Dennis Drew, keyboard player with 10,000 Maniacs and a hometown boy, navigated the icy roads in his father's car and pointed out landmarks. "That's the village of Lillydale", Dennis said, gesturing to a cluster of white wooden buildings. "It has the country's greatest concentration of psychic phenomena."
Who can disprove a statistic like that?
Dennis drove down a red brick street, past an enormous cemetery, to Natalie Merchant's mother's house. ("There are more people in that cemetery," noted bassist Steve Gustafson, "than there are in the town.") At Merchant's house, Natalie, the Maniacs' lead singer and lyricist, got into the car distraught. She'd heard that a Comfort Inn was going to be erected across from the graveyard. "The cemetery", Natalie said, "is my favorite place. I go there and sit for hours."
For three years 10,000 Maniacs have been playing to hip rock crowds in New York, London and Atlanta, and then returning to another world. No wonder their music is such a strange mixture of youth and age. No wonder their songs sound like tunes taught to children by ghosts.
Natalie Merchant fits no rock'n'roll cliche. In a world full of third generation Jaggers and second class Springsteens, there's no obvious precedent for her haunted romanticism. Though her love for Sandy Denny comes through in live performance, Natalie is possessed of that rarest of virtues, an original voice.
That voice was first apparent on Tension, the one song on both the Maniacs self-made EP (Human Conflict Number Five), self-made LP (Secrets Of The I Ching), and new major label album (The Wishing Chair). In Tension Natalie spoke in the voice of an old woman, used to the losses that accumulate as life nears its end but not reconciled to them. After ticking off markers along the years ("dress lengths, assassinations, fractured family ties, christenings") with a stiff upper lip, the singer delivered this zinger:
The early hope for permanence
The words, the rings, consistency...
Local posts will list your friends
in order of disappearance
Lawn scattered tins feed birds
The portion baked for absent guests,
10,000 Maniacs are not an ordinary rock band in style or sensibility. Despite their hard-core name, the group's eclectic style has evolved from vaguely new wave/reggae to folk-rock of the Denny's Fairport Convention made popular fifteen years ago. Guitarist John Lombardo notes "We're as close to the Band as we are to Blondie".
So far out they're in, the six Maniacs have built followings in style centers such as Atlanta (where they briefly lived), London (where the press went wild and their single My Mother The War was an indy hit) and New York (where they signed to Elektra Records). About the only place 10,000 Maniacs aren't accepted is their own home town.
"The only hostile audience we ever had was here," Natalie sighed.
"People would come up and say, 'You'd better not play any of that punk shit or there's going to be trouble!" John recalled. Such admonition could inspire the Maniacs to break out their Clash covers.
After about three years playing clubs from Canada to Florida, 10,000 Maniacs were signed to Elektra in the fail of 1984. They chose Joe Boyd as their producer--Boyd produced Fairport Convention and, in recent years, Fairport alumnus Richard Thompson. (The Maniacs turned their friends R.E.M. on to Fairport, and R.E.M., too, recruited Boyd.)
When the group settled on the producer around Thanksgiving of '84, Boyd was tied up with other projects until April of '85. This left 10,000 Maniacs with a whole winter to pass between signing the deal and going to London to record. Some young musicians would use this hallowed time between draft notice and boot camp to go wild, run up big bar bills, and blow their advance on fast cars and loose love. Others would play every gig available, honing their stage chops while expanding their geographic base. Others-- maybe most--would strike the time-honored stance of new stars ascendant: They'd buy sunglasses and stand in the back of the local rock clubs, allowing well-wishers to come up and congratulate them.
But 10,000 Maniacs, bred among the farms, grapes and piety of the north country, used the winter hiatus to get down to the woodshed. The band returned to the isolation of Jamestown and the low-cost living of their parents' homes. They put themselves on a tight budget (ten bucks a day according to Dennis Drew) and rented a cabin they nicknamed Big Stink on the wooded shores of Lake Chautauqua. Then they set out to rehearse.
The cabin was turned into a makeshift studio. The band cleared out the small living room and set up their instruments. Percussionist Jerry Augustyniak made a drum booth out of a tiny breakfast room, using old mattresses as baffles. The dining room became a recording booth full of new equipment the Maniacs bought with the advance money less serious bands spend on bongs and flash pots. At the center of creativity were two Fostex Series A reel-to-reel tape recorders, a 2-track and a 4-track. On these the band worked out their new material and tried new approaches to old. When they got to London to begin their album, the Maniacs would be held to a recording budget of 56,000 dollars. A good chunk of that would go to producer Boyd for his services. What remained was a tight allowance for a major label album, a budget too trim to accommodate goof-ups or experiments. All the exercises, arrangements, rehearsals and rewrites had to be done in advance, in Jamestown.
Some band members supplemented the rehearsals with exercise regimens at the local Y, and all took private music lessons. Devotion to art was certainly a prime motivation, but boredom cannot be discounted; in such enforced hibernation, the band's music began to improve with remarkable speed. 10,000 Maniacs went through about three years' worth of musical development in six months. When they were signed, different Maniacs often went off in different directions on the same song. Fills over-lapped, one player's lead line wouldn't fit into another's chord. Every part made individual sense, but there were sometimes several musical conversations going on at once. The Jamestown hibernation gave the Maniacs a chance to take the songs apart and study them. By the time The Wishing Chair was finished the band was playing as a solid unit; the acoustic tunes were airy, the rockers solid and, on the anthemic Scorpio Rising, downright ass-kicking.
Natalie's lyrics, often incomprehensible on the independent records, were now clear. Dennis Drew once joked that the reason 10,000 Maniacs were so often compared to R.E.M. was that you couldn't understand what the singer in either group was saying. Producer Boyd admonished Natalie that he wanted to be able to make out every word on the demos, and damned if the new articulation didn't pay off six, months later, when The Wishing Chair proved accessible at first listen.
Returning to their hometown, their parents' houses and a child's way of living had an unexpected effect on the Maniacs' new songs: They are filled with an adolescent's sensitivity to change, a precocious nostalgia for lost childhood combined with anticipation of endless new possibilities.
In Can't Ignore The Train a young girl delights in private fantasies and dreams of escaping the teasing of little boys. In Back O' The Moon grown-up Natalie implores a little girl to sneak out in the moonlight, play some games and enjoy being a child while she can. There's a dark side, too- a political comment just below the surface. The song implies that the best part of childhood is being killed by the fear that today's kids won't live to grow up:
Yes that was a sigh
But not meant to envy you
When your age was mine
Some things were sworn to
Morning would come
A calendar page had a new printed
season on the opposite side.
"I wrote that song for a little girl in my neighborhood", Natalie explained. "I was trying to interest her in these wonderful books with gorgeous illustrations that were printed in the twenties. She just wanted to watch Dukes Of Hazard. I'd say, 'Let's jump rope, let's play hopscotch. She'd say no. I'd get so frustrated. I started out the song trying to say, 'Oh, Jenny and I have so much fun together.' But I realized we don't have fun. One time we were looking at the moon, and I was telling her about the sandman, the man in the moon, and she said, 'Are they going to put guns on the moon and point them down at us? I heard that on the radio.' Sort of takes the fun out of it."
On the last night of winter it was snowing. Jerry came over to the cabin to break down his drums for the passage to London. Dennis and Steven went into town to hit Jamestown's one rock club, where a top forty band was slugging through Dancing With Myself. The cover charge was a dollar. A local yokel eyed the Maniacs suspiciously and said to the doorman, "Punk bands should have to pay double.".
When the Maniacs made their first independent record Natalie approached the disc jockey at this club and asked if he'd play it. He told her to "fuck off".
That night Dennis got bounced out of the bar for attacking the DJ. Jamestown's a beautiful place, but it's easy to see how a winter there could drive someone of an uncoordinated sensibility around the bend.
Steve the bassist woke in the cabin at 11:15 the next morning, just as winter became spring. The snow was gone, the temperature was high, and the weather on the lake was beautiful. Steve had to get to the bank and get his money out for England. Natalie was leaving the next day, and the rest of the band three days later. Steve took Rob's car and, on an impulse, snuck into the Chautauqua Institute, an old fundamentalist retreat/summer resort.
The fenced-in village was right out of The Twilight Zone. Streets were lined with perfectly preserved nineteenth-century houses, interrupted by an occasional Greek temple. It was as if a giant child had constructed a play town with mismatched-toy buildings. Along the lake shore the land had been molded into a miniature reconstruction of the Holy Land, complete with scale-model Bethlehem, Jerusalem and other ancient meccas.
A couple of Amish workers were the only people around. Steve approached the amphitheater where he and Dennis graduated high school. It's used by the Institute for concerts, too. A rule says that all operas performed there must be sung in English. Natalie had better keep working on her pronunciation.
"I'm just taking a good look now", Natalie said the day before she left. "Because it's not going to be here later".