A friend was playing 10,000 Maniacs the other week, and it prompted me to dig out In My Tribe and to finally purchase Our Time In Eden. I know, a crime that I didn't own it till now, though I've always known people who've had it, and in turn have heard it many times over the years.Fifteen years ago today, on May 6, 1993, I actually saw 10,000 Maniacs in concert at Slippery Rock University, which is about a half hour drive from where I grew up in Pennsylvania.
That spring, my small town had just gotten a 10-screen cineplex called The Regal. This was major, since there really wasn't much going on there for a teenager to do other than shoot heroin, tip cows and go to church...pretty much in that order. And, being a pretty vanilla 19-year-old, all my friends and I did was go to the movies. (This was when the roots sprung up of a developing fascination with Los Angeles.)
The Regal, part of the Regal Cinemas chain, was the first theater in town that printed the name and date of the movie on the ticket, and I saved every single one of them; Benny & Joon, Indecent Proposal, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and probably a hundred more over the next six years. I still dig them out when I'm back visiting my parents.So, maybe not so suprisingly, 10,000 Maniacs coming to town was a pretty big deal. Usually you had to drive almost an hour to Pittsburgh or two hours to Cleveland to see a concert, but this, by comparison, was practically in my suburban backyard! Natalie Merchant and Co. had always kind of been in the periphery of bands I liked as a teenager, though I'd never bought anything at that point other than the 45 (!) for the Smiths-esque "Trouble Me" four years prior.
Matt, my best pal at the time, really liked "Candy Everybody Wants," and so we snagged tickets to go see the show. I bought In My Tribe that week on cassette, so I'd at least know a few songs when we heard them live. Not sure why I didn't get Our Time In Eden, the band's most recent album at that point, but in retrospect I probably bought In My Tribe because I'd always liked "What's The Matter Here?" and "Like The Weather."It ended up being a great night, and they even did a cover of Morrissey's "Everyday Is Like Sunday" and Freda Payne's "Band Of Gold." Later that week, a girl who worked at the store next to the one I worked at in the mall told me gossip of one of her friends being on the concert committee at Slipper Rock U. The friend had apparently bitched about the specificities of Natalie Merchant's contract rider: the singer wanted bottled water in her dressing room and recycling bins placed all around the seating at the concert hall. The nerve!
That summer brought Jurassic Park, The Firm and The Fugitive to The Regal, and my friend Matt and I saw them all in our sometimes twice-weekly treks to the movies. Meanwhile, when their tour ended, Natalie Merchant left 10,000 Maniacs to pursue a solo career. As well, that fall Matt got a girlfriend and we pretty much drifted apart.
Fall 1993 was the beginning of my last year living fulltime in my hometown. The music I listened to over those next 12 months had a special urgency and meaning to it -- from Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and Madonna's "I'll Remember" to stuff as trivial as Ace Of Base and of-the-moment as the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. They're all the records that album artwork slideshow in the sidebar goes back to.It always seemed like a cruel irony that 10,000 Maniacs' biggest hit with Natalie Merchant, their MTV Unplugged cover of Patti Smith's "Because The Night" (video above), came that autumn, after she'd already departed the band. Of course, equally unfair is practically blinking and realizing you saw that band a decade and a half ago.
Anyway, there's this great line in "How You've Grown," off Our Time In Eden:
Everytime we say goodbye
You're frozen in my mind
As the child that you never will be
Will be again