When the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks arrived, Americans had the opportunity to commemorate the day by watching the films United 93 or World Trade Center, reading the extensive press coverage, or attending political events which, with midterm elections looming, had an extra note of intensity. But for those who piled into Neumo’s Crystal Ball Reading Room, a nightclub in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, remembering the date also meant remembering that the Melvins were playing that night. Although not exactly a homecoming—the previous show in Tacoma was closer to the band’s birthplace near Washing-ton’s Pacific coast—the fact that singer-guitarist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover had once been regulars in the same Seattle alternative music scene that produced Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Mudhoney was not lost on the audience, which welcomed the band with the casually festive air reserved for old friends.

Impressive as the size of the crowd was, however, its composition was even more noteworthy. Although there were plenty of people in the audience who were old enough to have seen the Melvins in the late 1980s, the majority of the audience was comprised of people in their teens and twenties who only could only have experienced Seattle’s surprising rise to cultural prominence indirectly, through documentary evidence and the testimony of those who witnessed it firsthand, in some cases their own parents. In other words, even if the crowd sometimes acted as though they were welcoming home the city’s prodigal sons (the band now lives in L.A.), the truth of the matter is that Osborne and Crover were better suited for the parental role.

Music fans have long been accustomed to dividing artists into two basic categories: those who are still capable of winning people over with new work and those who have come to rely solely on the past for sustenance. To be sure, the line between them is rather fluid. A group consigned to the has-been category can make a comeback record that makes their music commercially viable once more. For example, in the mid-1990s, the vast majority of Santana’s fan base was interested in hearing the band’s classic rock hits, not their light-selling new material. But the 1999 release of the blockbuster album Supernatural, in which Carlos Santana collaborated with a series of younger artists, restored the group to relevance and, indeed, made them more successful in the marketplace than they ever had been.

Although the stunning success of Bob Dylan’s latest album Modern Times, which debuted at number one, might seem like an instance of the “Santana effect,” there is a crucial difference between that record and Supernatural. Whereas Santana’s comeback was fueled by his inclusion of popular younger artists like Dave Matthews, who were rather cynically brought into a project explicitly conceived as a comeback, Modern Times makes no concessions to youth. Dylan and his largely anonymous band sound like they are channeling the music that percolated in the American South before Elvis Presley made his fateful trip to Memphis’s Sun Studios. The irony that one of the most successful rock albums of 2006 wears the faded denim overalls of pre-rock reveals as much about the state of the contemporary music scene as the moans of industry insiders who lament the continuing decline in CD sales.

And so does the continued vitality of bands like the Melvins, who never managed to make it big, but also avoided the ignominy of falling from a high place. There has never been much room on the commercial airwaves for the Melvins, a band notorious for playing shows in which a single guitar chord will linger for minutes between drumbeats. In their latest incarnation, however, the Melvins foreground their punk side, playing faster, more focused songs. For their new album A Senile Animal and the concert tour leading up to its release, Osborne and Crover teamed up with two other musicians who had transplanted themselves from the Pacific Northwest to California—Jared Warren, formerly of Karp and the Tight Brothers From Way Back When, and Coady Willis, formerly of the Murder City Devils, who have their own two-piece band, Big Business. In concert, Big Business plays as the Melvins’ opening act, with Crover joining the band for some songs on guitar, then going on to serve as the Melvins’ “rhythm section.” Since Crover still takes his usual spot behind the drum kit, however, the Melvins now play with two drummers. On record this doubling is at first hard to detect, since Crover and Willis are often in total sync. But careful attention to the stereo separation eventually reveals slight variations in their respective performances, which grow increasingly compelling with repeated listening. In concert, the drum “duets” also make a nice visual counterpoint to the sight of Osborne and Warren on stage, both of whom have “big hair” and tortured vocals to match.

Aside from the musical advantages that Osborne and Crover achieve by doubling themselves in this way, the move also draws attention to the composition of their audience. Although the musical careers of Warren and Willis date back to the early 1990s, they look considerably younger than their band-mates. Watching the four men perform, especially in the wake of Big Business’s opening act, is like witnessing a symbolic sharing of the torch, the replication of the band’s aesthetic for members of the audience too young to have conscious memories of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain—from Crover’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington—telling anyone who would listen that the Melvins were his inspiration. Interestingly, A Senile Animal sees the Melvins making some concessions to the radio format. Many of the songs clock in at under three minutes, and some even feature singing in the places where conventional songwriting demands it. Coupled with the aural and visual effects generated by the group’s new line-up, the album’s accessibility, at least by the Melvins’ standards, suggests that they are making a bid to win the popularity that has until now eluded them. But the truth of the matter is that, in this era of market fragmentation, that popularity may no longer be possible or desirable. More likely, the Melvins are attempting the less ambitious, more practical task of trying to extend their fan base into a new generation.

Evidence for the soundness of this approach was in ample supply in the aftermath of the band’s show at Neumo’s. The “merch”—short for merchandise—table at a Melvins concert has long been a model of creative marketing. Even back in the early 1990s, the band was supplementing the standard T-shirts, pins, and posters with a variety of quirky goods, such as custom dolls, to entice customers. Today, however, that strategy has been elevated to an art. Although there were still plenty of T-shirts and a wide variety of low-priced items for sale at Neumo’s, the merch table also functioned as a “virtual” virtual auction, with rare items of the sort that purveyed on E-Bay were put up for bid. As teens and college students clamored for their low-priced souvenirs, older fans of the Melvins were dropping hundreds of dollars on out-of-print 45RPM singles from Osborne’s personal collection and limited edition signed prints, not to mention custom tin robots that the band had specially commissioned. In fact, it almost seemed as though the group’s more seasoned fans wanted to spend a lot of money to differentiate themselves from the younger portion of the crowd in order to prove their long-term devotion. All told, the table must have taken in well over a  thousand dollars that night, handsomely supplementing the Melvins’ take from the door.