The greatest power pop band you've never heard of...

Cover of Off Broadway's "On" AlbumThe year is 1980, and if you're in high school in Chicagoland, chances are you owned Off Broadway's debut album, "On". Or you knew somebody who did.

You knew every song on the album. You sang along to every song on the album.

The album art of the shattering light bulb is an indelible image in your mind.

But if you lived outside Chicagoland, chances are you never heard of Off Broadway.

In 1981, I started college at St. Louis University. I brought along my cassette tape of Off Broadway's "On". When I first played it for my roommate, who was from Louisville, Kentucky, I was stunned that he'd never even heard of songs like "Stay in Time" or "Full Moon Turn Your Head Around." I thought perhaps he was an aberration. He was, after all, a guy whose music collection consisted of nothing but Neil Diamond 8-tracks. But he wasn't. I was the only one on my floor at Griesedieck Hall who'd ever even heard of Off Broadway.

On Friday, two days before Christmas, I took a nostalgic trip back in time. Twenty-five years back. A quarter of a century.

About half past eleven, Off Broadway took the stage at a packed, smoky Fitzgerald's in rugged Berwyn, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago. All of the original members were intact: Cliff Johnson, Rob Harding, Ken Harck, Mike Gorman and Mike Redmond.

I'm not sure what brought me there that night.

There was, I suppose, a curiosity factor. What had happened to this band that had left such an impressionable mark on me way back when? Why hadn't they become the huge success that all of us who had heard them thought for sure they would eventually become? I didn't find the answer to that. They didn't dwell on the past.

Clues to what happened can be found on the Off Broadway website, however. "On", the critically acclaimed debut album sold nearly 300,000 copies in hometown Chicago alone; however in other parts of the world, marketing efforts were, to put it kindly, less aggressive," reads the band's web site.

I also wanted to hear how the band sounded today. Would they still be able to crank out the power pop the way they did twenty-five years ago? The answer to that one is a decisive yes. Cliff Johnson's voice remains in fine form. And the rest of his band mates can still rock.

Not long after the band took the stage, a bar fight broke out in the audience. Atmosphere, they call it in Berwyn.

Perhaps what I most wanted out of the night was a little bit of that time back. I wanted to feel like that high school senior from Chicago's south suburbs all over again, if only for an hour or two. But I can't say that I found that skinny, mop top kid that I used to be. I still like that kid, but he's not me anymore. 

I guess what I found is that you can't go back in time.

But, man, "Stay in Time", it sounds just as good today as it did back in 1980.

On the 45-minute drive back home, I listened once more. I pushed in my Off Broadway CD, cranked the volume and sang along with each and every song. All over again.

Maybe there is just a little bit of that high school kid still in me after all.