It’s been a while since they last played Madison or released any new material, but come this weekend, Minneapolis rockers The Suburbs will return to the city after 20-some years of separate projects.
Keyboardist Chan Poling described a sort of full-circle evolution within the band that brought them back to slow but steady touring.
They started out playing for fun and for art in 1977, he recalled, then quickly hit the road on tour and toward record deals. Eventually the touring wore them out, Poling said, but it wasn’t long before they felt the pull to reunite in the mid-’90s.
“There’s a path you go on and you write songs for popularity or whatever you wanna be. You want to get a hit single, but then once you kind of give that up … it gets a little more relaxed and fun and you get to just play for the art of it,” Poling said. “And we’re back at that stage now.”
One can hardly blame the band members, Bruce C. Allen and “Beej” Chaney on guitar, Michael Halliday on bass, Hugo Klaers on drums and of course Poling on keys, for going on hiatus. Having carved a name in the Minneapolis scene, The Suburbs never quite reached the widespread popularity of their friends and peers, despite – or maybe because of – their unique sound.
“I’d say we were a little bit ahead of our time and pretty contemporary still,” Poling said.
They were one of the first and only bands to somehow blend two streams of patently-’80s music, danceable synth-pop and grimy punk rock, into a single force. Coupled with often-eccentric lyrics, they might have been just too much for the mainstream to handle. Their network, too, left some pretty big footprints to fill – The Suburbs played alongside bands like R.E.M., The Talking Heads and Iggy Pop. Even their local pals like H?sker D?, The Replacements and Soul Asylum had notable success.
Leaving the band didn’t mean leaving music altogether, though, at least not for Poling.
After retiring briefly from The Suburbs, Poling in fact expanded his range, composing music for theater, film and television and forming the jazz trio The New Standards in 2005. And branching out, he said, is exactly what he hopes to do this fall back with The Suburbs.
“We just like to see what it’s like if we branched out a little bit. You know, make a path through Chicago, Denver, Madison and see what kind of interest we can get. We haven’t played Madison since the ’80s,” he said.
That may be partly because of their strong ties to the Twin Cities. In the 30-some years since The Suburbs heyday, Poling has enjoyed watching the city’s scene grow as new, talented artists have come out of Minneapolis and continued the musical legacy he and his band helped create. He even feels like something of a mentor to some of them, he said.
But it’s always refreshing to get away from familiar territory, and having avoided the stereotypical breakup drama, a Suburbs reunion is anything but a chore.
“We’re still pals … and it’s kind of a big deal to get together,” Poling said. “We just have a blast.”
The Suburbs will perform on Saturday, Sept. 8 at The Majestic. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. and tickets are $20.
