Happy Anniversary: 10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man’s Zoo
25 years ago today, 10,000 Maniacs released Blind Man’s Zoo, an album which built on the momentum of its predecessor, 1987’s In My Tribe, and helped them further cement them as more than just another one of R.E.M.’s jangle-friendly opening acts.
That’s not to say that R.E.M. didn’t have some seriously great opening acts right around that era – stand up and be recognized, Let’s Active, the Replacements, the Dream Syndicate, the dB’s, the Three O’Clock, the Minutemen, Fetchin Bones, and Guadalcanal Diary, among many, many others) – but precious few of them had made much in the way of an impact on the charts.
10,000 Maniacs, however, had a couple of advantages that the others didn’t, starting with the fact that they opened for R.E.M. just as the band was taking the world by storm with “The One I Love” and the Document album. Additionally, their sudden raise in their profile happened to coincide with Billboard adding a Modern Rock chart to their pages, and “What’s the Matter Here?”, the second single from the aforementioned In My Tribe album, hit #9, which – even though it’s technically not as impressive an achievement from a sales standpoint – still sounds way more impressive than announcing. “Our single hit #80 on the Hot 100!”
Although Blind Man’s Zoo is technically only 10,000 Maniacs’ third most successful studio album (In My Tribe and 1992’s Our Time in Eden both went double-platinum), it’s still seen as the one that officially took them out of the college-rock trenches and into the mainstream, thanks to the Modern Rock success of the singles “Trouble Me” (#3) and “Eat for Two” (#12). The latter may not have charted on the Hot 100, but the former was their highest studio single of the Natalie Merchant era of the band, hitting #44.
(Just to clarify the above caveats, their cover of “Because the Night” from the MTV Unplugged album hit #11, while the band’s biggest single, a cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” was from 1997’s Love Among the Ruins, their first album after Merchant’s departure for a solo career.)
Blind Man’s Zoo also found the Maniacs reuniting with producer Peter Asher, who’d helmed In My Tribe. He was gone by the time the band entered the studio to record Our Time in Eden – that highly glossy affair was produced by Paul Fox – but Asher aided them considerably during his time in the studio, helping them craft a strong album with mainstream sensibilities without sacrificing their artistic aspirations in the process.
Maybe Blind Man’s Zoo isn’t the end-all and be-all of 10,000 Maniacs albums, but give it another spin: you might be surprised at how well it holds up.
