Second chance

Varsity Drag reawakens the rock within former Lemonhead

PROFILE. History has treated Ben Deily like a Boston version of Pete Best, the original Beatles drummer who Ringo replaced right before the band redefined popular music — until now.

Deily co-founded the Lemonheads with Evan Dando when the two were in high school. They wrote and recorded three punk classics that hinted at the pop craftsmanship that Dando would later exhibit with great success a few short years later. Deily quit to attend Harvard, and the Lemonheads went on to help govern the alternative nation of the 1990s.

But because Deily left music, and kept quiet about his experiences, fans guessed he was sacked from the group. On his Web site, he explains the situation as thus:

“What is there to say that hasn’t already been said completely inaccurately, translated into 25 langu-ages and splashed across a thousand uncorrectable Web pages?”

What really drove Deily to leave was something he refers to in conversation as “the grown up complex,” and it is the eroding of this state of mind that has given him the urge to start Varsity Drag, his first band after more than 15 years in the white collar world.

“By the time ... that you probably are too old to be playing music, you all of a sudden discover that you appreciate certain things about it that you used to fail to see,” he muses.

Deily put the Drag together in 2006, when he was living in San Francisco, and recorded “For Crying Out Loud,” an album of speedy pop-punk that picks up where his last contributions to the Lemonheads left off. The album did well over-seas, and his label, Boss Tuneage, set up a tour, for which Deily used all of his vacation in one fell swoop.

“The drag about that is I was like, ‘Holy crap! It’s only February, what am I gonna do for the rest of the year?’”

But there was an upside.

“When we first went to Europe, people said things like, ‘I’ve been waiting to hear those songs since 1989.’”

A job change has brought him back to Boston to stay, and his wife, Lisa has joined the Varsity team on bass.

He says quitting his day job in the advertising industry isn’t in his near future.

“The tour was a great experience in that after five weeks I was so ready to just get back home,” he laughs.

Varsity Drag
Saturday, 9 p.m.
The Cantab Lounge
738 Mass. Ave., Cambridge
MBTA: Red Line to Central
$8, 21+,617-354-2685
www.cantab-lounge.com