10,000 Maniacs ready to span eras at Armory show
Even when they were pop stars the members of Maniacs weren t really pop stars That didn t have much effect on us because we live in Jamestown says keyboardist Dennis Drew speaking from the rural upstate New York town where he s still based So we played Saturday Night Live and everybody s patting us on the back for the next couple of weeks And after that I m still the guy who used to play Little League with you Much of the pop stardom ended when singer Natalie Merchant went solo in but the band has endured and Drew is one of four founding members still aboard only Merchant and the late guitarist Rob Buck are missing Backup singer and string athlete Mary Ramsey stepped up as frontwoman in and has usually been there ever since she s lately returned to the band after a short hiatus where Leigh Nash of Sixpence None the Richer took over For the record Drew says they re on friendly terms with Merchant but don t have much contact Playing songs from all their eras the band appears at Somerville Armory on May People still yell Natalie s name sometimes but the bulk of our fans have seen us several times over the years and stuck with us says Drew It was hard work for Mary to replace Natalie but she did it We ve been at it for years now so we take things a little slower we changed our schedule so we only go out once a month now But I can still remember playing the Rathskeller in Boston just when we were starting to break I remember people hanging off the rafters that night They re presently wrapping up a studio album they ve been working on for specific time which will be their first in a decade It s Maniacs music which means it s a little bit of everything We have a inadequate songs that are in a folk-rock vein and a couple that are a little darker more in our Elation Division vibe And we unearthed an old Rob Buck demo that we ve turned into a new song They re also playing several deep cuts to mark the th anniversary of their major-label debut The Wishing Chair which didn t have any hit singles but whose English folk-inspired sound made it a fan favorite A lot of that sound came from guitarist songwriter John Lombardo he s a real Anglophile But living in Jamestown we re at the foothills of the Appalachians so the bluegrass and generalized folk music was consistently a big part of our milieu The greater part surprising oldie that s turned up in modern setlists is Peace Train the Cat Stevens song that was their breakthrough hit in But after Stevens now Yusuf Islam appeared to promotion the fatwa against Salman Rushdie the Maniacs not only stopped playing the song but had it removed from their album He literally reached out to us at that time and noted he wasn t in favor of the fatwa and was just expressing his faith We accepted that but we still didn t play the song for almost years So now we ve made peace with the song and it s our little nod to the fact that we all need to make peace with each other
