When the second installment of Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise set sail from Miami earlier this month for a quick and noisy jaunt to Cozumel, Mexico, and back, one of the featured bands should have been more than a little rusty. The Mooney Suzuki hadn’t played a live gig in two years. Since 2019, they’d only been onstage a half-dozen times.
But then the Mooney plugged in and, over the course of a sweaty, curfew-be-damned show in the ship’s atrium, proved that more than a little time off can’t dampen their chaotic brand of rock & roll.
“We always try to put on the show that we want to see,” singer-guitarist Sammy James Jr. says the next day during a sit-down on the ship that requires him to practically shout over garage-rock pioneers the Sonics, who are sound-checking nearby. “We were working for it last night and we’ve seen the various levels of ecstasy you can bring an audience to. It’s like, can we get the maximum level?”
At the turn of the century, the New York City-based quartet often hit that peak, making a name in their hometown and in Europe for their explosive live shows. The performances had the energy and verve of a Pentecostal revival, with James playing the role of charismatic preacher. The constant push-and-pull between the band and audience was electric, and it inspired their peers to raise the bar at their own shows.
But while the Strokes, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs parlayed their New York hero status into career artists, the Mooney Suzuki, whose 1999 EP was heralded as a watershed moment for the scene, had the unfortunate fate of missing out on the boom. As Pitchfork put it in their 2006 review of the group’s Maximum Black EP, the band had the “dubious distinction of arriving both too soon and too late for the turn-of-century garage rock windfall that should’ve guaranteed they’d never have to shop at a thrift store again.”
Less than 24 hours after their first performance on the Underground Garage boat, James and drummer Will Rockwell-Scott are conducting a postmortem of the previous night’s gig, which opened with the rowdy “Singin’ a Song About Today.” Clad in all black, James and the band cracked wise onstage with a brash, swashbuckling attitude, led constant clap-alongs, and took multiple sojourns into the crowd — and that was just during the first song. By the time they closed with “Yeah You Can,” James was telling the cruisers how they’re about to go “down down down,” before adding a disclaimer: “Not like the Titanic.”
It was a show that evoked the same energy that made the Mooney a favorite of the Meet Me in the Bathroom era, but now delivered with some new personnel — touring guitarist Chris Isom and bassist Michael Bangs — to a ship full of SiriusXM listeners and garage-rock lifers. That’s just fine for James.
“We could not have had more of a blast on the cruise and would certainly be delighted if a return invitation came our way,” he says, sipping seltzer and fielding questions about the band’s past and where exactly the Mooney Suzuki fit in 2026. “Of course, feelings about ‘how things turned out with the band’ are going to be mixed. I could say it’s a bummer we never got to be on Top of the Pops, for example. But the fact that there are people who still come out when we perform — how can you not feel great about that?”
The Mooney Suzuki are betting those same fans will also show up for the group’s latest studio project: the re-release of their 2000 debut People Get Ready, which is being reissued by Yep Roc on April 18 for Record Store Day. The album, originally released through Estrus Records and produced by Tim Kerr, is a snapshot of a time when a young, upstart band with ass-kicking ambitions and a garage-rock sound, unimpeded by technology, could channel the spirit of the Stooges, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and MC5, and try to conquer the world.
“We put so much work into the first album,” Rockwell-Scott says. “If you’re lucky enough to get a good response, people want a follow-up.”
In addition to remastering the LP, the Record Store Day collection features a live set from 1999, which James says acutely captures the band’s onstage prowess. The original People Get Ready is also only 35 minutes, a reminder that, in the era of mega-tracked albums meant to boost streams, brevity can be even more powerful.
“I’d just hope for it to have some kind of legacy,” James says of the reissue. “Our initials clawed somewhere into the trunk of the rock & roll tree.”
On the way to leaving that mark, however, the Mooney Suzuki got burned out. When they wrapped their 2007 European tour, they made the group decision to go on indefinite hiatus. Unlike other bands who have used a hiatus as an excuse to hide acrimony, James says the members went their separate ways with zero animosity. After years of hauling ass on the road, touring with the Strokes, the Donnas, the Hives, and even the final traveling edition of Lollapalooza, they needed a break. There was also an ill-fated major-label deal with Columbia Records to process.
“It was a legit hiatus, not like one of these ‘we’re breaking up’ hiatus,” James says.
Original guitarist Graham Tyler got a job, Rockwell-Scott ended up moving to L.A., and James started exploring other projects. “It wasn’t a priority,” Rockwell-Scott says of the Mooney Suzuki, “and the right offer had to come along for us.”
But the unbridled spirit of the Mooney Suzuki couldn’t lie dormant forever. In 2019, James announced a reunion gig celebrating the 25th anniversary of New York club Mercury Lounge. It sold out instantly. “I was motivated to do a show so that I could physically reconnect with a huge group of my network of people,” James says. “That seemed like the best way to do it.”
Since the Mercury Lounge comeback, the Mooney Suzuki have played here and there, but never launched a full-scale tour. The response on the Underground Garage cruise, one of live-music company Sixthman’s newest cruises, just may lead them to change that. By the time they hit the stage for their second performance, on the cruise’s final night, Mooney Suzuki shirts were ubiquitous on fans and even fellow artists: Supersuckers singer Eddie Spaghetti sported one proudly, and members of the Buzzcocks and Social Distortion crowded near the stage to catch what may be the rebirth of the garage-rock revival’s great lost group.
“The band’s recent activity has been mainly in response to exciting invitations,” James says, looking ahead. “What’s next is anyone’s guess.”
