Nickell’s Bag

As he looks forward to the New Year’s Eve reunion of his longtime band, John Brownell finds himself prematurely mournful.

“I think it’s gonna be sadder after this show than after the last show we did,” says Brownell, lead singer of the Oblio Joes, the legendary Missoula band that officially played its last gig at Caras Park in June of 2007. “You just don’t have the same perspective on what you’re losing as you do after a few years of it being gone.”

Brownell isn’t the only one who has come to feel the loss of the Obes ever more since the band broke up. For fifteen years, the band was a reliable cornerstone of Missoula’s indie rock scene, playing week after week on nightclub stages and in basements and wherever else that anybody asked them to set up their gear.

After hundreds of gigs, five full-length albums, numerous EP and compilation releases, and probably enough emptied beer-cans to build a ladder to the moon, it was Brownell himself who decided to pull the plug on the band, just half a year after it released its most ambitious and coherent album, “Let’s Decompose and Enjoy Assembling.”

“In a way, I always figured we’d do a reunion show someday,” said Brownell earlier this week.

Talk of such a reunion began to bubble up earlier this year – not surprisingly, over a beer. Brownell had been spending time organizing his archives of old live recordings, and asked some of the other band members – which include guitarist Stu Simonson, bassist John Fleming, drummer Dan Strachan, and keyboardist Ian Smith – to come listen to what he had found. Later, hanging out at a bar, a few members of the band began talking about doing another gig.

“Everybody seemed into it, but we just kind of left it at that,” said Brownell.

The chances of such a show diminished significantly when Simonson moved to Olympia, Wash., on short notice late in the summer. But then, another local musician and longtime diehard Obes fan, Dennis Lynch, decided to move from Missoula to New Jersey. As a last hurrah, he decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party featuring some of his favorite local bands.

“Dennis called and asked if there was any way we’d be willing to do an Obes reunion,” said Brownell. “I told him it was totally impossible, but on a whim I Facebooked Stu and asked if there was any chance, if we could help get him out here, that he’d do it; and he said yeah.”

So around October, Brownell set up a Web site where fans could pitch in to help buy Simonson an airplane ticket to Missoula for the gig. Donations poured in.

“We had enough money for the ticket in like two days,” said Brownell.

Since then, the four band members who still reside in Missoula have busied themselves practicing tunes from across the band’s considerable repertoire of original music. He said fans can expect a bunch of old favorites – including “Ginger” and “Roll On Kentucky Moon” – along with some songs that the band rarely played live, such as “Patty Melt.”

“It’s funny, when we go through the lists people keep saying, oh, we’ve gotta play some of the old ones, we can’t play just the new stuff,” said Brownell. “But of course, none of them are new songs anymore.”

They may not be new, but they’ll probably sound as raw as the first time anyone ever heard them.

“The show’s going to be messy, some songs messier than others; but we’ll definitely have a blast,” he said. “Getting together again, it’s just like the old days, we’re all just a little fatter and balder.”

The Oblio Joes reunion show will take place on Thursday, Dec. 31, at the Palace Lounge. El Zombi Gato, Rooster Sauce, and Volumen will also perform sets.

As to the future, Brownell doesn’t foresee another reunion.

“This feels like it’s just a one-time thing…I can’t imagine it’d happen again,” he said. “Especially with Stu not living in town anymore, I just can’t think of doing it without all of us.”

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