10,000 Maniacs, Blind Man’s Zoo

By Chelsea Spear

You are twelve years old. In your pocket you have some jangly change and a wilted sawbuck, heavy with sweat from your clammy hands—money you earned from babysitting your snot-nosed brother while your mom went out on another pointless date. You enter the Tape World at the mall—a store smaller than your bedroom at home—with the intent to buy the first album you’ll purchase with your own money.

This is a momentous occasion, you know. You’ve paged through the issues of Spin and Rolling Stone and (ulp) the Tiger Beat-ripoff Alternative Hits at your local library and you know the first record that all of your favorite artists bought—the ones you’ve taped off the radio or pirated from the local library. And running your index finger down the racks and racks of tapes, you think about how you live to make the same kind of aesthetic “statements” that Robert Smith and Michael Stipe and all those folks do.

Everyone at school knows you live to save the whales, the rain forest, and the frogs you dissect in science, but that you can’t be bothered to wash your hair. You clomp around the hallways in heavy boots and your dad’s fisherman’s sweaters. Classes bore you—you doodle in your notebooks when you should be taking notes and you live for art class. When all the sheep in your classes are working shitty nine-to-five jobs, you’ll be designing record covers for your favorite artists, and the joke will be on their straight-A asses! Ha ha!

Alas, Tape World has next to nothing by your favorite artists—most of the stuff they have is albums you’ve taped off of library LPs, and you can’t justify paying for that. You contemplate a tape by some band you’ve heard on the radio—The Pixies—but balk at the price. “Besides,” you think to yourself, “what I need is a woman in my record collection.” Who was that band you heard on the radio—the one with the pretty song about trouble, the one whose lead singer was dating Michael Stipe and got written up in Sassy? Sauntering over to the end of the alphabet, you find their latest album and trot over to the checkout counter with a copy of Blind Man’s Zoo by 10,000 Maniacs.

A few weeks in, and you can almost bring yourself to admit that you wish you saved your money for the Pixies. Sure, “Trouble Me” is lovely and sweet, and the first and last songs are eerie, but . . . the rest of the album makes you feel as though you’re on the receiving end of a lecture from a protester. Since the music is kind of boring and the vocals are so close to the front of the mix, you can’t ignore the strident tone of the lead singer’s voice, her drab delivery, and the one-note rant of the lyrics. Racism is bad! Rich people who don’t help the poor are bad! Mindless consumption and conformity is baaaad! These are all things you know, and you don’t need someone pointing her well-manicured index finger so close to your face that she almost kebabs your eye.

Many years later, you find your cassette copy of Blind Man’s Zoo in a huge cardboard box with a bunch of other tapes. You pop it on in absently while you start throwing your clothes and your worldly possessions into cardboard boxes. The life you dreamed of as a precocious, strident, unhygienic middle-schooler never quite came true, and your twelve-year-old self would be appalled at the world you inherited. And your twelve-year-old self would be right. You’re so engrossed by thoughts of folky bands of the late 1980s and other, better female vocalists, folks who would have given your seventh-grade self nightmares but who fascinate you now, that you barely notice the warbling noise in the middle of “Trouble Me” and the sad snap as the tape dies in the middle of its final play.