On Friday the Humpers will return to Alex’s Bar to remind all the tenderfeet in the audience that they are still the Eagle Scouts of rootsy punk rock. I caught up with founding member Scott “Deluxe” Drake as he babysat his two-year-old daughter from the safety and comfort of Portland, Oregon.

So, you guys broke up in about 1999. If I’m doing the math, you guys quit right around the beginning of George W. Bush’s reign, and then you’re getting back together right when it’s over. Was there something about the Bush administration that prevented you guys from playing rock ‘n’ roll?
Yeah, we blame everything on him, ha ha! It’s sort of like now how Johnny Cash would wear all black as a protest against hatred in the world. We decided we would lay down our instruments until the end of the Bush era was coming about.
You went on like six or seven big tours back in the day, right?
Yeah, well, once the ball gets rolling, it’s like inertia. We wanted to tour from the very beginning, but if you’re going to tour, you’ve got to have some product to take with you and an album to promote. So as soon as you’re done touring, you’re back in the studio, and then as soon as the next album is done, it’s like, okay back on the road to promote the album . . . it’s sort of a perpetuating machine.
It seems like after you guys stopped that cycle, you’ve gotten bigger than ever.
Well, there’s people who liked us from before, and there’s younger people who never got a chance to see us back in the old days. It just kind of grows because the records never go away. I didn’t even think there was that much interest until I went on the Internet and started seeing pages about the Humpers. And I was like, maybe I should start a MySpace page for the Humpers, just for anybody who wants to hear the old songs. And once I did that, there was just this outpouring of people saying “What’s going on? Are you playing?”
But maybe it’s also because you had a pioneering sound that’s since become contemporary?
Yeah, we had the rare honor of being 20 years behind the times and 10 years ahead of our time at the same time. At the time we were playing around, people would say “Oh, you guys are playing that old style.” And now that style’s way more popular than when we were gigging regularly. I remember our first tour we did, most of the bands we played with were bands who were trying to be Jane’s Addiction or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There were no “punk rock & roll” bands.
But now that your sound has come into vogue, will you be playing more shows?
I guess the next thing is in October, we’re going to do two shows in Texas. We’re going to play at the Las Vegas Shakedown in February. Eventually I’d like to get over to Europe and play over there, but that’s a big undertaking.
Your first real brush with fame came from Yugoslavia.
That was in 1990, so . . . I used to be in this band called Suicide Kings, and through mutual friends I ended up having a correspondence with this guy in what is now Croatia, and he wanted to release the Suicide Kings album. And in the meantime, Suicide Kings broke up, but I didn’t want to lose the deal to do an album. So I said ‘I have this new band, that’s even better,’ which I didn’t! So the Humpers was really born just as a recording project, but we all liked it and thought, hey, let’s do some gigs and see what happens? And 10 years later, we’d done a lot of stuff. But yeah, it was just a fluke thing that the first album came out in Yugoslavia.
Was it bigger with the Croats or the Serbs?
Well, I guess both, because just last year a bunch of Serbian bands put out a tribute to the Humpers CD. We never made it that far East, but we’d like someday to go over there and return the favor.
Yeah, maybe get a street named after you or something.
There you go!