![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThis may be the week. There always seems to be one in this part of the world around this time of August. Right after a particularly brutal stretch of some combination of high heat and humidity, the pattern suddenly shifts, and we get the slightest hint of autumn. For me, that realization came on Monday night in a rainy parking field in the middle of relative nowhere in Chautauqua County. It has mainly continued, mostly minus the rain, over now the past week, which is wonderful.
So was my reason for being out in that field on Monday night.
Although they passed their superstardom “sell-by“ date many years ago, the band known as 10,000 Maniacs has continued to tour, to write new material, and to maintain a presence with their fans- many well beyond, but a lot of us particularly near their Chautauqua County roots from now over 40 years ago. They had a few stops and starts last year after some illnesses hit the group, and when I last saw them outside Jamestown about a year ago, they had a new lead guitarist and singer, both joining them from the folk duo Sixpence None The Richer. Perhaps because those two had homes and memories in the South rather than the Southern Tier, that partnership only lasted a few months, and the band brought in a new lead guitarist along with the return of their longtime singer and stringer, Mary Ramsey.
You may associate the name of another lead singer with that group. That would be Natalie Merchant. As far as I know, she is the only alumnus in their 40-plus years to have left the band on acrimonious terms. She has gone on to a long, and by charting and monetary standards a more successful, solo career, but she has mostly developed a sound unique to her. I finally saw her perform live just over a year ago, in the famed venue in Chautauqua County near where she and most of her original bandmates grew up. On that 2023 evening, accompanied by the full Chautauqua Institution orchestra (and attended by hundreds of its regular summer season subscribers, most of whom left at the intermission because they didn’t like that rock and roll stuff), Natalie only performed two songs from her Maniac days: a very early one she wrote when she was 19 that is not in her former group's concert catalog, and an encore from her last album with the band, that I have now seen played at the end of at least four shows. This is a clip of Natalie doing it earlier on that 2023 tour:
She still has the voice, and the moves, but without Jerry's distinctive four-beat intro on the drums and the uniquely Maniacal keyboards of Dennis leading into the song's first line, it is simply not the same. Yet this past Monday night, with the third different voice singing lead on it with me in the audience in just over a year? It was perfect.
Before my travel down the 90 on Monday afternoon, though, I had gone back much further in time through the magic of streaming audio. Because not long after the current Maniacs announced their own return this week to the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater, the college radio station at nearby SUNY Fredonia started playing audio documentary pieces retelling the story of these musicians’ earliest days. All of them are now available on the station website, and they are best experienced in the chronological order they were broadcast. They really give a sense of the amazing series of changes and coincidences that led to this little known group of graduates of Jamestown and other WNY high schools becoming, however briefly, what they referred to among themselves as the “NBTWARD.”
(The "next big thing with a record deal." There may be some other letters in there I missed. Go listen to the thing.)
The core of the group is just a little older than I am. Steve did a shoutout the other night to the.JHS Class of 1975. First they had to come from little bands with strange names like The Stains, The Mighty Wallop!, The Mills, and the earlier incarnations of their own group known as Still Life and Burn Victims. A very young Natalie joined up by just walking into the Jamestown Community College radio station and telling them she had some poems. All of that led to their first primordial gig in a dive bar in Erie, Pennsylvania, where they got thrown out after their set because one of their (now departed) band members put out a cigarette on the floor. They considered this ejection to be vital to their nascent punk-era cred. This was also a time period when the group was going through more drummers than were parodied in the Spinal Tap mockumentary. I found myself marveling at the fact that Jerry has somehow not spontaneously combusted in all the years since he first sat behind the kit.
Many other things were there to marvel at hearing in the four episodes I listened to. If one of the band members hadn’t seen a sign on a college bulletin board about some Fredonia State production students needing to record music for a school project, they never would’ve been able to afford a recording session. If they hadn’t borrowed the money to press 1,000 copies of that record, and had the savvy to send 500 of them to other college radio stations, no one might’ve ever heard of them. And if one of those copies hadn’t made it all the way across the pond to the legendary BBC disc jockey John Peel, they might have never been heard of beyond tiny clubs and college cafeteria stages within 75 miles of their Jamestown home base. Yet all of these things did happen, and through other connections of karma they wound up hitting New York at the dawn of the New Wave era, getting a gig at the city’s legendary Danceteria to open at 2:30 in the morning for a punk band known as the Bonemen of Barumba. That all landed them with a manager, an agent, and a contest between two major record labels to sign them with Elektra winning out.
That, more or less, is where the documentary ended. I already knew the story of the 30-odd years between then and now, when the band, then fronted by Natalie, became a fixture of early 90s music just about everywhere. From sold-out arena shows to an MTV Unplugged appearance to performing at Clinton’s inauguration, this group of Western New Yorkers really had arrived as "the next big thing with a record deal" just as I was discovering them.
Then, almost as suddenly, they weren’t. After Natalie left, Elektra stuck with them for one more recording, which remains one of my all-time favorites of theirs, but it never led to the sales or performance attendances that marked the previous years. The first time I attempted to see them perform, they were supporting that Love Among the Ruins album at a free outdoor show in Rochester. A very young Emily was with me, and we never got to see them; their guitarist Rob Buck was already showing signs of the medical decline that would take his life a few years later.
Various new and old members came and went, a few self-produced studio CDs surfaced in the twenty-teens, but it wasn't until 2018 that a stable core had reformed and got back onto my radar. I was present for three of their shows in and near Jamestown between 2018 and 2023, paused as they did due to the pandemic and other illnesses in some of those years including one canceled show at UB, but this past Monday was my first chance to see them on the Ampitheater stage at the historic Institution I first entered and wrote about here just over a year ago.
That visit was my first ever to these once Methodist-hallowed grounds (the church still maintains a parish there and a friend served as its pastor for a few years). I spent more time that year exploring its narrow streets of ridiculously expensive Hobbit- houses and other facilities and greenery on the campus before queuing for my General Admission seat for Natalie's two sets. That show was on a Saturday, so I had the time to get there early, right when gate admission was included with the concert ticket at 4 p.m.; this week's was a Monday, and I left straight from work to get to the area much closer to the ampitheater's opening at 7:15.
I had one or two friends to meet up with, but they were coming straight from other engagements so I just planned the pre-show time to be short and sweet. I had not planned on it being as chilly and rainy as it was, which is why my realization about this being "the week" of WNY weather transition came only after parking at the far end of a grassy field with a long walk to the gate and me only in a concert T-shirt. At least I'd changed out of shorts for the night.
Before that, dinner wound up a spur-of-moment choice: a restaurant right off Route 394 (once, and still marked roadside in places as, Route 17 in these parts) called the Lakeview Hotel that was on the band's '22 t-shirt of all the places in the county they'd ever played:
That wasn't why I stopped, though. This was:
Hi, Bob!
No drinks for me, but my first fish fry in ages. I was three miles and two hours away, and around here that equation was
3+2= 104
That scientific notation will be important later. In fact, I think this entry has gotten too long and been prolonged for too long, so I'm going to end this portion of it here, with the events of the actual show, between the bus rides to and from that parking field to follow, hopefully soon. There's also work and medical and political observations in my backlog, so those will be along, as well.