NEWBEATS

NEWBEATS

HOW MANY MANIACS CAN YOU CRAM IN A PHONE BOOTH?

When Natalie Merchant was 12, her mother had the family TV set disconnected. She laughs, recalling the moment. “We were all having D.T.’s. It was so strange; she’d leave the house and we’d get the TV out. But it worked eventually.” At that time, the singer’s family lived in a farm house located two miles from their nearest neighbors. “It was pretty easy to be alone. My brothers and sisters and I spent all our time in the woods. That was our big entertainment, which I thought was a wonderful way to grow up. We never got bored.”

That might sound like cultural deprivation to you, but for 10,000 Maniacs, it has meant escape from the clutches of the mass media whose chief function is, as Robert Warshow put it, “to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one’s life directly.” Happy result: The Wishing Chair, |he six-member group’s major-label debut, an album so fresh in vision it seems like a privately-bound book of poetry lost among a glossy stack of massmarket paperbacks.

The Maniacs aural signature is all their own. You can hear it in the unique synthesized guitar textures of Robert Buck, which clearly originate from the future, and is certainly manifest in the lyrics and beguiling presence of Natalie Merchant, whose emergence on stage is like the unfolding of some rare and exotic hot house flower.

“I think we’re all pretty proud of the fact that our music has that timeless quality,” says guitarist John Lombardo. “You can’t listen to it and say, ‘Oh, that sounds like a ’60s garage band revival or a country-punk revival.’ So much of the music, even that I like, is locked into a compartment by choice. That’s a losing battle, because all you can ever expect to be is as good as who you’re molded after.”

Merchant’s lyrics are the key to that timeless quality. Much of her imagery comes from real places located in her hometown, but she has a talent for coaxing universal truths out of specific settings. All is not sweetness and light, anxiety lurks beneath the sunniest surfaces of the band’s music, a recognition of the brutality that lies just beyond the pastoral idealism in which Merchant finds her occasional moments of solace. Like IrisFf folk music or the blues, much of this music is born of oppression, which it seeks to transcend through poetry.

It’s a vision that ultimately points toward some sort of political consciousness, though the 20-year-old Merchant would be the first to suggest that answers aren t that easy to come by. “I’m too young to have any established political views,” she says. “I can’t go around preaching to people about ethics if I don’t even know myself. I change my mind constantly about what I think is right.” Clearly, Merchant is still taking stock of the world and forming her opinions, but as long as they’re couched in the gentle burr and wash of 10,000 Maniacs’ music, there should be a lot of people willing to hear her out.

Richard Chon

JIMMY OF THE APES

What’s 6'4", skinny, red-haired, nearsighted, wears a leopard-skin outfit and had an international smash hit with a dopey but catchy tune about swinging around in the jungle? The answer is one Jimmy McShane, who, through a bizarre set of career twists, grew up to be an Italian pop star named Baltimora.

The 28-year-old native of Londonderry has been performing since his childhood when, at his parents’ behest, he became a dancer, proficient at ballet as well as Irish traditional hoofing. At age 14, he split for London to study classical and modern dance in London. There, he met soul singer Dee Dee Jackson, who hired him as a choreographer and backing vocalist.

It was in 1981, at the tail end of a European tour with Jackson, that McShane got his first taste of boot-land. “I just flipped out over the place,” he recalls. ‘‘I was getting offers of work as a singer and as a dancer, so I went back to London, picked up everything I needed, and moved to Milan.”

A few years later, Jimmy met up with Italian producer/arranger Maurizio Bassi, who was then working on the track that would eventually become ‘‘Tarzan Boy.” McShane: ‘‘We decided to do something ironic, and being that my puny little body doesn’t resemble Tarzan whatsoever, we decided to make it Tarzan Boy.’ I like to see people having fun, and I thought I would help it along by putting out some fun music. I think we’ve got enough shit around us today that a little laugh now and again can’t hurt anyone.”

Thp gimmick worked. “Tarzan Boy” went to #1 in eight European countries (and #2 in England, where Jagger and Bowie’s gyrations for the hungry held the ape man at bay). Rechristened Baltimora (reportedly because his real surname sounds a lot like a naughty Italian word), McShane became the most unlikely European sex symbol since, well, since all the other silly European sex symbols.

Jimmy says that he never anticipated pop stardom: “When I was doing backing vocals, I always said to myself that one day I would like to make a record, but I never thought that this was gonna happen. When I made Tarzan Boy,’ I thought, ‘Well, maybe it’ll get into the Italian charts’ and that was about it. And I didn’t imagine getting any response in the States.” Despite his modest expectations, the stateside Manhattan label responded, releasing the single and a six-song EP entitled Living In The Background.

“It would have been easy for me to make an entire album of Tarzan Boy,”’ says McShane, “but it would have been boring. I don’t want to get into thismovelty trip at all; no one can live on one-offs. I think it’s important for me to gradually move away from the gimmick and get more personal. I want to show people that I can do more than commercial novelty things.”

“Tarzan Boy,” like the rest of the material on Living In The Background, was written by producer Bassi and American lyricist Naimy Hackett. But McShane says that he intends to take a more active role in his musical future. He’s beginning to write songs on his own, and “playing around and experimenting” with electronic keyboards.

“The songs I’m working on for the next album have more personality,” says McShane. “I’m still growing into the business. I know the basics, but it’s very early and I’m still learning. Being a backing singer, you’re not really into the technical side of it, and now I want to make up for what I’ve missed.”

Harold DeMuir

ESSRA MOHAWK: NOT A HAIRCUT

Do you know who Essra Mohawk is?

She does. She a very talented, very industrious young woman who happens to have a very distinguished recording career behind her—and, very likely, an equally distinguished career ahead of her. She is a very good singer and a very good songwriter.

I think she’s tremendous; if you’ve heard her, you do too.

‘ Some past: a Verve album from 1967 by one Sandy Hurvitz called Sandy’s Album Is Here At Last.

The cover title is written in a word balloon mouthed by Frank Zappa, who’s on a TV screen. It makes sense. The album was one of the first bearing Zappa’s infamous Bizarre logo; the singer was an occasional member of the Mothers Of Invention. ‘‘They were doing one of my tunes, plus I was singing background and doing monkey songs and stuff: ‘Hee, eee, eee.’” This from Essra Mohawk, many years later, j^ho of course was Sandy Hurvitz back then—and also very young. It’s a nice album, really, though the instrumentation’s a little bare. ‘‘It still holds up, though,” says Essra in the ’80sJ “It took me a while to even be able to listen to it.”

Next c$me her best album ever, Primordial Lovers on Reprise, circa 1970. A collector’slitem these days, it’s a beautiful, erotically-tinged recording that makes a fine companion piece to Tim Buckley’s classic Happy Sad moodwise, not least because of the presence of guitarist Lee Underwood on both LPs. It’s a dreamy album; the arrangements and textures are near perfect. Find it.

In ’74 she returned with an Asylum album produced by Tom Sellers—it’s the one with the fake Maxfield Parrish cover. It’s commercial, it’s good, and it sold diddly. It’s also her favorite. ‘‘I think it holds together the best,” says she. She should know. Two years later Essra emerged on the fabulously incompetent Private Stock label. It sunk without a trace. And that’s the last most people have heard of her. Sort of.

‘‘I got off of Private Stock and left for L.A. in ’77,” she recalls for those chronogicallyminded. ‘‘Thinking to start all over, that it had always been easy to get a deal, and just do better with this one, you know? But what happened then, of course, was that the music business plummetted. I didns’t take that personally.”

An album no one’s really heard came next from West Coast producer Matthew Katz, whom you might know from his past association with Moby Grape, It’s A Beautiful Day and (very) latter-day Tim Hardin. I’d sure like to hear it. And very recently—last year in fact—E-Turn found its way into America’s best record stores. It’s the Essra of the ’80s, and it sounds it. If you’d like to hear it, you might want to drop a line to Eclipse Records, P.O. Box 78, Willow Grove. PA 19090. If you’d like to read about it, you are.

In 1986, Essra Mohawk is a practicing Buddhist who lives in Philadelphia. She chants, as do Tina Turner, Sandie Shaw, Herbie Hancock and other famous entertainers you’ve heard of. She has a very energetic, very enthusiasticpapproach to life. She performs regularly with her new band, which consists of Charylou Roberts on keyboards, Jesse Gress on guitar, Patti Nichol on rhythm guitar and backing vocals, Donnie Markowitz on bass, and Tass Philipos on drums. She is as deserving of a major league record deal as any other recording artist in this country, but she currently lacks one. If you are a record company executive, please fix this.

“I can’t wait to do the next record,” enthuses Essra. ‘‘Because it’s sevens, man. The next one.will be my seventh album, and the tunes that I have now, ready for it, are just so, so hot that they should be out right now. And this one is a good album, and I love it, but I’m always excited about what I’m gonna do next.

‘‘It’s like, in this Buddhism, it’s cause and effect. If you don’t like the effect that you’re receiving, then you take responsibility; you (make the cause, you get the effect. So anything that happened to me in the past—or now or later—I can’t blame on anyone else.”

You will hear of Essra Mohawk again in the near future. ‘‘No matter how fine and grand you may think of yourself,” she says, ‘‘you’re still underestimating what you can do.”

I think she can do no wrong, but I might be underestimating her.

Dave DiMartino

THE JOHNS’ ROYAL FLUSH

First question I had for the Three Johns was “What the hell are you doing here?” Their recent single, “Death Of The European,” is hardly a flag-waving tribute to the land of the free and all the other nasty fascistic little rituals that spring up every hostage crisis.

“It’s not anti the American people, it’s anti the 21 families that rule this country,” explains lead singer John Hyatt. “It’s about how the Berlin Wall runs through everybody’s thinking. It’s a mental wall between ideologies. People live out an image in the West which is defined by the image they’ve got of the East. Everybody needs a them.”

If the Three Johns sound like hardened intellectuals, this is not strictly the case. Live, they mix thrash attack and left-wing commitment with hilarious Madonna skits, quick-fire repartee and general riotous good humor, hurling their stocky frames around the stage in a drunken frenzy.

“We’re very serious about having a lot of fun,” says bassist John Brennon.

“We like having a balance between seriousness and fun,” agrees guitarist John Langford. “Humor’s really a sort of weapon in the sense that you can really dig at people with it, instead of just making sloganeering comments that become completely bland in the end.”

It’s exactly this quality that sets artists like the Three Johns and Billy Bragg apart from the cliched sloganeering of most British political punk.

I ask the Johns if their music has changed much since their inception three years ago. “We started off doing dance routines with a drum machine and a synthesizer, so it’s changed quite a lot,” deadpans the guitarist.

“We formed in a park in Leeds on the eve of the Royal Wedding,” remembers the boss vocalist, slouched against a garbage can in New York City. “We decided to play this festival,

“Funk the Royal Wedding,” but they wouldn’t let us play it ’cause we were out of our minds. And no one would lend us any instruments.”

The world was not to be spared that easily, however. The Johns started gigging at Leeds University, where they were all (supposedly) studying. What was the idea behind their formation?

“Good excuse to have band meetings.”

“Poke fun at hypocrites.”

“Keep us out of the pub.”

From such illustrious beginnings the Johns have been surprisingly productive, given their almost incessant state of inebriation. Three singles were followed last year by an album called Atom Drum Bop, grinding Hyatt’s high-pitched whining, Langford’s distorted, staccato guitar riffing and drum machine Howard’s precision belligerence through apertures like “Teenage Nightingales To War” and the anthems to organized labor, “Firepits” and “Do Not Cross The Line.”

Over the past 12 months, many of their gigs have been benefits for the striking British miners, finally defeated last March by police aggression and lack of support from other unions. “It was just so sad to see people pummelled into the ground by scenes of sinister;:: legitimized violence,” remarks Brennan gloomily.

“It was a class war,” adds Hyatt. “It was about who’s gonna profit from new technology, and the ruling class wanna make sure that only they profit. To do that, they had to demoralize the trade unions by taking on the most powerful union in Britain, which is the Mineworkers’.

“It’s a disastrous situation, but we’re not defeatist. There’s still a lot of people who have this naive attitude that politics is something with a capital ‘P’ that comes on telly every now and then, but the strike definitely did politicize a lot of people. You just keep scratching away, keep fighting for small victories.”

And you keep your sense of humor.

“We stayed in a hotel with George Michael for two days, and all he did was eat beans on toast and try to get off with the waitresses.”

“No, none of us' are married. I had a girlfriend in 1974 for about a quarter of an hour.”

“I had one for two minutes but she said I was no good in bed.”

“I’m 19.”

“I’m 17.”

“I’m 12.”

Flush thrice.

Dave Kendall