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"Inevitable" sold better than anybody expected. By the spring of 1996, the Zippers were booked to play "A Prairie Home Companion" and the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Things were getting serious enough that the band drafted a four-page partnership agreement dated June 1, 1996 -- three days before the release of their second album, "Hot."

The Plenty More General Partnership (named after the last song on "Inevitable") was a model of egalitarian spirit. It called for profits and losses to be split equally among all seven members. Disputes would be settled through arbitration, not lawsuits. And it made provisions to split income from publishing -- money generated by public performance of music on radio, television, commercials and soundtracks -- among each band member, not just the songwriters. Publishing rights are the most valuable asset any musician has, so this was a generous provision.

"It totally seemed like the right thing to do," says Maxwell, one of the Zippers' primary songwriters. "I mean, I was a bartender. 'Publishing, what's that? Let's just split it up.' It seemed like everyone should have a stake in that. Otherwise, one [expletive] makes obscene amounts of money and everyone else feels resentful."

Back then, the only money involved was hypothetical. "Inevitable" had sold 18,000 copies -- a healthy number, but nobody was getting rich or even making a living. The biggest issue was whether they could quit their restaurant jobs.

"I was working at the Flying Burrito when the Zippers broke," Whalen says. "And I remember I did not want to give up my good Friday and Saturday shifts. That was hard. I really had to think about it. 'Well,' I thought, 'OK. I hope this works.' "

Act II: Money and MTV

It was 1997 when the Zippers exploded. They started the year playing President Clinton's inauguration and closed it out at "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve." In between, they had a song blow up at commercial radio -- "Hell," an irresistible calypso tune with a dark message about damnation.

As "Hell" sent the "Hot" album rocketing up the album charts, the Zippers crossed over from NPR to MTV. The "Hell" video was playing constantly, and they were pop stars with a million-selling album.

The crowds got bigger, and so did the paydays. They went from playing for a few thousand bucks at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro to making $75,000 at private corporate events. A television commercial for Intel's Pentium computer chips used another "Hot" song, Maxwell's "Put a Lid on It," to the tune of $350,000.

"I remember when they told me we grossed $1 million one year," Whalen says. "Which just made me go, 'Wow!' Now we didn't get all that money, obviously, because there were so many expenses. We were all on salary. It was costing us $30,000 a month to travel to gigs on two buses. But there was a lot of money flying around, and people get crazy when that happens."

All that money raised the financial stakes, bringing managers and lawyers into the picture. The Zippers were Mammoth Records' blue-chip asset when Walt Disney purchased the label for a reported $25 million. That created immense pressure for another hit.

"Perennial Favorites," released in 1998, had its moments. But the album was strained where the Zippers used to be easygoing, betraying a sour fatalism. The video for the first song, "Suits Are Picking Up the Bill," showed the Zippers on display as entrees in a restaurant. After debuting at a lofty No. 18, "Perennial Favorites" faded fast and sold less than half of what "Hot" moved.

Behind the scenes, all was not well. An unsettling blow was the death of Stacy Guess, the Zippers' original trumpet player, whose heroin addiction forced him out of the band before "Hot" was recorded. He died from an overdose in 1998, when the band was on tour in Europe. They took the news hard.

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