It isn't exactly old home week, but 10,000 Maniacs this weekend is returning to a familiar city and the club that gave it a chance before it became the critics' darling and a major-label act.
The six-person band, in fact, called Atlanta home during a jelling period in 1983, a year when its brightest accomplishment was being permitted - not asked - to perform at the 688 Club, where the Maniacs will headline Saturday, March 29, with the Windbreakers opening the show.
"We played in some pretty obscure places," says John Lombardo, guitarist, bassist and songwriter for 10,000 Maniacs. "Our first gig was at Tokyo Beach on Peachtree, and we played the Niterie and Hedgen's also; but our first big break really was when we played the 688."
The band didn't knock anyone dead. "We were just sort of getting in the groove of things," Lombardo says. "We had a different drummer then and we didn't really solidify our sound until Jerry Augustyniak joined the band."
Since then, 10,000 Maniacs has progressed from cult status - "... the most engaging and innovative new music act in America not currently signed to a major label," the Washington Post declared last summer - to being, quite literally, a low-key international sensation.
The band, which also includes vocalist Natalie Merchant, keyboardist Dennis Drew, guitarist Steve Gustafson and guitarist Robert Buck, still doesn't play major venues; but it has been well received while touring the United Kingdom and Europe, has opened for R.E.M. and has a moderately successful album, The Wishing Chair, on the Elektra label.
The band is grateful, but is as unimpressed by it all as Atlanta was by the band in 1983. "We didn't end up staying long - only three or four months - but a lot of the contacts we made proved valuable in the long run," Lombardo says. "And it was the first time we played in front of some large crowds." [webmaster note: the band lived in Atlanta in 1982, not 1983].
That's "large" as in hundreds, not thousands. Even so, 10,000 Maniacs did much better in the South initially than in and around Jamestown in Southwest New York.
"I think that we were better received in the South," Lombardo says during a telephone interview prior to a show in Orlando. "When we came there, it was the first time we had traveled."
The band, which was formed in 1981, was more than an unknown. It was an unknown with a name that misled many into thinking it was a punk group. "Our name sometimes leads people to assume that dimension, but it's far from that," Lombardo says.
It was helpful, though, as Miss Merchant has noted. "We used it mostly to sensationalize ourselves - to get people to come see us. When people did see us, they began assuming that we called ourselves 10,000 Maniacs for the irony involved."
The music then and now is more cerebral than visceral, with solid but not overwhelming musicianship led by the guitars and keyboard. Miss Merchant's vocal stylings have resulted in rather disparate comparisons. "I've been compared to Yoko Ono, Nico, Anabella Lwin," says Miss Merchant, who also has been compared to French and English folksingers of the 1960s and someone singing in German because of her "foreign-sounding phrasing." She's even been compared to Michael Stipe of R.E.M. because the lyrics she sings aren't easily understood.
"A lot of people do assume I'm from England because the people there seem to have a purer sound to their vowels, but it's just that I studied voice for a few years and I was taught to enunciate.... I don't pinch my vowels the way most people do," she says.
Fans who have tracked 10,000 Maniacs through their independent releases - Human Conflict Number Five and Secrets of the I Ching - and their major-label debut will hear some changes in music the group plans to play at the 688 Club. "We'll do about four or five new songs," Lombardo says. "It's a little bit more rhythmic, but still in the same vein, I think."
Whatever it's called, it's uptempo, usually danceable music with Miss Merchant's lyrics touching on everything from smalltown life to war to laments for the American Indian. The music and the lyrics, Lombardo says, are permitted to "just evolve.... The main thing we've done is try to please ourselves musically and hope that it will translate.
"Academic types are attracted to our music."
That is a good definition of the fans of 10,000 Maniacs. The band plays a lot of college dates and clubs frequented by collegians. "Also," Lombardo notes, "that has to do with college radio being so supportive of what we are doing."
That's only fitting. It was at Fredonia (N.Y.) State College near Jamestown that 10,000 Maniacs first recorded on its Christian Burial label and it was the music played on the school's radio that united them.
"Except for John," Miss Merchant told the Los Angeles Times, "we were all deejays on the station and that music was our only link with modern culture. Most of the kids in town were just into the normal stuff you hear on the radio, but this other music by bands like the Clash, the Gang of Four and the Cure seem so exciting, even revolutionary to us.
"It's what made us want to be in our own band. The funny thing was most peole in our area were so isolated from this music that they assumed we wrote the songs when we started doing cover versions of things like Guns of Brixton, a Clash song. And I was too shy to even speak into the microphone to tell people they weren't our songs."
That aspect of the live performances by 10,000 Maniacs has changed. Miss Merchant now talks and twirls for crowds with the same confidence with which the band unveils its original music.
"By the time a song has cleared all six opinions," Lombardo says, "it's usually stood up to a lot of criticism. We try to be objective and that's the bottom line, really.
"You don't get too many chances recording for a major label, so if you're not putting your strongest material foward, you don't get to do it again."
But the band will go into the studio this summer to record another album, and it will be a pleasure. "To me," Lombardo says, "it's like a dream come true. It's hard even to believe it's happening."