Eight o'clock in the morning isn't a very rock 'n' roll time of day -- unless, of course, you were up all night and never went to sleep. Back when their 1980s-vintage band Pressure Boys ruled Chapel Hill, John Plymale, Bryon Settle and Greg Stafford put in plenty of sleepless nights.

But that's not why they're gathered over biscuits and pancakes at a Chapel Hill restaurant on a recent weekday morning. Between work and kids and everything else, 8 a.m. was the only time that all three men could get together and talk about their shared Pressure Boyhood.

The band is about to enter the present tense again, temporarily, with two reunion shows next weekend to benefit The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. So they're revisiting music they haven't played in 20 years, trying to shake off the rust.

"Today, after this, I get back on the horse," Settle announces. "I've gotta go practice."

"Yeah, I've been playing a lot of trombone, trying to get that back," Plymale says. " 'Soul Chip' is not coming together. Neither is 'Queensland' -- can we change the key on that?"

"You just need to practice harder," Settle kids, drawing a dirty look from Plymale.

"In all seriousness," Stafford interjects, "I've forgotten how to read music."

"And play music, too," Plymale says.

"Ha ha."

Kick-starting the Pressure Boys back to life has not been simple. Frontman Plymale, guitarist Settle and saxophonist Stafford live in the Triangle, but the other three in the reunion are scattered across the country. Trumpet player Je Widenhouse lives in Asheville, and drummer Rob Ladd and bassist Jack Campbell both reside in California. So they're having to rehearse when they can (including this week).

It's worth doing because it's for a good cause. It's also worth doing because the Pressure Boys' legend has grown in the 20 years since the band broke up, landing members everywhere from platinum jazz band Squirrel Nut Zippers to onstage with Don Henley.A lot has happened in those 20 years -- marriages, kids, career changes, even death -- which makes conjuring up the Pressure Boys' old youthful exuberance a challenge for a bunch of rockers in their 40s. And of course, the present keeps intruding.

"My son's band wants me to play with them," Settle says. "They had their guitar player bail because he's playing Merlefest."

"Are you gonna?" Stafford asks.

"Probably," Settle says. "It's just hard-core, so it'd be pretty easy. But if I do it, I want to put a La-Z-Boy onstage."

Back in the day

Pressure Boys formed in the fall of 1981 at Chapel Hill High School. They sounded like what they were, marching-band geeks who had picked up on British new-wave ska music -- a combination of sped-up reggae rhythms and punk attitudes.

They got by on enthusiasm the first few years, eventually growing into a sound akin to English new-wave pop band XTC. By then, Pressure Boys and Raleigh's Fabulous Knobs were at the top of the local alternative-music totem pole.

"In the mid-'80s, they were pretty much the main Chapel Hill band," says Peter Cashwell, a longtime fan who teaches English at Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. "A lot of that had to do with the fan base they had at Chapel Hill High, which is where their first core audience came from. Early on, they were heavy on energy with a good choice of covers, a lot of the British two-tone ska stuff like Madness or Specials. But by 1982, they were putting together original songs with some weird elements that went in other directions."

Pressure Boys didn't sound much like anyone else in the Triangle back then. But they fit right into the burgeoning rock underground that was coming together in Chapel Hill, Athens and other Southern college towns. And they had a particularly valuable secret weapon: They were less pretentious and more fun than just about anybody else.

"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."

After the end

Pressure Boys played their final show in August 1988 and the band members scattered. They had enough success for their former band to acquire a posthumous reputation similar to that of grunge band Mother Love Bone, who also never broke through. But you've probably heard of the Mother Love Bone spinoff, Pearl Jam.

Ladd moved to Hollywood and went to work as Don Henley's drummer. He played on Alanis Morissette's 1995 album "Jagged Little Pill" (which sold 16 million copies), and on Broadway with the Red Clay Ramblers.

Various Pressure Boys turned up in regionally popular party bands, including Johnny Quest and Sex Police. Settle played guitar in the alternative country band Trailer Bride. Plymale turned to studio work, producing numerous local and national bands of note, including Superchunk, Hobex and Meat Puppets.

Another of Plymale's studio clients, Squirrel Nut Zippers, featured a couple of his old Pressure Boys pals, the late Stacy Guess and Widenhouse. Zippers seemed a lot like Pressure Boys used to be, a fun and seemingly nonserious lark for everyone involved. So it was a shock when the Zippers had one of the unlikeliest million-selling albums of all time, 1996's "Hot."

"It's the proof of how good any band was, how much they've done since they broke up," Grier says. "A lot of those guys have gone on to things beyond Pressure Boys. You could say there was more talent onstage with them than any other band of that era. Other bands had one or two focal points at the most, but there were at least four guys in Pressure Boys who could've had their own band."

Before the reunion

With all the Pressure Boys off doing other things, nobody seemed inclined to revive the band. Then, in 2004, Plymale's 2-year-old daughter Allie was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, an often fatal congenital condition that involves a grueling treatment regimen.

So Plymale set to work. He put together a 2006 benefit album for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, "Songs For Sixty Five Roses: Re-Working the North Carolina Jukebox," in which he enlisted friends and peers from the Tar Heel music community to cover songs by one another. The project raised more than $30,000, and Plymale was encouraged to follow up with something even more ambitious.

Somebody suggested a Pressure Boys reunion as one of the few things that could top "Sixty Five Roses." Plymale, who had long resisted reuniting the band, was finally ready to give it a try. So were his band mates.

"I have nothing but great memories about the Pressure Boys and zero regrets about that time of my life," Plymale says. "But a reunion always seemed like a bad idea because youth and irreverence were such a big part of it."

"Without a reason to do this," adds Stafford, "it would seem like an attempt to recapture youth or 'rekindle' something. Which is obviously ridiculous."

Still, even if they have no plans to extend Pressure Boys beyond next weekend, they don't want to embarrass themselves. So they're doing what they can to dust off the cobwebs, which especially goes for Stafford. He's a lawyer nowadays and hasn't played a real show since Pressure Boys broke up -- except for a couple of disastrous wedding gigs.

"Way back when, this girl I know asked if I'd play someday at her wedding," Stafford says. "I said sure. Well, 15 years go by and when she finally went to get married, she asked me to play Kenny G's 'Wedding Song.' I had to go buy a soprano sax and learn it, and it was brutal."

The reunion will feature the core foursome of Plymale, Settle, Stafford and Ladd, plus Campbell and Widenhouse -- which was the lineup when Pressure Boys disbanded in 1988. One poignant note will be the absence of trumpet player Stacy Guess, who struggled with a heroin addiction for years before dying from an overdose in 1998.

Yet for all the years and all the mileage, initial Pressure Boys rehearsals have gone better than anyone expected.

"I thought it would be like high school yearbook pictures," Ladd says. "But none of us are the same as what we were. It's been half a lifetime, literally. Hanging out was a little nostalgic, yeah. But it didn't feel like going back in time, it felt very present-tense to me. It didn't sound like when we were 24. In some ways, it sounded better. More mature, like we were listening to one another more. It would stink if it sounded exactly the same."

As to how these shows might turn out, no one in the band is making any bold predictions. But at least one member of the band's longtime audience is cautiously optimistic.

"I have relatively high hopes for this reunion," says Cashwell, who is taking his wife and sons. "The main thing that was always the spine of the Pressure Boys was that danceable, relentless beat, and there's no reason to believe Rob Ladd's foot has gotten any weaker in the last 20 years. I think the band might actually be stronger than the audience."

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