At some point while Chipmunk Punk was still floating around the album chart, Simon gave me a call. The first thing he did was to suggest that I sit down, which wasn't like him at all.

"Why? What is it?"

"We have been asked by another band to be their support on tour."

For the first time in years, my body started quivering, and my foot began tapping uncontrollably. Touring as part of a rock band had always been my biggest dream - a dream that looked like it was finally going to become a reality. "When? Where? With who?"

I could almost hear Simon smiling on the other end. "Remain calm, brother, and I will answer your queries. When? For two weeks in August. Where? Through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. With whom? With a band named D.A."

"...D.A.?" I tried to remember where I had heard that name before. "The band that does 'Ready 'n' Steady'?"

"You are familiar with them, then?" Simon sounded surprised.

"I think so." It had been a rather minor hit about a year previously. For some reason, I could remember the title, but the actual song wasn't coming to me. And I won't lie - I was sort of hoping it would be a band with a larger fanbase. "So, how will this work? Will they be opening for us?"

"No, brother. The Chipmunks will perform first each night."

"Really? Why?"

"Because we are being added to their tour, which has already been booked. In fact, we will be taking the place of another group that had to bow out. And the band is unsure what sort of crowd, if any, the Chipmunks might draw." Simon lowered his voice. "But it is still a tour, brother." He was right, of course, and I thanked him over and over for helping put this together.

The three of us immediately started planning. Alvin had to get time off from the terminal - "they weren't very happy about that" - and I had to try to arrange my HalFlat jobs so I'd be free for those two weeks. Simon was still on his summer break, but he still had to rearrange his research schedule.

The logistics weren't too difficult to work out. D.A. kindly offered to make room in their van for us, but we decided it'd be better if we took my truck. We fitted the back with a lockable canopy so we could store our instruments in the back, and in the first week of August, we all piled in and set out on our very first long trip together.

Our first gig was at a club in Rochester. We set up our riser and our instruments, then sat in the rather cramped green room with D.A., nervously biding our time while the crowd started filing in. Then, just before nine o'clock, we got up and accepted some "good lucks" from the guys in D.A. I high-fived Alvin and Simon, then we slowly marched out onto the stage. The crowd got quieter, but I could hear a lot of murmuring. We made our way up onto the riser, and took our places at our instruments. Then, Simon reached over and turned on the reel-to-reel tape machine that we had borrowed from Spencer.

The opening strains of "Christmas Don't Be Late" filled the club. The crowd laughed as the voice of David Seville asked us if we were ready to sing our song. Simon and I lip-synched our "OKs", but Alvin yelled his, then launched straight into the harmonica opening of "Good Girls Don't".

This introduction was Simon's idea. "I desired to inform the audience that yes, we were in fact The Chipmunks from decades past. But once that was accomplished, we could then reveal ourselves as a pop-rock band."

"I wasn't a big fan of the intro at first," admits Alvin. "Personal baggage. The last time I was on stage with 'The Chipmunk Song' playing was in Billings about half a year previous, and that didn't go so hot, did it?" Alvin grins. "This one worked out quite a bit better, though."

The set list was a condensed version of the sets we played in New York. "Good Girls Don't", "How Do I Make You", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", "I Want You to Want Me", "My Sharona", "You May Be Right". And shoved right in the middle of the set was the first song we had written together in over fifteen years - "Survival".

"I had been contemplating that word since you first suggested it as a title for the album," says Simon. "I began free-associating some pop lyrics, and you and Alvin helped create the music to accompany them."

"It was an 'original'...lyrically, anyway," says Alvin. "Musically, we did an awful lot of borrowing. The basic form is a lot like 'Frustrated', and the guitar solo was just a crunchier version of the one I used to play in 'Spanish Omelets for Breakfast'. But Simon's lyrics were pretty good. 'Just trying to make it to tomorrow, that's all I'm doing today'. We should've recorded it. It might have ended up in a lousy 80s action film."

If there was no third band on the bill, we would get a longer set time, so we'd add in some of our older material. "I'd tell the crowd about the Little Rocks," explains Alvin, "then we'd do a couple of instrumentals - 'Wipe Out' was always the last. Then I'd talk about the Beatles album we did, and we'd do 'Can't Buy Me Love' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'. That would be enough to fill out the set."

The gigs were definitely different from our ones at Riley's. We had to prove ourselves to a new crowd every single night, to an audience who was presumably not there to see us. And it was a bit more of an uphill battle than I was expecting. After all, most humans saw us either as a children's group or a novelty act, or maybe both. Even Chipmunk Punk was viewed more like "isn't this funny? Chipmunks playing pop-rock?" So we had to go out there to make a case for us being a legitimate music group.

"Some nights we were just on," insists Alvin. "From the first harmonica notes on 'Good Girls Don't', the crowd was loud and supportive. In Cincinnati, we left the stage to some people chanting 'chip-munks, chip-munks'. But then there was Pittsburgh. That one was a bear."

Simon elaborates. "When the opening strains of 'Christmas Don't Be Late' would play at the start of our sets, this would routinely engender a reaction from the audience. Laughter or cheering, or, most commonly, a combination of the two. But when we performed in Pittsburgh, it was met with complete silence. It was clear that this audience would not be easily won over."

"When the audience doesn't react, you start second-guessing yourself," continues Alvin. "I started babbling a bit on the mic between songs, which didn't really help matters any. We just needed to keep serving up the rock. And they'd either get it or not."

Actually, one of the things Alvin said that night did help thaw the audience a bit. Alvin looked out at the crowd and said, "Our latest album is called Chipmunk Punk. And we'd like to apologize for that. It's not punk. At all." He paused a second, then added, "That'd be more like this." He began shredding his guitar and yelling, "London calling, at the top of the dial..."

"That Clash song was really the only punk song I knew," admits Alvin. "And I only knew it because it's the flip side to 'Train in Vain', which you owned. But a few people laughed, and a few cheered. So it was a small step towards winning them over."

We finished that set, to some rather modest applause. I began breaking down my drum set, feeling that we had failed somehow. But soon, D.A. was on stage giving it their all, and getting the same muted reaction from the crowd. And this was the band that these people had ostensibly paid to see. It was a bit bewildering to me. And I'll admit - I let this one gig color my perceptions far too much. (For a short time, I even decided that my least-favorite baseball team was now the Pirates instead of the Cubs. Very mature, Theodore.) But Simon finally set me straight. "Crowds are deceptively complex. The difference between a raucous audience and a subdued one is actually very slim. To some degree, everybody in that audience is attempting to fit in. If someone only hears polite applause, they will think, 'oh, we are being restrained tonight' and also only give polite applause. But if they hear loud cheering and yelling, they will feel free - if not quite obligated - to join in. There is a very good chance that, had we come back on tour a year later, the Pittsburgh crowd would have been raucous. And perhaps the one in Cincinnati would have been reserved."

Alvin has a high opinion of the tour overall. "Definitely. I think the applause increased as we made our way through the set, every single show. Even in Pittsburgh, the crowd went from barely responding at all to some healthy applause at the end."

Simon is a bit more reserved. "We did not have a truly disappointing gig throughout the tour, which is something in which I still take some pride. I believe that we convinced most of the attendees that we were an adequate, and perhaps even good, pop-rock band. But I am less certain that we truly gained many fans. Did any of them seek out our albums the next day? Had we returned to their town playing our own show, would they have come? I am less convinced of that." Simon shrugs and adds, "But then again, we were opening for a band with a somewhat different sound. Our job, such as it was, was to entertain their crowd for thirty or forty minutes. And that goal was certainly accomplished.."

"One thing that surprised me," adds Alvin. "Almost no rodents in the crowd. I wasn't expecting a roomful of squirrels at every show or anything. But I was expecting at least some in each city. And we saw, what? Four squirrels and two chipmunks, maybe? But I guess it stands to reason. Most rodents in America live in New York and LA, with hardly anywhere elsewhere in the US. And rodents aren't usually much for going to concerts in clubs. If you don't get up front, your view tends to be nothing but the butt of whoever is standing in front of you. And it's not like we were advertising to the world that the Chipmunks were coming to town. We were just opening for this band.

"But you better believe I went out to meet the rodents that did show up. And I'll always remember what one of those chipmunks in Philadelphia told me. He grabbed my paw, shook it, and said 'All my life, I hoped you were real.' That's some pretty heavy stuff if you think about it. For us, not getting to portray ourselves on TV and record was just annoying. But apparently, there were rodents out there who actually found somebody to identify with in The Chipmunks. Even as paper-thin as they were. It was us or Secret Squirrel, I guess. But think of how much better they could have identified with the actual Chipmunks."

This being our only tour, I don't really have anything to compare it to. I'm guessing as tours go, it was rather smooth sailing. We slept in the truck a few times, but when you're chipmunks, even three to a front seat isn't all that crowded. Other times, if they had one, D.A. let us sleep on their hotel room floor. We'd just find a spot in the corner, take the extra blanket that came with the room, cover us three with it, and shove a rolled-up pair of our jeans under our heads for a pillow. That worked fine, although their drummer snored pretty loud.

If I have a complaint, it's that neither of my brothers could drive at that time. That meant I was stuck behind the wheel for the entire tour. But compared to what other touring bands have to deal with, I'm sure that was really small potatoes.

"It was an unexpected bohemian existence, however temporary," Simon recalls. "You must recall that we were in our late thirties the time - a decade or two after most musicians have faced such travails. Not that it was not enjoyable, after a fashion. But I was quite pleased to return to my home, and resume my professorship at Columbia."

A month or two after the tour ended, I was sprawled out on my couch. Alvin was out picking up lunch, and I was taking a break from building some shelving to work on a song. A couple of days previous, I had been reminded of my unfinished song from two decades previous - "There's No Rock and Roll on Mars". And while humming it to myself, I realized that this might be a good song for the new revitalized Chipmunks to record. It probably wouldn't be a single or anything, but it might make a good album track. So I began scribbling down lyrics and chord progressions. I had the first two verses looking almost acceptable when the phone rang.

"HalFlat - in no time flat. This is TD - how can I help you?"

"Good afternoon, Theodore," said Simon in a sort of mock polite tone. "It is Simon."

"What's going on, brother?"

"Well..." Simon sounded a bit uncertain. "I have a visitor in from out of town. Ross Bagdasarian, Jr."

"Ross is in town? Great!"

"Yes. In fact, Ross and I would like to extend an invitation to dinner at my loft tonight, if you are available." He added, a bit hopefully, "I will be preparing spaghetti and meatballs, which I believe is one of your favorite entrées."

It was, but why was he sounding so odd? "Uh, sure. But Alvin is working at the terminal tonight."

"That may be for the best. We would like to talk with you alone, if at all possible."

"What about?"

"I shall elucidate upon your arrival. Seven o'clock, if that time is convenient?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I have a piece I need to try and finish, but I can just subway over there afterwards."

"Excellent. We look forward to seeing you."

For the rest of the day, as I tried to get the shelving done, I kept wondering what it was that Simon wanted to discuss with me. It couldn't be anything bad, really. Simon was more the type to just announce any bad news right off the bat. I decided that he was just uncertain about something, and wanted my opinion on it.

I showed up at Simon's apartment just after seven. I shook Ross's hand - one of the very few humans I felt comfortable doing that with - and accepted a short glass of beer from Simon. I climbed onto his easy chair, then looked up at them and grinned. "So - what's the story?"

Simon glanced over at Ross. "Ross and I have been looking over the figures," he began. "The income from the last album will be...well, significantly more than we originally had planned."

My grin grew larger. "That's great!"

"Indeed," said Simon, although he didn't sound that enthusiastic. "And not surprisingly, since our arrangement with Excelsior was for one album only, other labels are now expressing interest. While we were touring, I enlisted Ross to speak to those labels on our behalf."

I now glanced over at Ross, a bit confused. "You never mentioned this before. How come?"

Simon looked a bit embarrassed. "To be truthful, I was simply not prepared for this particular turn of events. As Ross is based in Los Angeles, I believed he could simply gauge interest from several labels. I wished to see if any wished to release another album by The Chipmunks, under conditions that we would insist upon."

Ross sat down on the couch across from me, and added, "After all, I didn't do much to earn that money from Chipmunk Punk."

Simon shook his head. "Your input was significant. More than most people realize."

I waved my paw around impatiently. "OK, so Ross talked to some labels. And?"

Simon and Ross shared a questioning look, then nodded. Simon sat down on the sofa next to Ross, rather heavily. "I will endeavor to come to the point. We have received an offer."

"From who?" I asked.

Ross answered. "RCA."

RCA. The Nutty Squirrels had done "Hello Again" for them almost twenty years ago, but that had been a small deal that had came and went almost immediately. And I had plenty of black-labeled (and orange-labeled) 45s and LPs on RCA in my collection, most notably by Elvis Presley. In 1980, they were still a force to be reckoned with - Hall & Oates, David Bowie and Dolly Parton were all on the label at the time.

"OK," I said. "RCA is cool. So, what's the story? Crappy offer?"

"No," said Simon. He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. "Indeed, quite the opposite."

"What do you mean?"

Ross leaned forward. "Theodore," he said, "RCA made an offer better than I would've ever thought possible. They agreed to nearly everything Simon has tried to get for you guys - merchandising rights, your opt-out clause, you name it. And they want to sign you guys for the long haul. A multi-year, multi-album deal."

A huge deal. A huge contract. At a huge label. And yet they were sitting there looking like they were afraid to tell me my goldfish died. "OK. And the bad news?"

Simon looked at me, then looked down. "They want full control."

"Full control? What does that mean, exactly?"

Sighing, Simon admitted, "They wish to select the concepts for the albums, approve if not outright select the songs to be performed, direct the promotion..."

I smirked. "Forget it."

Simon looked at me with a pained expression, and Ross said, "Theodore, the terms here are incredibly good."

"So what? We've been through this before with Liberty, and it stunk. We're not in it for the money." I looked over at Simon for confirmation, but the look on his face caused me to stop short. "...Simon?"

Simon sat still for a second, staring at me through his glasses in that way of his. Finally, he said, "Theodore, what was the impetus for the Chipmunks reunion?"

"Alvin," I said, without really thinking, then stopped short again. Alvin. He was the reason the three of us got back together. Because he was broke. And in fact, hadn't I originally suggested doing the Knack covers specifically because I thought it might draw better than Cemented had? In other words, because it would "sell"? Simon was right. The reunion had been a money-making enterprise from the very start.

I sighed. "OK, fair enough. But do we have to go that route? Can't we continue on like we have been?"

Simon looked doubtful. "We could. But do not forget that Alvin is still deeply in debt. The metaphorical wolves may no longer be directly outside his door, but they are far from gone. As things currently stand, it would take years for him to emerge from his deficit. This deal would greatly hasten that process. Most likely to the point where he would no longer need work at the subway terminal."

I thought for a second. "What does RCA want us to do specifically? I'm assuming they don't want us doing any more Knack covers "

Simon smirked a bit at that. "Almost assuredly not."

"Well, then - what? Do they have songs they do want us to do?"

Simon thought for a second before answering. "Do you recall my explanation from years ago, brother? About what Liberty Records truly cared about?"

"Yeah. The red, blue and green blobs on the cover of the records."

"Precisely so. And so it is with RCA. They desire Chipmunks product which they can sell to the world at large. At this point in time, they appear satisfied with us doing renditions of current hits, although that may change. We will be at liberty to suggest potential songs to record, but the final decision will be theirs. And as Ross pointed out, the opt-out clause will remain in effect. If we choose not to participate, they will find others to perform it for us, and we will receive a smaller share of the profits."

A cover band, but not getting to choose the material. Better than "Alvin for President", I guess, but I wasn't too keen on what sort of songs RCA might think were Chipmunk-appropriate. "Can we still tour?"

Simon looked over at Ross, who said, "Well, uh, they have plans to revive the cartoon, so..."

"...so they want the real Chipmunks out of the spotlight so they can sell the three colored blobs."

"Well, more or less..."

"So now that we're finally firing on all cylinders again, they want us to stop. That's such bullshit." I turned back to Simon. "Come on, brother! You really want to give up everything we've been building over the last year for a fat paycheck?"

"Yes."

I stared at my brother almost without comprehension. "What?"

"Brother..." Simon began, trying to find the right words. "The last several months have not been unpleasant. I have enjoyed recording, performing and even touring with my two brothers. But..."

Slowly, the light dawned. "...this isn't what you really want to do...is it?"

Simon gave me the crookedest smile I've ever seen. "I was pleased to help Alvin when he was in need of assistance. And I have been very pleased to witness you be as happy as you have been this past year or so. But..." Simon shook his head. "No. The life of a full-time recording and touring popular musician no longer holds any interest to me."

"So what do you want?"

"What I desire most is a return to my studies, and an expansion of my research. I wish to travel to the Middle and Far East to continue my studies of ancient music and its preservation. But the salary of a music history professor does not exactly lend itself to all that much travel..."

Another piece fell into place. "...and this contract would help you do more of that." Simon nodded a bit. I stared at him, then got up out of the chair. I wandered over to the window and peered out at the night, trying to collect my thoughts. So Simon doesn't want to be a rock musician anymore. And what about Alvin? Alvin liked playing live, no question. But I honestly don't think he cared that much what he was performing. Even when Simon and I dropped out of recording in the sixties, Alvin was there until the bitter end. I think he'd happily sing anything RCA told him to, especially if it meant no longer scrubbing subway cars for a living. It seemed as if I was the only one of us who was really into this Chipmunks-as-actual-power-pop-band thing. The other two were more or less just tagging along for the ride.

I looked back at Ross. "Well, then, what happens to me?"

"Totally up to you," said Ross, suddenly animated. "If you perform on the records, you get a bigger cut. If you do the voice for the cartoon, again, bigger cut. But you get a share of it regardless. Same sort of deal as last time."

"Can I still perform live? With another band?"

"As long as you don't tie it back to the Chipmunks brand, you're free to do what you'd like," said Ross.

"Can I still perform with my brother?" I said, staring at Simon.

Simon looked back at me. "As Cemented?" he asked, and I nodded. Simon thought for a minute, then nodded once. "Yes. In between my travels. I would enjoy that."

I looked back out the window. My stomach was in knots. An hour ago, I thought I was in a great pop-rock group with a great future ahead. But now I was being asked to blow all that to bits, in exchange for the possibility of a big payday. Or, to look at it another way, I was being asked to ditch my dreams so that my two brothers could chase theirs. But after all the stuff that Simon had done for me over the years...didn't I owe him this?

Suddenly, I felt very very old.

I kept looking out the window. "Simon?"

"Yes, Theodore."

"Do you trust Mr. Bagdasarian?"

There was a pause, but Simon answered. "Yes, Theodore, I do."

That was good enough for me. I sighed, left the window, and walked over to Ross. He stood up, a bit uncertain what I had in mind. "Mr. Bagdasarian?" I said.

"Uh, yes?"

"You get every goddamn penny you can from those bastards." I held out my paw, and he shook it.

"Definitely."

Simon got up and put his hand on my shoulder. "Thank you, Theodore. Sincerely. Thank you." I nodded glumly. "Come - let us get you some spaghetti."

I shook my head. "I'm...really not hungry."

Simon looked even more pained than he did earlier. I don't think he had ever heard me say those words before. "...oh."

"I think I'd like to be alone, if that's OK."

"Oh. Yes, of course."

I left without another word. I didn't bother trying to organize my thoughts on the subway ride home, but just let them come and go. So many things I hoped to see one day. My photograph on a record sleeve. Touring the whole country. Live TV appearances. All those dreams were now officially back to being nothing but that - dreams.

I got to my apartment, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and then collapsed on the couch. After taking a sip, I almost set to the beer down on a piece of paper. I looked closer to see what it was - my lyrics to "There's No Rock and Roll on Mars". I sighed heavily, and then crumpled the paper up into a ball.