On the way home from Simon's, I decided to take Alvin to The Dirty Rat for a drink. We took our places at the bar, and as I was explaining the drink selection to him, the bartender Gretchen greeted me with her typically stunning smile.

"Nice to see ya, TD. Who's your friend?"

"My brother, actually..." But before I could complete the introduction, Alvin interrupted me.

"Roger," he said suddenly. He held out his paw, and Gretchen shook it. "Good to meet ya."

"I had done a lot of thinking on the bus trip out," Alvin says. "And even more during Simon's talk with me earlier in the day. One big difference between me and you two was how we dealt with the whole Chipmunks thing. I had held it up as a source of pride, bragging to people that I had sung lead on those records. But you two had...well, buried it, really. You both had changed your names in order to break away from it. And which of us was doing better?" Alvin smiled and shrugged. "I don't want it to sound like I thought that I could just change my name, and that would magically clear everything up. I wasn't all that naive. But it seemed like a good first step. To try and face the world as an unknown for once, and maybe leave some of that baggage behind. So, from that point on, to anybody new that I'd meet, I was Roger."

The next morning, Alvin and I ran into Rusty when he was on his way to work. I introduced Alvin (as Roger) to him, and then asked about any job opportunities there might be at the terminal. Rusty thought for a minute, and then told us that although there was nothing open right now, there probably would be something opening up in a week or two. "One of the foremen is moving south. Georgia, I think he said. Anyway, when a foreman leaves, usually everybody moves a step up, and we add somebody to the bottom." He nodded his head at Alvin. "You'd be on the line, of course."

"The line?" asked Alvin. "What's that?"

As usual, Rusty thought that over before answering. "You know the platforms in your apartment?"

"Sure."

"Like that. But three high." He indicated three levels with his paws. "Sixty-five feet long. Three rodents on each level. Both sides of the tracks. Pull in a subway car. Dump the cleaning fluid down. All the rodents take brushes and scrub down twenty-two feet on their level. Once everybody's done, move it along to get rinsed, bring in the next car." Rusty shrugged. "Not too taxing, not too fun. That's where you start, though."

Alvin looked over at me, his eyebrow arched. But I remembered What Simon had told me, so I said, "OK, Rusty. Let us know when the slot opens up. If Roger doesn't have another job by then, he'll take it."

Rusty nodded. "Good, good. I'll have Melvin keep me informed. Have a good day, neighbors." He hurried off, and Alvin turned to look at me with a pained expression.

"Washing subway cars? Really?"

I shrugged. "Hey, it's a job. And consider it a fire under your tail. If you don't want to work there, you just have to find a job before that position opens up."

Alvin did spend some time over the next week looking for a job, but he also spent a good chunk of time teaching himself the Knack songs we had chosen - "My Sharona", "Good Girls Don't", "Let Me Out", and "Frustrated". "The songs were pretty involved," Alvin says. "I had to cover two guitar lines, and they weren't as easy as they originally sounded. And the guitar solo on 'My Sharona' is a bear." Over the next few days, as I worked in the next room, I heard Alvin playing the record over and over, trying to get his parts down. "This was my first time playing with you guys in years," he adds. "I didn't want to half-ass it."

It wasn't until Thursday morning that I sat down to learn my parts, and realized that the drum parts in those songs were pretty involved, too. Luckily, Alvin had the songs down pat by then, and helped coach me until I could get thr]ough them. Having heard them so many times from the next room probably helped.

Alvin remembers how the set began that Thursday. "I sat in the crowd, off to the side. You two came out and did your first little song, then you brought Bert out to play sax and jam along with you. And I tried to sit there and enjoy it, but I just couldn't. I was really nervous. And that was unexpected. I had never been nervous before a gig. Looking back on it, I think it was a sign that AL-VIN was no longer in full control. In the old days, AL-VIN had always been telling me how awesome I was, so why would I get nervous? But now, I was just a small little chipmunk trying to sing and play guitar in front of all these people. I had to go backstage, and remind myself that I could do this."

After Bert finished and left the stage, it was Alvin's turn. Simon played a quiet bass pattern as I pulled my microphone in and gave a lengthy introduction.

"Thank you, everybody. He's Thomas, I'm TD, and this is Cemented. Some of you might know this, some of you might not, but many years ago, we two put out some records together. Back then, though, he was Simon and I was Theodore. (laughter and some applause) And our main role on those records was supporting our rascal brother Alvin. (more laughter) Those records did have some element of truth to them. I mean, Simon is smart, and I am kind of fat. (more laughter) But The Chipmunks records didn't really convey what we three were all about, or what we were really capable of. We used to perform in clubs, and on college campuses, but eventually we broke up and went our separate ways. We three haven't performed together on stage for almost a decade and a half. That is, until tonight. (applause) Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome to the stage...my brother Roger, formerly known as AL-VIN!"

To great applause, Alvin walked out, wearing his white-star t-shirt and jeans. He waved to the crowd and slung his guitar over his head as Simon changed the bassline. I joined in, playing a quiet cymbal-tapping tempo. Alvin approached the microphone, but then stopped and looked back at us. Suddenly, he grabbed the mic and stand, and dragged them up the stairs onto the riser between Simon and me. He then looked back out at the crowd and said, "I want to be up here with my brothers." That got a nice round of applause.

"Yeah, it was kind of showy," says Alvin. "But it was honest. I did want to be next to you two."

When the applause died down, Alvin started playing a slow cowpoke melody, then began singing. "I wish I had a horse, a bright and shiny horse..."

It was Simon's idea to start our set with a Chipmunks song, but Alvin was the one who suggested "Horse". "It was a chance to play that one the way we originally sang it. Plus, there was a great contrast between that and the rock and roll that followed."

Simon and I joined in on harmony, and we sang together up until the end of the first chorus. "...a horse that I could call my own."

And as that note faded away, I launched into the "Walk Don't Run" drum intro. And the small crowd erupted in cheers. Alvin and Simon launched into their parts, and we rode that groove hard. I took my short drum solo in the middle section, and glanced over at Alvin. And I saw an expression on his face that I don't ever recall seeing on his face before.

Alvin smiles and says, "It was joy. At least, that's the word I would use to describe it. Just over a month before that, I was on stage, doing something I hated - lip-synching to my old records. And I had been dying up there. I kind of felt like everything was over at that point. But then, just a few weeks later, I was on stage doing something I loved - playing guitar on one of my favorite songs. And the audience was loving it. There was this feeling of...salvation, almost. I was utterly at the end of my rope in Montana, but now it seemed like everything was going to be OK. So I was just really in the moment."

We made our way through a few of our favorite old songs - "Telstar", "Can't Buy Me Love", "Walk Right In", "Wipeout". Then I got on the mic and announced, "We've been learning a few songs that are a bit more current, if you'd like to hear them." That got the expected polite round of applause, so I said, "That's what we figured. This song is by The Knack - it's called 'Let Me Out'." We plowed our way through that one and "Frustrated", and the crowd was rather appreciative.

As the applause died down, Alvin reached into his guitar case, grabbed something and held it up so the crowd could see. "You've heard about it, you bought the record about it, and now here it is. Live on stage, it's Alvin's harmonica!" Only a few people laughed, and Alvin looked pained. He grumbled, "I waited twenty years to make that joke, and now nobody gets it." That brought a bit more laughter from the crowd, and Alvin cracked a smile as he finished setting up his harmonica rack. He then told the audience, "A few days ago, I played this thing for the first time in fifteen years. I'll try not to screw it up too badly."

There was more laughter, and a woman in the audience piped up. "Such language, Alvin!"

Alvin looked over at her and shot her an evil grin. "Lady, if you can't handle Alvin saying 'screw it up', you'd better not listen too closely to this next number." He then launched into the harmonica intro of "Good Girls Don't", and Simon and I fell in behind him. The crowd responded much better to this number, possibly because it had been a pretty big hit only a few months previous. Or maybe it was because every time Alvin hit a rather salacious line in the song, he would stare pointedly at the woman in the audience who had spoken up. "Wishing you could get inside her pants", "you heard she's pretty fast", and most especially "until she's sitting on your face". At the last "good girls don't, but I do" he wagged his eyebrows at her suggestively. And the crowd went nuts for it.

"Alvin had not lost his way with an audience - that was abundantly clear," says Simon with a smile. "The crowd reaction had been pleasant but polite at the outset, but during the set of Knack covers, the audience was clearly in his paw."

After "Good Girls Don't" ended, I told the crowd, "OK, three songs by The Knack is probably enough." Then I paused for a second, and said, "What the hell - let's make it four," and started the well-known drum opening to "My Sharona".

Alvin admits, "I've sung that song plenty of times, but I've never nailed it...and never will. The original vocal has this sort of growly horny undercurrent that a chipmunk just can't pull off." Perhaps to compensate for that, Alvin really cut loose during that number. He threw his head back and howled the "my my my woo" parts. He ran down the steps onto the stage proper during the extended guitar solo. He worked both sides of the stage, and even went down on one knee during one part. We hit the false ending, and Alvin just stood there with a huge grin on his face, soaking in the applause. Then he slowly walked back up the steps to his microphone, struck a pose, and yelled "One! Two! Three!" And I slammed an upbeat that led us back into the short coda of the song. We hit the final "my Sharonaaaaa", and I nearly collapsed. I felt exhilarated...and exhausted.

I stood up and waved to the crowd, then headed down the stairs off the riser. I saw Simon with his paw on Alvin's shoulder, and he quickly asked me, "Can you go work the crowd?" I nodded, and Simon hustled Alvin backstage. I began chatting to some folks in the crowd - "thanks for coming!" "yeah, it's great playing with him again", "oh, definitely, we'll be doing this again soon". But I wondered what was going on with my brothers.

Ends up Simon had taken Alvin to a small office in the back. Alvin says, "We had...well, ten years before that night, I would've called it a 'fight'. At the time, I thought of it more like an 'argument'. And now, I'm thinking it was just a discussion." What about? "The gig. Its effect on me. Simon was worried that it had swelled my head back up, that I was going to start slipping back into my old habits. I don't remember exactly what he said, but basically, he was trying to keep me grounded.

"I do remember one thing he said to me that night. 'Confidence not arrogance.' I thought about that quite a bit the next few days. Simon's damn good on the bass and keyboards, but you'd never hear him say so. He just gets up on stage and kicks tail, you know? And you're a great drummer, but I never heard you bragging about it. You just start playing 'Topsy' and blow everybody away. So maybe I needed to do more of that. Less blow more show. I decided that that was something I had to work on."

As we drove home that night, we discussed plans for our next performance. We already had our slots filled for next week's Cemented gig, but we didn't have anything lined up the following week. We mulled over the idea of having Alvin be our only guest, and doing a full Chipmunks (or Little Rocks) show. But what should we perform? Not just our old material - we liked doing those Knack songs, and they went over especially well. Should we learn some new material over the next two weeks? And if so, what?

Alvin was listening to the Knack LP when he came up with an idea. "Selecting which Knack songs to do for our first show was tough, because that album is pretty much all killer no filler. So I thought, 'why don't we do the whole album? From start to finish?' That doesn't sound like much of an idea these days, because that album has sort of been forgotten by most people. But it had been a huge hit just a few months before - number one for over a month. So a lot of people owned it and knew it, which meant we could probably get a good crowd from that aspect alone."

We decided we all liked the idea enough to give it a try, so we arranged to meet on Sunday evening to rehearse. Alvin and I spent most of Friday and Saturday night learning the parts to the songs we hadn't tried yet, and we powered through rehearsal the next night.

"We unexpectedly mastered the unfamiliar songs in short order," recalls Simon. "We three had become a rather formidable power-pop ensemble."

That was a good thing, too, because Rusty knocked on my door bright and early Monday morning. He told us that the line position had opened up, and Alvin could start Friday afternoon.

Alvin sighs. "I really didn't want to take that job. It sounded like a complete drag. So I was doing my damnedest to find something else. For the next four days, I was going all over the city, reaching up to counters, asking for managers, filling out applications. And of course, I didn't find anything. The economy was in rough shape around then. Plus, seriously - would anyone be that interested in hiring a rodent in his late thirties whose only other job was being a cartoon-show host on TV?"