But that's not to say the band doesn't wonder about its place in the current marketplace; maybe it just doesn't care. After this long, sales are a moot point, something for the accountants at the label to worry about. The band only wants to be taken seriously (no more jokes about Boston, thank you) and to be heard. If it's no longer the Toadies against the world, it's at least the Toadies versus the music business that sought, for the longest time, to silence a band that cries havoc every time it steps in the studio or onstage. One gets the sense that, in the end, the Toadies were afraid of only one thing: being forgotten.

"I'm of the belief that if we can get it out, get people to listen to it, and get it across, then people will dig it," Lewis says of any, ahem, expectations. "That's all we need to do."

"There's no competition now," Reznicek says. "It doesn't seem like any bands play their own instruments, or if they do, they play them poorly and go, 'Yeeeeeaaaaah.' There's no singing. It's all rapping."

"There are no songs anymore," Vogeler adds.

"I went to Best Buy today to buy some blank CDs so I could burn about 50 CDs before Napster shuts down," Reznicek says. "While I was there, I went to see if there were any new releases this week, and they have this one long row of what's hot or what's on sale, and it was all crap. There's, like, fuckin' two million manufactured teeny-bop bands I've never heard of before, and they all have terrible names. It's all about what you look like now. I'm afraid kids are going to grow up and feel like, 'I don't need to nurture any talent I might have, because I'll just be pretty and wait for someone to discover me and throw me on stage.'"

"It makes you just wanna go out and get breast implants," Umbarger says, and the table laughs.

"We're so old," Reznicek says, "the last new record we bought was in the 1970s."

No, they're told, the last new album you released was in the '70s.

"Yeah," Umbarger says, smiling, "we've been around a long time."