL: Did you think you'd get in a band?
NM: No. I didn't think so. I sang with a folk band when I was about 15 but we never performed for anybody, we'd just do it for ourselves. I always thought I'd just "be an artist" (laughter). So I never planned to do anything very concrete.
CL: You could call yourself an artist with what you're doing now.
NM: Yeah, but not a visual artist. Well, I guess dance is a visual art and I suppose designing album covers.
CL: Which you do for the Maniacs.
NM: Well, I assist. I guess I design but the artist was really the one to put it all together. But we were limited in our supplies. We couldn't have the kind of paper we wanted and we couldn't do the laminating we wanted. And you never know. Carol Friedman, she's the art director, she said when we wanted our lyric sheet and the album to be the same color, she said, "Well, I'm just going to throw them off of a cliff and scream 'fire' and hope" cause they were done in two different factories. So she was just saying, "I've no idea if they're going to be the right color." So you can claim to have lots of control, and we do, but in the end...
CL: Your first record, The Secrets of the I-Ching, was released through Christian Burial. Now you have Myth America, is that a licensing arrangement?
NM: It's sort of a cosmetic label. Christian Burial is our publishing company now.
CL: Where did the phrase "Christian Burial" come from?
NM: It's something we, I don't remember who made it up. I had this pin that I'd bought in a church rummage sale of Saint Anthony and the baby Jesus and I just put it on the Xerox machine - and I said, "Christian Burial Music is our company now."
We make jokes about someday opening an office but right now it's just... it's just a Xeroxed pin (laughter). Well, now it's a publishing company, which is still us. But for all those times we would get resumes from people who wanted to he employed by Christian Burial music. They thought it was (a big label).
We'd get letters, "Who else is on your label?" And all that. But it was just us. We were completely independent and we just manufactured the records through a place in Clarence, which is outside Buffalo. The company's usual clients were marching bands and family singers and choirs. We were the biggest seller they ever had - 6,000 records were big statistics for them.
CL: Is it any different for you now, having a major label deal and going on the road?
NM: Oh yeah. We feel much more secure in some ways. I mean, we're in more debt than we ever have been because we bought buses and equipment but we feel like we don't have to worry about distributing our own records. We don't have to worry about doing all of this touring on our own. If it turns out we're in Tuscaloosa and we don't have enough money to get to the next gig, we could call the record company and they'll loan us the money to get there.
CL: What made you start this originally?
NM: We come from a really depressed area, there's no form of employment. We were all just out of school, well not just out of school. Rob had worked in a factory, which was not what he deserved because he had a bachelor's degree in anthropology but there's no job for that. John has a master's degree in painting and he was teaching high school and was really bored with that.
Everyone else was either still in school or just out. I was planning to transfer to an art college in New York. We were all faced with huge debts for our schooling and no way to get a job in the area and no way to get out because we didn't have the money to even put the deposit on an apartment in the city, even if we wanted - it's the bind most people are in.
We were in this band and we decided, "Well, we want to get out and we can't settle someplace else." We tried to settle here in Atlanta but that didn't work, so we brought the bus and said, "Well, we'll live like gypsies and see where that goes." So we did. We lived out of the bus and took a tent out on the road, when we couldn't afford... Well, we didn't get any hotel rooms the first year and a half, we stayed on people's floors or in our tent. Or slept in the bus or on the floor of the club - anywhere we could.
CL: So you started the band as a means to get of Jamestown and to play music.
NM: We never thought, "We're in a band and we'll get a major label deal and then we'll go to Europe and we'll tour the States and we'll be on the charts." We never thought any of that. We just thought "We need $20 a piece to buy some food today." When we finally went home, luckily we had very sympathetic families who had saved the guest room for us (laughter). If it hadn't been for our parents...
Probably I would be a waitress or, I don't know, I'd probably just be graduating from school with a bachelor's degree in some ridiculous study that wouldn't get me a job and I'd probably be waitressing right now. Which is an awful thought. It's the fate of lots of my friends who have so much more ability and they just... money is so tight they can't...
And they become more and more disillusioned and less interested in their art or whatever, their writing, their other abilities.
CL: If you look at some of the bands on the charts, there aren't that many making artistic statements.
NM: We just laugh. We're not about to alter our style just so people will like us because then the people who do like us wouldn't appreciate us anymore. I think that there are enough people in this country to sustain us. They just don't know about us yet. I don't think we're too complex at all. I think we're very accessible to a large amount of people in this country.
In the main statistics you'll read on people who buy albums, they are young boys. I don't think we'll attract that sort of crowd, the heavy metal crowd. We never intended to and I don't think any of us want to because we'd really have to reduce our whole stance (laugh) to appeal to them. It'd be really humiliating.
Elektra really appreciates us and they know that we're not going to be smashing the charts right away. They think that we have longevity and that we'll develop as our audience develops. They say that we're before our time, or ahead of our time. Which I don't think is true. I think we belong right now. There are a lot of people who are ready to listen they just don't know about us. And that's what the major label is there to do for us, I think - to give us a broader audience.
We're willing to tour forever. We don't want to make a video, we want to be a band that people have to experience live and preferably in small places.
CL: What was Europe like? You'd been there before, right?
NM: We'd been to England, but never to Europe. I loved it. I feel like I'd rather live there than here. I love history, and I love things that show history. Aged buildings, landscape that hasn't been changed for thousands of years. I was in Spain. I went on holiday there, after the band came home, and I saw monasteries that were built in the 14th century and surrounded by all these olive orchards and sheep, it was great.
But aside from that, we were very well received. To meet so many people, so many young people who speak fluent English, it was such an advantage. I don't like to say, "Well it's great they speak English, they should speak English." 'cause that's not the way I feel. I just felt so lucky that we could share information because they could speak my language. I became very good friends with these French people in London. I learned so much about them and their country and their culture and the same with these people in Germany and Holland all over. The band was over there about four months and I was there about six.
CL: It has been a long time since you last played Atlanta.
NM: We haven't been here for a year. We stayed home most of the winter and practiced, went into pre-production. We rented a cottage on the lake for the winter and we had an eight-track recording outfit that we bought with our advance and we got ready to make the album.
Then Joe Boyd came down to Jamestown to visit. He flew from Melbourne, Australia to Jamestown.
CL: What kind of shape was he in when he got there?
NM: (Laughing) He was so jet-lagged then he got snowed in and had to spend the night with Dennis' parents. The "legendary" Joe Boyd stranded in Jamestown. That's the greatest part about the major label is you get to encounter those sorts of people and not be, "Gee, Mr. Boyd!"
It was more a working relationship. And I think he respected us quite a bit. He was so happy that there were young people who could make good music and were aware of things that were happening in the world. I think we really surprised him.
CL: Joe Boyd produced both your new album and R.E.M.'s. Which group decided to use him first?
NM: We went to his home the first time we were in England, last August, and he agreed that he would do it if he could find time because at the time he was producing a play and writing a script for a film and he had the Richard Thompson album to work on. He agreed to do it in, umm, it must have been February. Right, the first week of February he came to Jamestown. Then R.E.M. called him pretty much the day after he left Jamestown and he went down to Athens and saw them and agreed to do their record, too. He fit them in before us. They were still in the studio when we got to London.
CL: He didn't seem to change much of your sound. Instead he let the band do what it wanted.
NM: Yeah. I remember asking him in Jamestown what his function actually was as producer because we were so unaware, we didn't know what a producer's job was. He said his job as a producer is different from most producers. Because some producers are hired to really mold a band. He said that we didn't need that. He just wanted to provide an environment where we could do what we really wanted. Then, if he saw something really grossly wrong, he would tell us. And he didn't have too many opportunities to because we pretty much knew what we wanted (laughter).
He would say, "You don't put that many guitars on" or "You don't want the voice up that much" or "That snare needs to be changed." People at Elektra were so nervous because they thought Joe Boyd, a hippie producer, he doesn't know how to do rock records. We had to explain to them. I remember being in the office, the president came in, "Joe Boyd" (She shakes her head). But I think he did a good job with us.
CL: I was happy to hear there were not drastic changes in your sound.
NM: I think there are other producers who would've changed us. It was so good to have him. He didn't smoke cigarettes and he doesn't do any drugs and all those horror stories you hear about producers doing coke on the board and just being really immature about it. He's so well educated.
It was such a privilege to work with him because he respected us. I remember him saying that my lyrics were brilliant. And I thought, "A man like Joe Boyd said my lyrics were brilliant." And it gave me confidence to know that. But he wasn't afraid to say, "Natalie you sang the whole song off-pitch." We'd do it again and again and again. So it was good.
CL: Did he have any stories?
NM: Oh. Newport Folk Festival. Parties at Bob Dylan's house. It was funny. A lot of the stories he told were really funny. He did a lot of albums that I didn't even know he had. Like Nico. He did Nico's Desert Shore record with John Cale. He was John Cale's roommate for about three years in L.A. Things like that. We'd be watching a film, at the studio there's a TV, and Joe would walk in. There'd be Charlton Heston on the screen and we'd go, "Ever meet him?" He'd say, "Oh, yeah. Some party."
CL: As far as your songs go, what do you hope to communicate to people?
NM: Once again, every song differs, and I think our live show is so separate from our recorded material.
CL: Which do you prefer?
NM: I don't have a preference. They are completely different. I think there's more seriousness to the records than there is to the live performance. In the studio, you have this contained environment and you can be obsessed with a certain mood and you're isolated. When I sang, it was just me in this black room and once in a while Joe's voice in my headphones but, otherwise, I couldn't see anyone.
But when I'm performing, I know there are people out there, and in a way, they've come to see you and they want to be pleased. Sometimes, even though I'm not in the mood, if it's a song like Daktari, I know it's a song where I should be happy.
And sometimes it's the exact opposite. I'm really happy and I don't want to be gloomy and sing sad. I don't know. I feel sometimes like I deceive people. But, also, all our songs emphasize all different emotions, so, sometimes you feel kind of schizophrenic to do a song like My Mother The War and then Daktari. It's two different personalities that come across in the music. But, I guess if you want things that we like to communicate, we convey a lot of real emotion. That we are human.
CL: So your music is very real to you?
NM: It's very much real. When I listen to other people's music, it's more escape. But, when we're doing it, you can't be more real than moving and singing and feeling the heat of the lights on your face.
CL: There is a spiritual side to music and certain people can reach that level with their music.
NM: I have my stereo and it's on pretty much every moment that I'm in the house, some type of music. And I think it's so incredible that, just, even if it's just a recorder solo and there'll be one note played and then one note follows it and that transition between those two notes can just make me cry. And I don't know why. I think music's incredible. There are no words. There's no message. There are just those two notes.
I remember meeting this blind man on the subway in London. They'd been doing all this construction around Paddington Station and I took his arm and asked him if I could help him and I helped him home. On the way he was telling me all about the music that he enjoyed listening to and he said it was his only link to the world. The only thing that he could understand was music because he couldn't see anything and a lot of things people spoke of were really abstract to him because he'd been blind since birth. He said that music, any sort, explained the world to him. I felt really important when I told him that I was a singer. And he was naming all of his favorite albums. He was really incredible.
He said that he couldn't really dance because he was always apprehensive that he would fall or hit something. But when he sits and listens to music, he would just move his arms and he said he felt like he was dancing. And it was a safer way.