It’s a rainy Sunday night in Chicago, and about 2,000 people are filing out of the Belmont Arts and Music Festival.

At 10 p.m., the two-day event on Chicago’s North Side has all but wound down. The vendors that range from local artists to restaurateurs have closed their booths. The auxiliary stage at the east end has been vacant for a couple of hours, and the weekend’s headliners – Smoking Popes – have just finished their set on the main stage at the opposite end of the street.

Tucked between not-quite-high-rise condos and nestled next to a small playground, a couple of blocks are barricaded each year by promoters in one of the city’s trendiest areas. Although the redbrick complexes prevent any glimpse of the famous skyline, everything else about the setting is undoubtedly the Windy City. Cubs and White Sox banners hang over several adjacent balconies. “Barack Obama for Senate” posters are faded but still lodged on windowsills. Thick accents straight from the Saturday Night Live “Super Fan” parody boom out over the last few slices of Chicago-style pizza and their hometown hotdog counterparts.

The fest could be any in the series of Chamber of Commerce-sanctioned celebrations that mark individual neighborhoods. This one just happens to be in late June, and it just happens to be the one in the Roscoe Village district.

As the crowd moves toward the gates, a woman is lingering with her teenage son near the lone merchandise table. It’s dark, but the light from the street lamp above glistens off their damp faces. Their clothes hang awkwardly on their chilled frames, the result of periodic rain that plagued the afternoon and gave way to a breezy night. But instead of using the Smoking Popes shirt that she just bought as a towel, she folds it carefully and hands it to the youngster. Then she folds a second one and puts it in her own bag. Then another. And another. Before long, her large purse is packed with Tees for herself and her boy’s closest pals – 23 of his friends, to be exact.

“She bought how many?” singer Josh Caterer asked as the news made its way backstage shortly after his lengthy set. “Twenty-five?”

The soft-spoken 36-year-old’s voice is uncharacteristically wavering. Onstage, his chops hit the kind of pitch-perfect emotions that can cause his band’s live recordings to be mistaken for studio ones. When speaking, however, the polite front man sounds cautious to raise his tone above a library level. Yet tonight, even his reserved demeanor can’t mask the shock – and gratitude – with the sale.

So it seems almost unnecessary when Stefanie Caterer, who was at the merchandise stand, tracks down her husband and asks him to come thank the woman who still is stuffing the last couple of T-shirts in to her bag. Before the lead Pope can get his answer (“Twenty-five?”), he takes a Converse All-Star-clad leap over a small puddle en route to the booth. Even if Josh Caterer doesn’t know the fan who just bought more than two-dozen shirts for the next generation of guitar-poppers, he soon will.

It’s the reason that the Belmont Arts and Music Festival all day has felt like a homecoming show and not just a gig in the band’s hometown. Walking through the masses before the performance, Josh Caterer, his brothers Matt and Eli, and drummer Neil Hennessy greeted old friends, soon-to-be-new friends and family friends. Shaking hands, giving hugs, flashing smiles, and anything short of kissing a few babies, the four had weaved their ways along the corridor through the sea of admirers. The onlookers never stared with the sort of amazement of those catching their first peek at a celebrity, but rather with the relief of spotting long-lost companions. It was just nice to see the guys again.

Originally from Northwest Illinois, this is the band members’ adopted home. Maybe they adopted the city, maybe the city adopted them. It didn’t matter. They were there, and everything about that rainy June night was undoubtedly Chicago.

* * *

“Don’t wake me now/And break my world in little pieces/I’ve got no where else to go, baby/Don’t wake me now/I need this dream to last forever/We can make it if we just stay down.” – Smoking Popes, “Stay Down”.

* * *

The title track to this year’s Stay Down is as appropriate as it is discouraging.

Through some speakers, it’s a testament to Josh Caterer’s devout Christianity. Midway through the LP, the ode to staying on course is the perfect song to start the record’s – and the Popes’ – proverbial Side B. It’s reassurance that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t always the devil’s music and that religion can have a place on record store racks next to Elliott Smith and Sonic Youth.

But through another set of speakers, the title is a painful reminder of the band’s breakup. For all its accuracy in describing the vocalist’s spirituality, “Stay Down” makes a bold bet that fans won’t remember that Smoking Popes disbanded in 1998, or that the album’s ironic namesake marks the ensemble’s first new material in more than a decade.

“Up until the Pixies reunited, there were not any lists [that] you could look to see something like that happened,” bassist Matt Caterer said over brunch a month after the Belmont concert. “Up until the Pixies, I was like, ‘There’s no way; it’s not going to be cool. There’s no way we could make it cool. It’s never cool when a band gets back together. We’re not going to be any different than any band that tried to get back together.’ But then the Pixies did it, and it seemed cool.”

Caterer has his back to the restaurant at a Chicago cafe, his military hat pulled down to the top of his black-rimmed glasses. Throughout the meal, he spouts out names like non-sequiturs when they pop into his mind: “Mission of Burma.” “Dinosaur Jr.” “There has to be another band that put out a good record after awhile.”

The group’s senior member doesn’t look like he’s changed much in the past decade. He’s older, sure, but his shaved head then didn’t look much different than it does today at 40, and sneakers and jeans fit similarly at any age. The same can be said for all three of the brothers. Josh Caterer still wears his blue guitar just as low on his hip, strung over his blazers and striped ties. And aside from a beard – something he might have been able to grow when he joined the band in his teens – Eli Caterer goes about his unassuming ways today as he did in the late ’90s.

From the outside, these are the same guys who had turned their punk-fused love songs into tours with Green Day, Jimmy Eat World and Morrissey just about the time they were having their first legal drink. There was no makeover, no stylized return calculated with glossy PR. They still are just middle-aged brothers with a propensity for gloomy album titles: their 1993 debut, Get Fired; its breakthrough follow-up, Born to Quit; and then 1997’s near-perfect Destination Failure. But from the inside, a few lifestyle changes – and a couple of roster moves – make this version of Smoking Popes a far cry from those nicotine-fueled twenty-somethings that came from Chicago’s suburbs.

* * *

“Climb aboard that tour bus/Down the road less traveled/Every song sounds like the last one/Let’s make this next one a fast one.” – Smoking Popes, “Theme From ‘Cheerleader’”.

* * *

Musicians – and the cities that they so often come to define – are victims of their own parameters. Be it fundamental, or at the very least geographical, artist collectives build their identities as much on their sounds as they do the company they keep. Performers in pockets such as San Francisco (1967), London (1977), Seattle (1991), and New York (2001) embraced associations with those hotbeds as much as they battled the stereotypes that came with them.

“Chicago bands seem quite happy to keep it a woodshedders town and be left to their own devices and to do their own thing,” said James VanOsdol, a longtime radio personality who built a reputation championing local music.

From 1993-2000, the jockey was the assistant music director and local show host at the city’s WKQX-FM – aka Q101. At one of the nation’s leaders in embracing what would become known as “alternative,” VanOsdol manned the airwaves for the entirety of Smoking Popes’ first run and one of the most vibrant periods in his hometown’s history. For the past few years, the 38-year-old has been up to his trademark sideburns in research on a book about the era, tentatively titled Chicago Rocked.

“Just look at 1993 alone. You had Urge Overkill’s Saturation, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and The [Smashing] Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. Those are all great records,” VanOsdol said. “Back then, it seemed like everybody was getting signed.”

Smoking Popes were no different.

In 1995, Capitol Records released the band’s major label debut, Born to Quit, a prophetically titled collection of chunky pop songs. It was upon this output that the brothers Caterer packed their suitcases and relocated from their suburban stomping grounds to the big city. It also was because of this release that stations with people such as VanOsdol first took notice.

“I’d like to say I was there for the early EPs, but my first impression of the Popes was Born to Quit,” said the journalist whose influential pipes still boom as loudly today as back then. “I couldn’t get enough of Josh’s voice. It was three-chord punk rock, but with this melodic singing over it. It sounded like nothing else I had heard.”

Although it didn’t sound exactly like something that VanOsdol was accustomed to, the LP incorporated elements of artists whom the brothers adored. Culling their influences from Dinosaur Jr. to Jawbreaker, the 10 songs sounded strangely familiar but not too recognizable, like a person unsure whether he or she experienced deja vu. Even Josh Caterer’s distinct voice was a hybrid of Frank Sinatra’s croon and Morrissey’s aloof swagger, a comparison that would become unavoidable after The Smiths’ front man famously referred to the album as “extraordinary, the most lovable thing I’d heard in years.”

But most notably, songs such as “Rubella” and “Need You Around” were unapologetically power pop. Despite the tempo of the album’s most memorable tracks, the group’s knack for harmony was undeniable, and the Caterers couldn’t dodge the label of being Chicago’s latest in a string of guitar-pop gems. It’s a lineage that runs back through Off Broadway and Shoes to its start with Cheap Trick in the late 1970s. Yet, aside from Material Issue, the bands all had been transplants, moving from various suburbs and setting up shop somewhere along Lake Michigan.

So it was only natural that Smoking Popes – with their surplus of guitar hooks – would make the 50-mile move and accept their new role as the pontiffs of Chicago power pop. In doing so, they would blaze a trail that a number of bands would take over the years: east along Interstate 90 and ending somewhere near Wrigley Field.

“After a certain time, we would have to go down to Chicago to see the Smoking Popes play because they had gotten so big,” said Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba, who hails from the same area in McHenry County, Illinois. “They were our favorite band; the reason that we started bands, and the reason we started spending so much time in the actual city, was for both Popes’ and [Naked] Raygun’s shows.”

Kids only a year or two younger than the Caterers had a success story to point to, an act from the quaint, upper-middle class area that could cut it with Chicago performers. Aspiring musicians who had been chugging away in their bedrooms and garages now were coming together, and the Popes were proof that getting out of the suburbs could be as easy as mixing a few love letters over even fewer power chords. At least, that’s what it seemed like for the teens who followed in the band’s immediate wake, and that glimmer of hope was enough to inspire more than Alkaline Trio. A number of bands cropped up in the suburban vacancy created by the Caterer siblings.

About that same time, Brian Peterson, who had booked VFW shows in the guys’ hometown during the early 1990s, would stake claim to a rundown bowling alley on Chicago’s northwest side. Before long, the building – complete with its yellowing walls, decrepit lanes, and malfunctioning bathrooms – would become The Fireside Bowl, a punk club that helped shape the city until it abruptly stopped hosting concerts in 2004. With him, Peterson would bring fellow suburbanites such as Slapstick and The Lawrence Arms. It was a partnership like the one that these bands had watched Smoking Popes form with Metro owner Joe Shanahan, and one that they knew could create some security after moving to a new city. So much like the Caterers – and with their shadow still looming – this fresh crop of transplants had a venue to call home and a promoter willing to fight for them.

“I just loved that place so much,” said Rob Kellenberger, the former drummer for Slapstick, Tuesday, and Colossal, and who later would spend a stint with Smoking Popes. “Growing up, I always wanted to play Metro because that was the big club. But I always had more fun whenever we’d play The Fireside. That place was hugely influential because all the suburban bands knew we could get shows. So whenever we’d go on tour, we’d tell the other bands that whenever they came to Chicago, they could play there. So we’d go meet Less Than Jake, or Suicide Machines, or whoever, and when they’d come through town they’d always play The Fireside.”

By the late 1990s, the northwest suburbs sound that the Popes had jumpstarted was influencing not only Chicago’s sonic backdrop, but also was shaping the national landscape. Agents were clamoring to book their acts at Peterson’s small club, which still doubled as a bowling alley during the weekdays.

“We never really had any kind of coherent benchmarks, other than all of us feeling like we really enjoyed what we were doing and felt that we were pretty good at it,” Matt Caterer said, recalling the mass migration that followed the Popes from the suburbs. “We just wanted to become a ‘real’ band. Then later … I started to realize [bands that used to be heroes] also were peers of ours, and they might be looking at us the way I was looking at them. That’s when I started to realize we were a part of something that was nationwide that we had been a part of back in [the suburbs]. We were playing music and were part of a local scene. And then we just became part of the Chicago scene. And this national scene. With each step, we didn’t really realize it was happening.”

It has never been odd for Chicago to be at the center of the music universe. The city had birthed house music a decade before, which evolved into one of the most progressive industrial movements to date. It’s a blues town, immortalized by Robert Johnson long before Buddy Guy made his home there, or Elwood and Jake Blues donned their fedoras and matching sunglasses. Even today, while events such as Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Festival plaster their rock-studded rosters over the city each year, hip-hop names such as Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Common, Kidz in the Hall, and The Cool Kids aren’t so much redefining the city’s reputation, but instead bolstering the eclectic one it already has.

“There are many different scenes in Chicago,” Alkaline Trio’s Skiba says, “but from what I’ve experienced, the ’80’s and ’90’s [punk] scene was bigger and stronger and tougher than anything I’ve ever seen in Chicago.”

Even if it is The City of Broad Shoulders, there’s only so much room for all those bands to share, especially with that Sears Tower-size chip, the result of acts having been told for so long that they weren’t as glamorous as those from L.A., or as tough as those from Detroit, or as innovative as those from Berlin.

“I don’t think there is that Second City Syndrome that people think there is,” VanOsdol says. “Maybe a little. And maybe a few bands more than others. But back then, people supported each other just for the music. Maybe this is revisionist history, but [the mid-’90s] was just such an exciting time for Chicago.”

And it wouldn’t be long until it was again.

* * *

“This could be what we need right now/Tell me how it feels to be/The living end of your time.” – Smoking Popes, “End of Your Time”.

* * *

By 1997, Smoking Popes had recorded Destination Failure, the band’s second LP for Capitol. The label paid what Matt Caterer calls “a fucking ton of money” to work with the late Jerry Finn. The producer was in the midst of a string of successes that included Pennywise, Jawbreaker, Rancid, and Green Day’s Dookie. The Popes’ sessions would bridge the gap to his work on albums by Superdrag, The Vandals, and The Living End and on pop-punk’s breakout title, Blink-182’s Enema of the State.

Yet despite the critical acclaim and industry anticipation, the label did little to promote the follow-up to Born to Quit. (In addition to its commercial success, Quit’s tracks had been featured on soundtracks for the teen comedies Clueless, Angus, and Tommy Boy.) The original Failure sessions didn’t culminate in anything that Capitol thought could get the band the same MTV play as the song “Need You Around” had done a few years before.

“Destination Failure might be our best work,” Matt Caterer lamented. “Most of that is because Jerry Finn [was] a fucking genius.”

But the label saw it differently, and it was only after some sternly worded encouragement that the band penned the album’s signature single, “I Know You Loved Me.” But despite a rigorous tour schedule, the album’s success hit a plateau.

Back home, the city was at a standstill, too. The Smashing Pumpkins were still dealing with the 1996 overdose death of keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, and the subsequent firing of co-founder Jimmy Chamberlin would lead to a drastic makeover in their sound. Phair’s 1998 whitechocolatespaceegg would become her first album to fail to be certified Gold, selling less than the required 500,000 units. The national focus had turned its ears toward nu-metal, and acts such as the angst-ridden Disturbed were milking the public’s growing interest into sold-out hometown gigs.

It was something the Caterers could empathize with only from afar, as tours kept them away from their adopted city.

“Our whole thing before [getting signed] was, like, we’d hangout in kids’ basements where we practiced, smoking cigarettes, just sitting around doing whatever bullshit you do as a band,” Matt Caterer said. “But then, somehow, we improbably got into a position where we could actually take the next step to make plans as a band, and we sort of never – for whatever reason – we never came together as a band. We all sort of just went into our own individual lives and started freaking out. So then it was just a process over the next couple years of whimpering and disintegration and anger.”

It came to a head shortly after the release of Destination Failure when Josh Caterer overdosed on cocaine during party in California. Sprawled out on a balcony while waiting for the ambulance, the front man began to pray. It was a last-ditch effort by a person who was not raised in a religious household. The deal was simple: If he survived the night, he would turn himself – and his music – over to God.

And the next morning, the man whose band’s name poked fun at the world’s most recognizable Christian took steps to do just that.

* * *

“But I’m not the boy that you destroyed/I’m stronger than he was/I had to be to survive/I’m lucky to be alive/The me you left behind/Is still lying there/With his eyes froze open wide.” – Smoking Popes, “I Was Right”.

* * *

Smoking Popes always was a vehicle for Josh Caterer’s lovelorn tales. The singer’s heart wasn’t just sewn on his sleeve; it was stapled, duct-taped, glued, and bolted there – just above the name of every girl who broke it.

“Christine.” “Megan.” “Sandra.” The then-26-year-old singer had put his faith in more relationships than he could write about, and had filled three LPs with songs about every one. However, after surviving his near-death experience, he was poised to put it into one with somebody even less tangible – Jesus Christ. By doing so, he would end the group that he and his brothers started back in their suburban basement, withdraw to his new lifestyle, and leave his siblings to fend for themselves.

“I was mad at Josh. But, more, I think we all were just mad at each other,” Matt Caterer said of the final months of 1998. “I just thought he was being a dick about the whole thing and also that he just wasn’t being cool. Although, having said that, I didn’t really want to be in the band anymore, either. But I also didn’t want to not be in the band.”

It was a choice that would be made for Matt Caterer when his younger brother folded the group. And it was an experience the elder sibling cautiously avoided reliving a few years later when Josh and Eli Caterer formed Duvall, a Christian band in the musical likeness of Smoking Popes.

“The reason we couldn’t do the Popes thing anymore was because I didn’t want to be in a band about somebody else’s spirituality,” Matt Caterer said. “And we didn’t get along for a couple years. We really needed to be away from each other, but we never hated each other.”

So Eli and Josh Caterer joined with drummer Kellenberger – a fellow suburbanite whose bands such as Slapstick had made the trek to the city several years before – to release a series of Duvall EPs and 2003’s Volume and Density. And while his brothers were relearning how to be a band, Matt Caterer gallivanted about Chicago at night, and by day, he found solace in the music of others while managing a record store.

“I felt like one of the few great rock bands of modern times had been lost,” said Skiba, recalling the local post-Popes environment.

The Alkaline Trio front man was correct on more than one level. By 2001, Capitol had stopped printing copies of Born to Quit. Not only did the prospect of new Popes material seem dim, but the old music also was becoming harder to find.

“I really admire what [Josh] tried to do with [Duvall]. It almost was like a concept band. You could argue if it was successful or not, but I really admire it,” Matt Caterer said all these years later about watching his brothers’ new act. “It just might have been too far out of the box; it sounded too different than normal Christian radio because it was a rock band. The people who wanted traditional rock ‘n’ roll were distrustful of it for the same reasons people can be distrustful of religion. And people who wanted Christian music wanted something that sounded like everything else on Christian stations. But thinking about that back then would get me thinking about the Popes, and then I’d just think, ‘Heck, we blew it. We had our chance and failed. Fuck it, whatever.’”

The record industry had yet to learn how capitalize on the Internet, and lawsuits were still pending from the Napster fallout. Labels such as Capitol were tightening their purse strings, and more bands were writing stories similar to Smoking Popes’ every day. Although Apple had recently launched a little upstart program in 2001 called iTunes, it had yet to make much of a dent in the market, and Matt Caterer was left watching his musical legacy slip into “used” bins at his corner record shop.

* * *

“With all the simple times behind me/I can fail without regret/If I have to try, then I will never/Be able to forget.” – Smoking Popes, “Paul”.

* * *

“Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. People grow up and begin to demand the things they had when they were younger,” VanOsdol said. The author had been discussing his upcoming book, but soon his remarks turned back to Smoking Popes. “I always thought that it was such a weird end for the band. I wasn’t surprised when they got back together for that show.”

After more than seven years since his overdose on that California balcony, Josh Caterer still was a devoted Christian. The singer’s faith only had strengthened since leaving Smoking Popes, but now in his 30s with a wife and family, he was coming to grips with how his spirituality had affected others. Feeling better fit to avoid the temptations that he associated with his former life, he began kicking around the idea of reforming with his brothers as a way to get Born to Quit re-issued. With Eli Caterer already on board by way of Duvall, the future of the Popes rested with Josh and Matt reconciling the way the band had ended years earlier.

Coincidentally – or maybe by fate, depending on whom you ask – Chicago promotions giant Flowerbooking scheduled its 15-year anniversary at the Caterers’ beloved Metro in September 2005. The recently debunked Promise Ring already had been approached about a one-night reunion for the fundraising event, and the opportunity was too perfectly timed for Josh Caterer to pass up.

“I remember my first thought when Josh told me that he wanted to get the band back together was, ‘How is that going to be cool?’ ” Matt Caterer said. “But it took about a half-hour of convincing, and I agreed to do it. He made a point to reassure me that it wasn’t going to be a vehicle for his spirituality, and I really appreciated that.”

The last time that the band had shared a stage was in December 1998, just a bit north at the Double Door. Then, the band was in shambles. Josh Caterer was learning how to weigh his newfound beliefs with a loyalty to his brothers. Eli and Matt Caterer were watching a family member – a man whom they had known for a quarter-century – change right before their eyes and take their livelihoods with him. The record industry was evolving and pitting bands, labels, and fans against one another. Even Chicago was shifting, and the place that had been so welcoming only a few years before had come to challenge Josh Caterer’s resolve.

Yet, news of the reunion gig traveled quickly. And by the time tickets went on sale, there was enough buzz to sell out the 1,200-seat venue in less than 40 minutes.

“That was when we realized everything had changed on us,” Matt Caterer said of the sold-out performance. “We figured we’d play a show and it would be pretty cool. And when it sold out, we all had to stop and say, ‘Oh my God.’ Because up until then, [we] figured we’d play a show, and maybe some people would show up and have a good time. But we didn’t think that many people would care. But after that sold out, everything changed in our eyes.”

The performance became a live DVD, then a reunion tour, then another leg of a reunion tour. Before long, the brothers began working on Stay Down, their first original studio material since Destination Failure. All the while, they made sure to channel every effort back through Chicago. Kellenberger had replaced original drummer Mike Felumlee for the comeback gig, but he later gave way to Ryan Chavez and ultimately to Neil Hennessy, who joined despite his full-time job in The Lawrence Arms. The band played high-profile slots at Lollapalooza 2006 and South By Southwest the following year, and toured throughout Illinois’ Collar Counties, including its first stop in 15 years in Carpentersville, Ill. – the town where the Caterers got their start at a high school talent contest.

“I always had been aware of the Smoking Popes while growing up in the suburbs,” said the 29-year-old Hennessy of his new band mates. “But at my first practice with them, I had a couple moments when I caught myself kind of in awe that I was playing with these guys, thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m playing songs like “Pasted” that I had heard so many times on mix tapes.’ ”

But it wasn’t the old stuff that concerned Matt Caterer; it was the prospect of new tunes. After the Metro gig, he had set his sights less on dusting off his band’s treasured catalog and began to focus on fresh tracks. Even with Josh Caterer’s stabilized faith, the singer still was hesitant to perform some of his past songs. Yesterday’s standards such as “Let’s Hear it For Love” became late additions to the reformed group’s set lists.

“Before, when things went bad, it all sort of was based around this fact that we were in this position, and we didn’t want to blow it. But then we freaked out so much that we blew it,” the bassist said. “But everything bad that could happen already had. So I had nothing to worry about as far as the band breaking up was concerned. As long as we put out something that was in the same ballpark as our first release, then I’d be 100 percent happy. But there’s something about containing that spark that can carry you through the period where you made a bunch of albums together. If you put a bookend on it like we did and go on hiatus, you sort of close it off. And you might not be able to get it back.”

What followed that reunion show was more than two years of recording and shopping what eventually would become Stay Down. The album finally was released on iTunes in June of this year and hit stores in early August, despite being completed since fall 2007. Instead of writing about Jesus Christ, Josh Caterer had kept his word to his brother and turned his pen back toward the women in his life.

From “Stefanie” to “Little Jane-Marie,” the band’s Curb Appeal Records debut finds the songwriter fixating on day-to-day feelings in the same way that made him the poster child for ’90s crushes. It’s this tendency to sweat the small stuff that he lacked in Duvall. In that band, Josh abandoned his hyper-personal tales for big-picture questions, opting for proclamations of where he was emotionally, and not questioning how he got there. But in the Popes, the same lovesick fool that poetically crooned his way through those power-pop songs a decade ago reemerged.

Yet new tracks such as “The Corner” – written from the perspective of Perry Smith, the murderer immortalized in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – show a darker side the band, as one of Josh Caterer’s first acknowledgments that there might actually be something worse than falling out of love. A decade ago, the band would not have been ready to transition from the somber track to the album’s more traditional guitar-pop numbers such as “Grab Your Heart and Run” or “Welcome to Janesville”. It would have been too out of character. The sludgy guitars would not have meshed with the band’s upbeat sets. Even five years ago, the lyricist would not have entertained the subject in one of his songs. Phrases such as, “And if I had another chance to live through that dark night/I would un-shoot every bullet one by one/ ’til the killing came undone” could have sent the new Christian down paths he wasn’t ready to travel. It’s taken more than 15 years – a decade since he found himself floundering on a California balcony – but these songs today are about a different type of regret.

“One of the best bands of our time [has] been found again,” said Skiba of his friends’ band. “The Smoking Popes show [this year] in L.A. was the first time a band made me cry since I can remember.”

This type of emotional connection is why Skiba cites sharing the stage with Smoking Popes on New Year’s Even 2006 at Metro as a career highlight that fulfilled a dream, and why he stops just short of admitting his hometown comrades still are his favorite band. The Alkaline Trio member discusses the Caterers with the same reverence as both Hennessy and Kellenberger, who each confessed that they always relished the times critics would compare their other bands with Smoking Popes.

“All the kids in bands that I meet say they looked to us as a fairly big influence. They say they look to us in a way that would have you believe we should be bigger than we are,” Matt Caterer said. “Well, bigger in places other than Chicago.”

* * *

“I drove all the way from Carpentersville/To see you here tonight/And it was worth it/You didn’t play my favorite song/But that’s all right/I love the new stuff, too/I’m just glad I got to see you.” – Smoking Popes, “You Spoke to Me”.

* * *

Back at the Belmont Arts and Music Festival in June, three men are waiting at the rear gate with their copies of Stay Down. Although the album isn’t available in stores yet, it’s being sold directly from the band at their concerts. As Hennessy walks by, the friends call the drummer over, track down a Sharpie marker, and ask for a signature.

“You know I don’t play on this album, right?” Hennessy asks, double-checking that the fans knew he joined in May, after recording was finished.

“We know,” chimes in one of the men who sang along in the front row to every song of the night’s set. “But that’s OK; The Lawrence Arms are great. And I’ve got all their other drummers’ signatures, too. So I need yours.”

At the same time, Josh Caterer watches the woman walk away down the wet street, carrying a bag stuffed with 24 of his band’s T-shirts. He turns toward the stage and walks back to load his equipment into a van. The guys are preparing embark on a brief East Coast trek, and each of the members is making his final preparation before the tour. For the past few years, Josh Caterer has lived not far from where he grew up. The band might have moved away, but he’ll always be a suburban guy at heart. He knows that now, and keeping that distinction has been key to the success of Smoking Popes’ second go-round.

After packing up his guitar, the singer bids his mates goodnight, gets in his vehicle quietly and heads home, leaving his band in the city. In the morning, Smoking Popes will be waiting there for him, right where they belong – and Chicago will be, too.

Soundcheck Magazine, September 2008