A Squirrel Nut Zippers opera

It started with happy jazz in Triangle clubs. It ended with lawyers, divorce, egos and debt

Squirrel Nut Zippers came together with the greatest of ease. Their hit came even more easily, with a song Tom Maxwell claims to have dashed off in 15 minutes. Most effortless of all was their breakup, which happened so quietly it wasn't clear until years later that they were gone.

But in the shadows of that slow fade-out lay operatic pain and drama. After selling millions of records, the Zippers foundered amid litigation, divorce, broken friendships and lost money. Hard feelings linger, and bad blood still boils over in public.

"What irks me is playing a show at the Cave and having a drunk girl come up and ask why we'd broken up Jimbo and Katharine's marriage," says saxophonist Ken Mosher, referring to singer-guitarist Jimbo Mathus and singer Katharine Whalen. He says Maxwell's wife also recently took an earful about "what a jerk Tom was."

The last time Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher shared a Triangle stage with their fellow Zippers was October 1998. Performances next weekend at Raleigh's Artsplosure festival will be as close as they've come since then. Maxwell/Mosher play Artsplosure on Saturday, the day before Whalen sings with the Europa Jazz Quartet. It's probably just as well they're playing on different days.

Maxwell and Mosher left the band in 1999 and later took legal action against the remaining Zippers -- Mathus, Whalen, horn man Je Widenhouse, bassist Stu Cole and drummer Chris Phillips -- over money generated from the music they wrote and recorded with the Zippers. They say they've asked only for what is rightfully theirs. An arbitrator agreed, awarding them more than $345,000 in 2002.

The others say that Maxwell and Mosher had already been paid what they had coming and that the band's money is gone.

"Those two guys quit -- they resigned to start their own thing," Mathus says. "They sued me and took all the money from Squirrel Nut Zippers. It about ruined all of us. ... It's not but just jealousy and greed. Those are the two factors at work."

During arbitration, Mathus made an unflattering cartoon of Maxwell and Mosher as "Max and Mosh, Twins from Yucatan." Maxwell is shown saying, "$," to which Mosher replies, "Me want some too!" The caption at the bottom reads, "You can't get something for nuthin'." Years later, the cartoon is still on Mathus' Web site (www.jamesmathus.com) as a mysterious postscript.

"One of the first questions everybody asks is, 'What happened?' " Maxwell says. "I tell people to go watch 'Behind the Music' and extrapolate. Watch 24 straight hours of that, and they'll hit every single thing that took us down."

Act I: Jazz and whimsy

Most bands come to bad ends, even successful ones -- Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Clash, the Beatles. But in their heyday, you never would have guessed such a fate awaited the Zippers.

The group formed in 1993, growing out of a series of potluck parties at the Mathus-Whalen homestead where friends brought instruments to play old-time jazz. Reflecting the project's whimsical nature, they named themselves after a brand of candy.

"The Inevitable Squirrel Nut Zippers," released in 1995 on hometown label Mammoth Records, was long on ragged charm. The Zippers played old-style jazz in the spirit of Fats Waller and Billie Holiday, but their nervous energy and jittery tempos betrayed their underground-rock pasts in Metal Flake Mother, Rubbermaid, What Peggy Wants and other local bands. The triple-threat combination of Whalen's torch-diva voice, Mathus' blues leanings and Maxwell's idiosyncratic tangents made for perfect musical chemistry.