'We are always doing things when it's the wrong time to do them,' says Supersuckers frontman Eddie Spaghetti (with guitar).

When a group of long-time buddies forms a band just so they have an excuse to hang out together -- and then find their band name in a porn magazine -- the expectations for a successful career are limited at best. But in the case of the Supersuckers, doing just about everything the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons, has turned out just right.

Rising out of the dust in Tucson, Ariz., these lifelong friends became the Supersuckers in 1988 and began playing around their hometown. But a year later they realized the band actually had some potential and flipped a coin to see whether they would try their musical luck in Seattle or in New Orleans.

Unaware of the impending grunge explosion, the Supersuckers moved to Seattle and began making punk rock records.

"We are always doing things when it's the wrong time to do them," lead singer Eddie Spaghetti cheerfully explained in a phone interview from his home in San Diego. "In 1997 we decided to put out some country music, and [at the time] nobody else was listening to it. Then like a year later, it was the big thing. We never intended to be part of a trend."

By bucking trends and following their own, often haphazard, plan, the Supersuckers have become an unlikely success story. In their new hometown, the Supersuckers' raucous live shows became legendary, and by 1992 had caught the attention of Sub-Pop Records, which launched their recording career. A variety of releases followed, including three rock albums, a country album, and shared singles with Steve Earle and The Rev. Horton Heat.

"We're a marketing guy's nightmare," Spaghetti admitted. "You could call it the Supersuckers' Legacy of Confusion. It's impossible to describe the band without being around it."

He compared it to watching The Sopranos: Until you see it for yourself, you're really not going to understand what all the fuss is about.

Much of what it is about is a nonstop, in-your-face musical invasion that changes with each tour. The range of bands the Supersuckers have toured with is testament enough to their versatility -- or schizophrenia, depending on how you look at it. Sharing a stage with Mudhoney, Social Distortion, The Rev. Horton Heat, The Ramones, Butthole Surfers, and The Toadies seems a distinct contrast to their performances at Farm Aid or backing Willie Nelson on The Tonight Show.

"It's a lot like Sally Field in Sybil, I guess," said Spaghetti. "I think of our rock music as the urban or city music, and the country shows are more like desert music. But I like the country stuff. It lays the groundwork for us having a career vs. just having a job. There's a definite expiration date on playing rock 'n' roll, but those country guys can go on forever."

And so, it seems, could the Supersuckers. Last year the band launched its own label, Mid-Fi Recordings, and lest you think that's something that falls in between lo-fi and hi-fi, make no mistake: It's short for "middle finger."

"It's a lot of work, and honestly, we didn't get into the music business to work," Spaghetti pointed out. "But we've craftily avoided real jobs for over a decade now and figured it was time. We've always been fiercely independent, and now we are truly an independent band."

That gives the Supersuckers more creative control along with the extra workload, which is what spawned the band's new album, Must've Been Live, a little number that was released March 12. The sweaty, gloriously cacophonous disc was recorded in Dallas, Austin, and San Diego last year; the bulk of it, Spaghetti said, came from a show at Trees. Like so many of their successes, this disc was born by accident.

"We were recording our country shows, just because we thought we'd never do it again," he said, explaining that,"Our rock shows are better and get more people."

However, the more they handed out what they thought was nothing more than a crowd trinket, the more buzz they heard about it.

"Over time, we let people listen to it, and they came to see this as our next album. The more people we played it for, the more we realized we could sell this."

The 19-track disc became Mid-Fi Recordings' debut, and is sending the boys back on the road with their country show once again. It features several songs off their first country album, Must've Been High, in addition to some new songs and covers. Willie's daughter, Amy Nelson, and his harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, make guest appearances on the disc, and Spaghetti lives up to his role as an irrepressible and unrelenting entertainer. Added to the sparks from Spaghetti's live-wire performance, the guitars of Ron Heathman and Dan "Thunder" Bolton, layered over the beat of Dancing Eagle on drums and cymbals, deliver a happily discordant wall of sound that feels more like a punk brawl than a country barroom.

"We play some country versions of our rock songs, but it's pretty much a different show," Spaghetti noted. "There won't be any dancing girls this time."

The Supersuckers will tour for a couple of months in support of the new live disc, then will put that show away for "at least a good five years" while they turn their attention back to their rock roots.

At the moment, the band is living in different regions -- Bolton and Spaghetti are calling California home, while Dancing Eagle lives in Austin, and Heathman is in Seattle. But they're all heading to Seattle again to live, work, and play together.

"It's great to be standing up on stage, in Sweden or Spain or Japan or, hell, at Trees, and look across the stage at your old buddy from grade school," Spaghetti said. "At this point, we're more like brothers than friends. We fight, we get pissed off, but at the end of the day, we're all still brothers. You might get mad, but you still love each other. That's a pretty cool thing."