Forgotten Maniacs

It was mid 1988. I was 9 months into my new life in los Angeles and about 6 months away from retreat back to the east coast. My apartment was a shared basement piece of ugly in West Hollywood, near the corner of Holloway and Sunset. I was a 30 second walk from one of my jobs at Book Soup. I was reminded of this as it was the store where David Duchovny's character held a reading in my favorite new show, Californication. It was also about a 10 minute walk from my other job, working the box office at The Tiffany Theater on Sunset, across the street from the strip mall where I was punched in the head by a homeless man when I turned down his request for a cigarette.
One of the actresses working on "How the Other Half Loves" and her husband and I had struck up a friendship. They were so excited for me because I had just gotten my first commercial agent and their best friend, Bryce, had bought a town house rental in New York with his commercial money.
Kristin was a niece of movie royalty and totally unaffected by her lineage and her husband was a keyboardist who played keytar in a rock band in the valley. A bear of a man, he had dreams of scoring movies.
Driving down Sunset after dinner at Hamburger Hamlet, Kristin, her husband whose name escapes me at the moment, and I were headed back to the theater. She was understudying Yeardley Smith and i was working the box office.
On the CD player 10,000 Maniacs, "In My Tribe" was playing. Specifically, "What's the Matter Here". I quoted my roommate to Kris and hubby: "Her (Natalie Merchant's) voice is like an instrument all its own". My roomie was right and we all agreed, there was something ridiculous about Merchant's voice. It was strong but comforting. And dead on.
In My Tribe was one of the soundtracks of that summer. It had just the right amount of jangle and pop, rock and aor. It was a summery treat with devastatingly wrenching stories in some of the songs. "Gun Shy", a reckoning between singer and her army-issue brother. "What's the Matter Here" was the Luka for the Indie set, the singer trying all her might not to get involved with a father that abuses his son. the cover of "peace Train" harkening whistfully back to a time of protest songs when protest songs were just coming back to vogue. Or the wannabe boho who sings "Hey, Jack Kerouac." I always thought that the Maniacs were too clean for their subject matter. They wanted to be Bukowski but were just unable to shed the happy. It's impossible not to sing along with this album. Impossible to forget the time it was created. A few years before grunge, when adult music ruled the waves. The post New Wave time that included Paul Simon's Graceland and XTC's Skylarking and REM's Life's Rich pageant all suggested that the kids had grown up and we were about to become adults.
That sentiment was crushed of course. It had to be. Every musical trend is crushed by the next.
In the meantime, I dusted this CD off and ripped it back to my computer. I never did that before because I assumed I had heard it enough and was done with it.
It was great to rediscover. The music and the time. When it came out, the "summer of love" was just about as old as this album is now. Seems like yesterday.