MTV Unplugged

The first sound on 10,000 Maniacs’ MTV Unplugged is an announcer introducing the band and its lead singer to the assembled audience: “Well, it’s time to start—let’s say hi to Natalie and 10,000 Maniacs.”

When the MTV Unplugged producer Alex Coletti said those words in April 1993, that and meant something very different than it would in the autumn of 1993, when the album was released. In April, Natalie and the band were riding a wave of success: The band’s fifth album, Our Time in Eden, had already gone gold. “These Are Days” had hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts and was soundtracking promos for Fox’s new college series Class of ’96. That sunny sing-along celebrating a bright and joyous moment was perfect for MTV’s Inaugural Ball, the signature cultural showcase of Bill Clinton’s ascendance; after that song, friend of the band (and long-rumored Merchant paramour) Michael Stipe joined the Maniacs for “To Sir With Love.”

A cover story in Rolling Stone that spring explored the relationship between Merchant and the four men who played the music in 10,000 Maniacs: guitarist Rob Buck, keyboardist Dennis Drew, bassist Steven Gustafson, and drummer Jerome Augustyniak. The “Four Stooges,” as they called themselves, were all five to 10 years older than Merchant, mostly married with kids, and preferred to focus on the music and let their charismatic lead singer take the spotlight. “I don’t need to be in any goddamned video,” Drew said, “I’ll stay home with my wife.” Buck acknowledged that it might seem strange to others that Merchant’s star far outshone his own. But, he said, “it doesn’t seem strange to me.” In the ways that truly mattered, it seemed to fans, Merchant and the band were in equipoise.

But by October, when I bought the CD of MTV Unplugged at Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and carried it back to my dorm room, that opening introduction struck me differently than it must have struck the audience on West 45th Street. Over the summer, Merchant had announced she was leaving 10,000 Maniacs for a solo career. Though the split was presented as entirely amicable, a spokesman for Elektra made it clear how the label viewed the band, and with whom they were casting their lot: Merchant “was pretty much the 10,000 Maniacs, and now she wants to be on her own,” he said. “Natalie will definitely be making records. We have no idea what’s going to happen to the band, or what their plans are.”

That consequential and now felt like an acknowledgment that the band itself was an afterthought, an addendum—an impression augmented by the CD’s cover: Merchant alone on a stool under the studio lights. Behind her sat a cellist and a violinist, both women hired for the MTV appearance; the other Maniacs appeared only in photos inside the CD booklet.

MTV Unplugged was the swan song of Natalie and 10,000 Maniacs, and it turned out to be the biggest hit they would ever release together, eventually going triple platinum on the strength of a cover of Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” The album is a curious document of a certain moment in college rock, the musical ecosystem built around boutique labels (often underwritten by majors, with lax oversight) and university radio stations (always DJed by enthusiastic undergrads, with no oversight). It was a time when poetic musings, progressive politics, and gentle, precise jangle-pop could excite as much passion as the fury and mess of grunge. Though 10,000 Maniacs were always more studied and less artful than their friends in R.E.M.—R.E.M. didn’t print their lyrics, while the Maniacs laid them out in prose like little short stories—both bands inhabited the same literate, history-conscious landscape, and cultivated a similar population of fans: “the sensitive kids,” as Dennis Drew put it when I interviewed him this spring.

I was one of those sensitive kids. I had first heard 10,000 Maniacs the summer after eighth grade, when a camp counselor played “Verdi Cries” in our cabin. (Is there any better way for a teenager to discover a new band?) I was already styling myself as the world’s biggest R.E.M. fan, so my taste was driven primarily by those guys talking about their passions: I listened to Pylon and the Velvet Underground because the band had covered them; I learned about the Indigo Girls because Stipe appeared on their major-label debut. Here was another band with the Stipe imprimatur—he contributed a beautiful duet with Merchant on the bridge of “A Campfire Song”—and I was an instant devotee.

I followed and loved the band as their profile grew, and I despaired when Merchant left. So MTV Unplugged was my last chance to hear the alchemy created by Merchant and the Four Stooges, and more than 30 years later, it’s a fascinating album to revisit—a time capsule not only of my old collegiate self but of a brief moment of mainstream political optimism and artistic seriousness, as reflected in the Maniacs’ delicate, uplifting hooks and Merchant’s often issue-driven lyrics. These were the days, indeed.

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“We always felt like outsiders,” Dennis Drew told me on the phone. “We were from nowhere.” The band was born in Jamestown, a decaying manufacturing center in far Western New York. In the fall of 1980, Steve Gustafson was putting in a shift at the college radio station he and Drew had founded, WJWK—a 10-watt outlet affiliated with Jamestown Community College—when a 16-year-old named Natalie walked through the door. She was leaving her Jamestown high school to take classes at JCC, and before long, she, too, had a DJ slot at the station. WJWK served as a kind of locus for fans of punk, new wave, and no wave in Jamestown, and soon a locally prominent guitarist named Rob Buck formed a band called Still Life, featuring Drew on piano, Gustafson on a borrowed bass he was still learning how to play, and Merchant dancing, singing, reciting poetry, screaming into the microphone.

Renamed 10,000 Maniacs—a spin on a ’60s schlock movie whose title they found in a reference book—the band started playing gigs around western New York and self-released an EP and an album, both recorded by sound engineering students at SUNY-Fredonia as class projects. Buck and Gustafson mailed LPs to every other college radio station in America, and by 1984, the Maniacs were touring up and down the East Coast in a converted school bus. They played the 40 Watt Club so frequently that some locals thought they hailed from Georgia. After “My Mother the War caught the attention of the famed British radio presenter John Peel—he thought Merchant might hail from Yorkshire, based on her odd elocution—the band landed a record deal at Elektra. Determined to do their absolute best, these good students of rock’n’roll spent a healthy chunk of their advance on music lessons before the recording session.

The ramshackle bus; the graphics from vintage postcards; the impressionistic lyrics to “Tension” or “Can’t Ignore the Train”: The band’s everyday artsiness dovetailed neatly with the literate tastes of its young fanbase. They were countercultural in that they defined themselves against the grain of the rapacious Reagan ’80s, but they replaced the nihilism of punk with a winsome folksiness. Key to that presentation was Merchant, who, even at 20, was defining the band’s aesthetic: her thrift-store dresses, her old-fashioned accent, her carefree twirling at the microphone. As Lin Brehmer, who was among the first commercial DJs to play the band, explained in a radio documentary about the early years: “It’s almost as if Emily Dickinson had started a rock band.”

Merchant—who liked to tell a story about losing a Kellogg’s poster contest as a girl because her collage featured photos of starving children and a caption urging kids to enjoy breakfast because some people can’t—was idealistic, sometimes annoyingly so. “People would complain sometimes, when she would lecture the crowd about how there was too much litter in their college town,” Drew recalled. But she wore her principles with pride. When Joe Boyd, the producer for the Maniacs’ Elektra debut, 1985’s The Wishing Chair, joked that she’d never become a pop star if she didn’t shave her legs, Merchant angrily replied, “I’m never shaving my legs.”

Sales for The Wishing Chair were promising enough that for the next record, Elektra hired producer Peter Asher, a veteran hitmaker who’d worked with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. The band was skeptical but tried to be practical about it. “He’s worked with some very mediocre artists and made them millionaires,” Drew later told Rolling Stone, “so we figured, ‘What the hell’?” In Asher’s Los Angeles studio, the producer berated the band, whom he seemed to regard as amateurs who couldn’t hold a tempo. Rob Buck recalled him yelling at Merchant when she missed a take: “You keep fucking up. Are you an idiot?”

Yet the product of that experience, 1987’s In My Tribe, strikes me as the band’s most consistently enjoyable album. The songs are tightly crafted, and foreground Buck’s guitar, high in the mix and often high on the scale. Buck, who died in 2000, coated Maniacs songs in shimmering chords played near the bottom of his guitar neck. His guitar powers “What’s the Matter Here?,” a kind of response to Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” presenting child abuse not from the perspective of the victim but from a helpless observer next door. It’s there in the cover of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” added when Elektra didn’t hear a hit, which the resentful band was glad to remove from future pressings after Stevens, then going by Yusuf Islam, made comments supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. It’s there in “Like the Weather,” the actual hit, in which the sweetness of the guitar plays beautifully off Merchant’s snapshot of a cold and rainy day, a shiver in the bones.

And it’s there in “A Campfire Song,” leavening Merchant’s anticapitalist finger-wagging. In 1987, such genuine earnestness in a song that was actually about something was novel and welcome to listeners like me, who felt alienated by Top 40 radio but were too sheltered to encounter, let alone embrace, hardcore or rap. If Merchant was taking aim at unsurprising targets (alcoholism, illiteracy, militarism), she was often doing it the way a folk singer would, in the form of a fable—you could imagine Woody Guthrie singing about the rich men of “Campfire Song,” whose gardens grow tall but who only eat the best and toss the rest away. Gen X is often thought of as the most cynical of generations, but to be cynical one must once have been sincere—and to have had that sincerity beaten out of you by hard experience.

Merchant’s “folk-waif” image, as she would later describe it, may have contrasted in many ways with that of the guys in the band, who in interviews sometimes distanced themselves from the lead singer’s politics—but they all shared one thing in common: They were determinedly uncool. Elektra hired a stylist to work on the band’s image, and Buck told a story of the elegant London stylist entering the room and, confronted by his aggressively ordinary charges, bursting into laughter. “I’m sorry,” Buck claimed he said, “there’s obviously nothing I can do with you. You people are just hicks.” To me, growing up in Milwaukee, it wasn’t only that Merchant expressed my hesitant lefty politics; it was that she also sang about a Rust Belt wedding at the Sons of Roma Hall, with polka and tango played by Frankie Rizzo and his Combo.

In My Tribe was a slow-burn hit that blew up after tour dates opening for R.E.M. and a fortuitous performance at the Ritz in New York before Elektra’s CEO. But follow-up Blind Man’s Zoo was a bomb, each song a blunt instrument swung at its chosen issue—in order: teenage pregnancy, the Iran-Contra affair, the Vietnam War, toxic waste, rural poverty, and apartheid. (Robert Christgau, never a fan, could not believe the title of the apartheid song: “Hateful Hate.”) It ended with “Jubilee,” a six-minute operetta in which a racist religious fanatic burns down a dance hall. Something in the band’s balance of sugar and medicine—the sweetness in the shiver—had gone off-kilter, and before long they stopped playing most of the Blind Man’s Zoo songs live. “They were just such a bummer,” Merchant said.

The band assembled in a cabin near Jamestown to start writing for the next record, and Merchant was dissatisfied. “I didn’t want to consult with other people,” she said. “I was tired of art by committee.” Not to mention that, in the cabin, the only person doing the dishes and rinsing out everyone’s beer cans for the recycling was the ostensibly famous lead singer—the only woman, natch. Before they started recording, she told the band she was going to leave. Never one to do anything impulsively, she gave them two years’ notice.

And so from 1991 to 1992, throughout the difficult recording of Our Time in Eden, the band knew the clock was ticking. Just after the release of Eden, Augustyniak was struck by a car while riding his bike and Max Weinberg—free because Bruce Springsteen had walked away from the E Street Band—filled in for a few weeks on drums. Drew recalled the Maniacs telling Weinberg how anxious they were, because without Merchant, who were they? “You guys all co-wrote the songs,” Weinberg told them. “You’ll be fine. I never wrote a song in my life, so I’m fucked.”

Drew speculates now that Elektra leapt at the chance for a 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged because it was, in essence, a free album, supplied just before the band—as far as the label was concerned—would cease to exist. “But it was also just sort of the train we were on,” he said. “The album was a hit, we had a hit song, this is what you did.” Augustyniak’s collarbone had healed and so they spent a week in Bearsville, New York, rehearsing for the showcase. Merchant picked the setlist—“she’s the one who’s gotta sing ‘em,” Drew said—and the guys, working with Paul Fox, the producer on Our Time in Eden, re-arranged their songs.

In an all-acoustic environment, the band hoped to approximate the bigger sound of the album by building out the ensemble. They had seen the Congolese soukous performer Kanda Bongo Man live, and recalled the way the band managed its many instrumentalists. “They’d have four guitar players, but each one of them is only playing two notes,” Drew said. “If you kept it simple, everyone could fit in.” They supplemented Buck, Drew, and Augustyniak with guitarist Bill Dillon, pianist Amanda Kramer, and percussionist Jerry Marotta. They also added a banjo, bassoons, and strings, including longtime friend of the band Mary Ramsey on viola. This telecast and album would appear, they knew, after the summer tour, after Merchant announced her departure, after the band as they’d known it for 12 years was no more.

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Like Jeopardy! games, MTV Unplugged episodes were taped in batches. “Financially, you never did one at a time,” recalled Alex Coletti, the show’s longtime producer. “You set it up, you build the stage, and then you try to knock out two, three, four over the course of a couple of days.” Scheduling could be tricky. “Some people’s voices aren’t good early,” Coletti recalled, but he felt comfortable scheduling the Maniacs for the daytime session on April 20; they would be followed that night by Soul Asylum and then, the next day, by Midnight Oil and a spoken-word episode featuring Henry Rollins and Reg E. Gaines.

“Natalie was very shy,” Coletti recalled, a response to the small studio he’d seen before. “In a bigger room, you have lights in your eyes. But here you can see everybody’s face.” The audience was primarily fan-club members, with 50 or so guests of MTV scattered around: friends, salespeople, advertising clients. Perhaps everyone was a bit nervous; the taping started off with “How You’ve Grown,” an Our Time in Eden ballad that the band tried once, halted midway through, tried one more time, and eventually left off the telecast and album. Then they had a false start on “Noah’s Dove,” finally landing a take they liked on the second try. (That song would lead off the telecast but conclude the album.) And then: the hits.

Indeed, one reason the MTV Unplugged album eventually sold so well—it would become the Maniacs’ biggest record—is that it serves as a de facto Greatest Hits album in an era when those compilations were still valuable. Nothing from the early albums. Four songs from Tribe, two (the singles) from Zoo, five more from Eden, starting with “These Are Days.” On the telecast, Merchant spins with evident pleasure, delivered by the joyous spirit of the song, but she is not wearing a folk-waif vintage skirt. The designer Christian Francis Roth had recently offered to dress her, and for MTV Unplugged, she wears an elegant black suit and hose, her hair cut short—an independent-woman look for an independent woman. The guys mostly sport collared shirts buttoned up tight; Drew might be wearing a cardigan.

For a completist like me, the pleasures of MTV Unplugged came from hearing overfamiliar songs freshened up, if rarely truly reimagined. “Trouble Me,” a song I’d mostly ignored among the Issues Songs of Zoo, makes a sweet impression in this less dire context. The In My Tribe tracks also come off well, “Don’t Talk” especially, which attains a grandeur with this big ensemble that it never quite attempted in the studio. And the band’s playful arrangement makes “Like the Weather” sound sprightlier than ever, and thus makes an even funnier backdrop for Merchant’s four-poster dull torpor. This is my generational anthem, a bop you can tap your toes to while you’re too depressed to get out of bed.

For the telecast, the label had recruited special guest David Byrne, who joined the band for three covers: Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be,” Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas,” and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” It’s a nice idea, and Byrne in his folkie phase should have meshed nicely with 10,000 Maniacs, but in fact only the DeMent song works, and “Jolene” is mortifying. None of the three would wind up on the album. And so the real climax of MTV Unplugged is not that star-studded encore but a pair of songs that, together, justify the existence of this product of the Peak CD era.

Merchant had long idolized Patti Smith. In that radio documentary about the band’s early years, a Jamestown musician recalls sitting with Merchant listening to Patti Smith cackle and curse her way through “Radio Ethiopia.” Merchant, just a teenager, turned to him and said, “I could be in a band. I could sing. I could do that.” It might sound ridiculous, now, to think of genteel adult-contemporary queen Natalie Merchant taking inspiration from punk goddess Patti Smith. But in the early days of the Maniacs, everyone swears that Merchant was a shrieking dervish during shows, exorcising her teenage demons on the stage of every bar in the Rust Belt.

Drew still sounds apologetic that “Because the Night,” which the band had never played for an audience before the MTV show, became the Maniacs’ only single to sniff the Top 10. He thinks the song is ill-suited to the Unplugged treatment and compares it, with a wince, to Eric Clapton’s unplugged “Layla.” “But we pulled it off, and people liked it,” he allowed. “I don’t think it’s the best version of that song that’s ever been done, but Natalie’s vocal is heartfelt, and the band is in tune and on time.”

I feel more warmly than Drew does about “Because the Night,” a heart-on-sleeve love song unlike anything Merchant herself had ever written. There’s little Smithian abandon in her performance. Instead she latches onto its Springsteenian drive, the no-frills squareness that helped it become Smith’s biggest hit. Smith had to rein herself in to sell “Because the Night”; Merchant has to push herself a little harder than she had done in years. Throughout, her vocal is focused and impassioned, and onstage her body language is striking. For once she stands stock still in a power pose, one leg thrust forward, both hands on the microphone, pulling the stand to her mouth in a real rock’n’roll move. It doesn’t seem put on at all; for just this moment she has seized authority to deliver a song, not just to let a song deliver her.

But if the band spends “Because the Night” merely in tune and on time, it really shines in “Stockton Gala Days,” which seems to me the apogee of the Maniacs’ career. It begins with a chugging Rob Buck riff, soon joined by all the strings—Gustafson on bass, the second guitar, the banjo, even the violinist striking the bridge with her bow like a mallet—and picks up an unstoppable energy before Merchant even begins to sing. In structure and lyrics, “Stockton Gala Days” is a kind of reverie, a song of wistful regret about the girl the narrator once was and the woman she’s become. The verses paint a picture of a glorious bygone summer afternoon, “wild apple blossoms everywhere”; the chorus mourns “how I’ve learned to please, to doubt myself in need.” But even if the singer feels that way now, that girl long ago, whoever she was, “will never, never know.”

By song’s end, the band has built and built to a passionate pitch, a vision of earthly beauty to match Merchant’s evocation of “wildflower fever.” Mary Ramsey harmonizes with Merchant on the final chorus and the music at last winds down; the summer day draws to a close; the memory ends. To a 19-year-old who thought he was already nostalgic for his childhood, what could have been more appealing? To a 51-year-old whose nostalgia is far more bittersweet, what could be more moving?

“It just rolls over you,” Drew said of the song, which is built on three simple chords that repeat in those verses and reverse in the chorus. “Stockton Gala Days” is one of the few songs in the catalog that’s credited to all five band members, rather than to “Buck/Merchant” or “Drew/Merchant” or, increasingly over those 12 years, to “Merchant” alone. Drew told me that the song had real import to him and to his fellow guys in the band, and to play it that well at that moment in the band’s life was particularly meaningful. “It can really be mesmerizing if we get it right,” he said, “and we got it right that time for sure.”

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It’s a familiar story: A mercurial, gifted lead singer finally shakes her workaday band loose and strikes out on her own. In 1995, Elektra released Merchant’s debut solo album, Tigerlily. The rest of the band always presented Merchant’s departure as not only amicable but as a kind of desperate respite from the 12-year grind they’d just been through. “We were happy to be off the merry-go-round,” Drew told me. The band regrouped, won a battle with Elektra to use the 10,000 Maniacs name, and has toured and recorded in various configurations ever since. (Most of those years, Mary Ramsey, who sang Merchant’s harmonies on Unplugged, has sung Merchant’s melodies as frontwoman.)

Tigerlily became a college-apartment staple, alongside a VHS copy of Reality Bites and a Robert Frank poster. But that album struck me as fussy, unfinished, soft somehow. It’s funny now to think of myself longing for the muscle of 10,000 Maniacs—of all the bands!—but Merchant alone just didn’t compel me. To me 10,000 Maniacs wasn’t just Natalie Merchant—it was the interplay between the teenager and the college guys, the folk-waif and the married dads, the poetess and the players, the one who took out the recycling and the ones who left out their beer cans.

From this disparity came not only the conflict that would eventually break them apart but the fruitful friction that made their songs among the best of the college-rock era. “The tension came out in those performances,” Drew said. “It came out in the lyrics Natalie wrote, and our fear of losing her made us more urgent in our creative process.”

For the existence of 10,000 Maniacs, Drew said, was perpetually a precarious notion. “From day one, we never knew if Natalie would be back for the next gig or the next record,” Drew said. “For a long time, each record and each tour, people around us thought, This might be it.” With MTV Unplugged, this was finally it. It was the sensitive kids’ last chance to hear the alchemy of the and.