Every 25 years...

“A band never really truly breaks up until someone dies.” That is how bassist Mike Jones describes Saturday’s first smART Teens show in almost 25 years.

All four original members — Jones, guitarist Joe Comacho, drummer Conway Bowman, and singer/songwriter/guitarist David Moye — are getting the band back together.

For a little over a year (1990–’91) the smART Teens were the house band at Megalopolis, the long-closed bar at Fairmount Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard.

“It was the underground land-of-misfit-toys kind of bar,” Jones tells the Reader. “The four of us were just sitting at the bar on a Monday night and the owner Julie said, ‘You have a full band between you, so why don’t you get up and play.’”

That impromptu jam, merging Moye’s wit and the others’ musicianship caught on. The smART Teens became the Wednesday-night house band. “The Megalopolis was the starting place for a lot of bands,” says Jones.

“It became kind of the musicians’ bar,” recalls Moye, who says local notables Paul O’Beirne of Rocket From the Crypt, Gregory Page, and Bart Mendoza were some of the smART Teens regulars who would watch and sometimes sit in with the Teens as they ran through raucous favorites such as “Raised by Dogs” or “Mr. Belvedere.”

“I was an extra on an episode of Full House with my [twin] brother,” says Moye. “On the way home I was inspired to write ‘Mr. Belvedere,’ where I reimagined him as a pedophile. ‘Mr. Belevedere stop staring at my derriere’ is a great rhyme. That’s always a crowd-pleaser.”

While other local bands from the It’s Gonna Blow era were getting serious, The smART Teens were conducting tweaked, twisted Megalopolis sing-alongs to “Float On,” by the Floaters, or “Come on Get Happy.”

“The smART Teens are like one of those flowers that blooms every 25 years,” says Jones. “It blooms, it stinks really bad, and then it goes away for another 25 years. That’s us.”