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"My main memory of Pressure Boys is seeing them on a temporary stage at a lawn party," says Josh Grier, a New York entertainment lawyer who used to run Durham-based Dolphin Records. "They did a lot of that because they were a band you could dance to. Most bands seemed to aspire to being serious recording artists, not a party band. Pressure Boys were a party band, but they did originals. Even if it was music you didn't particularly like, they were so infectious that you had a good time."

Pressure Boys toured quite a bit, too, getting as far west as Idaho, and to almost every big city in between. No matter the venue, the band went out of its way not to take anything too seriously. Widenhouse joined the Pressure Boys late in their history, and more than once he wondered what the heck he'd gotten himself into.

"What was shocking to me was how stupid they'd try to appear," Widenhouse recalls. "They did things like pull their pants all the way up to their chest, tighten their belts and walk around all goofy. But ... they taught me a lot and made me much more worldly. I had a sort of redneck childhood, and they were my first introduction to the cultured world."

Ladd remembers the band's first trip to New York as teenagers, for a gig at the prestigious Peppermint Lounge. During load-in, they paused to watch a firetruck go by with its horn blaring, and one of the club's doormen yelled, "What, you don't even have firetrucks down there?!" Stafford shot back, "Hey, old man, we ain't even got fire down there yet!"

"Pressure Boys were the best extended childhood you could possibly imagine," Ladd says. "We did every ill-advised, crazy, dangerous thing you could. But no one got hurt, and it was a great time. We wound up in a lot of places where we had no business playing, clubs that usually had serious high-end, groundbreaking artistic bands. We'd come in there with funny hats and trombones, just having fun, because we didn't know any better.

"It was like a club," Ladd concludes. "If we hadn't played instruments, we would've been a nerd gang."

In the studio

Along with all the live work, Pressure Boys did a fair amount of recording during the '80s, working with Don Dixon and Mitch Easter (who produced R.E.M.'s first two albums). They also placed a song on 1985's "More Mondo," a Dolphin Records compilation of local acts. But they never moved past the do-it-yourself stage to a record deal that might have taken them beyond regional popularity.

"They never got the major-label bite," Grier says. "The [label scouts] who saw them probably said, 'This is just a knockoff of Madness, who we can't sell. Why should we try with these guys?' Labels would bring these bands over from Europe and no matter how hard they hit MTV, they never sold a lot of records."

Ultimately, Pressure Boys were a little too quirky, scattered and frenetic for mass consumption, which created plenty of frustration back then. They've come to realize that it was probably for the best.

"We were very naive, which made it great," Settle says. "Listening back to this stuff after so many years, about 25 percent of it I have no idea what I was trying to do. What little theory I knew, which was not much, I learned from these guys, who'd played in marching bands. If there was one thing I took away from Pressure Boys, it was how to play with 'feel.' That was something I didn't get for the longest time."

"I was the same way with people telling me about singing," Plymale says. " 'Why don't you try this?,' and it was always so confusing because I had no idea how to change what I was doing. I felt like they were saying, 'Make your hair blonde.' It came out how it came out, which made us different and unique. But most pop music is not like that. Our inexperience made us interesting."

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