This Is Our Moment, This Is Our Time

700. 10,000 MANIACS, "These Are Days"
Produced by Paul Fox; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 64700 1992 Billboard # 66

For a moment, a very brief moment, this particular 10,000 Maniacs song captured its time in history, which is only appropriate since it's a song about making sure that remarkable times don't pass without proper notation. The lyrics concern themselves with personal rather than public history, with the flush of youth and how intense your feelings and insights can be in that phase of your life. The singer is clearly beyond that phase, but she isn't rueful or judgmental. She's just telling the young person to whom she is speaking that she should remember this moment. She should (in the words of an earlier song that was less historical and more universal than most people appreciated at the time of its release) keep your eyes wide/the chance won't come again.

Buck and Merchant's lyrics here aren't particularly inspired, not even on the rough-hewn level that Dylan's had been thirty years before. As with the Stooges' "T.V. Eye," it's the music that carries the real meaning here. This was the one single above all else where that odd mix of old folkie instruments that the Maniacs liked to play actually gelled. All that strumming makes it feel as if something is bubbling under the surface for the whole song. The lyrics may adopt the perspective of a slightly older person looking back on her youth, but the music still exists in that glorious, giddy, inchoate moment, where the visions are inspired and come fast and furious, just before one needs to think about translating them into concrete plans. In my own version of this kind of youthful moment the guitars rocked a lot harder, but I still concede the general resemblance.

The historical moment this song captured, in spite of itself, was the dawn of the Clinton era. I can even give you a date and an approximate time: 21 January 1993, maybe around 10 o'clock at night. That was the night of the Clinton Inaugural, and 10,000 Maniacs were one of the featured acts at the Rock the Vote Ball because they were, as Dennis Miller pointed out in his introduction of them, Chelsea Clinton's favorite band. There were better performances that night--1/2 of U2 combined with 1/2 of REM to do a boffo a capella version of "One" (which actually is a great song); Don Henley sang "Dirty Laundry" as if it were the night of the Gary Hart inaugural; and Michael Stipe combined with Merchant and the Maniacs to do a version of "To Sir with Love" that made me seriously reconsider all those bad things I had previously said about Lulu--but, even with all that, "These Are Days" was unquestionably the song for that night. If you hunt up the band's performance that night on YouTube, you'll see that they all knew it, especially Merchant. Never before and never since/I promise.

As they took the stage that night, 10,000 Maniacs almost certainly knew that they would be breaking up very soon. There was pretty much just a valedictory performance on MTV Unplugged (as opposed to all that mad shredding they usually did in concert), and it was all over. Merchant went solo and the rest of the band just limped along. By the summer, this song was being used for promos for Class of '96, a Fox series about college life that starred, among others, Kari Wuhrer.

And Bill Clinton? Sometimes it's hard to remember how much he did accomplish as President, because the shutdown, the sexual relations, and the rise of global terrorism just loom so large in retrospect. But the truth is, no President could have accomplished what we wanted him to accomplish when he took that oath of office. Even if he hadn't been a sex addict, he was still just a mortal, not the angel Gabriel.

Pay no attention to the date and timestamp on this entry--I'm writing it at 11:17 pm Tuesday 3 June 2008 and I haven't felt this hopeful about my country since all the way back then. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope this much, because . . . well, because of history. I know all the things that can go wrong. I know how politicians can let you down. I know that the most secure way to be is smug and cynical and sarcastic and pragmatic. At my age, I'm supposed to have outgrown the stupid credulity of youth.

But I still remember knowing how it was meant to be. And there's a man over there who's daring me to be foolish, daring me to hope. Even though I'm supposed to be wiser than that, I might just take him up on it.