Back O’ The Moon. 10,000 Maniacs. Electra. 1985.

 The best of two outstanding tracks from the second LP by Jamestown, New York’s 10,000 Maniacs. The band was comprised of six members whose sense of professionalism when I saw them perform live in Dallas in 1985 took me by surprise. The personas the band presented to its audience was self-serious in a way meant to impose distance between themselves and us. It’s likely the band was uncomfortable playing a conventional stage show made up of borrowed poses and aped gestures from a tradition already thirty years or so old. Nevertheless, the musicians and Natalie Merchant herself generated a memorable excitement that convinced everyone inside of that small, Deep Ellum concert space that human unpredictability is as much a function of order and focus as it is of humor and passion. Inspired spontaneity gives Back O’ The Moon’s repeated plays their longevity and vim. The song snapshots that brief period in our lives when we choose between disabuse of the illusions from childhood mythology or deliberately turn away from the truthful dread of historical progression. Merchant’s allegorical lyric is a capsule distillation of a twentieth century fantasy of what pre-electronic media childhood memory may have resembled, complete with “smart dressed geese [who] dance with pigs in high-buttoned trousers.” I once thought the Maniacs’ talent for accessing musical charm this ideal was inexhaustible and would only grow more consistent over time. What followed instead was a long stretch of success and mediocrity, with only one more studio album that included only two outstanding songs. Following Merchant’s departure for her intermittently successful solo career, the band withdrew from the national stage. The strain of having to carry so much self-importance for so long could cause anyone to collapse, and it scrambles the creative faculties, sanctioning solipsism and monotony in place of a critical editorialship. If the best rock and roll was an inimitable escape from bourgeois pieties, 10,000 Maniacs at their priggish worst is a demonstrative embrace of them.

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