Offers still come in to reform for shows. Their CDs rarely turn up in secondhand stores, which is always an indicator of a band's continued popularity because it means people don't want to part with the albums.

And the band members still have people asking them about the 'Weed.

``Last time I was in Melbourne,'' says the band's original drummer Steve O'Brien, ``I don't know how he recognised me because I don't look like what I did 15 years ago, but, pissed two o'clock in the morning, this dude walks past me and then walks back and asks, `aren't you the drummer out of Tumbleweed?'. I couldn't get rid of him for the next half-hour.''

The other founding members - singer Richie Lewis and guitarists Lenny Curley and Paul Hausmeister (bassist Jay Curley was uncontactable) - all have similar stories.

Hausmeister says he feels a ``little bit embarrassed'' when people go on about the band, while Lenny Curley says he's moved on. ``When I'm playing in my new band people will come up and want to talk to me about Tumbleweed,'' Curley says.

``I'm like, `can you please just get over it? I'm over it, can you please get over it?'`

`I feel as though I've moved on whereas a lot of people haven't. I don't want to go back and talk about it with people all the time.''

Tumbleweed grew out of late-1980s band The Proton Energy Pills. After releasing a few singles and an EP, the Curley brothers and Lewis (who was then on drums) changed the name to Tumbleweed, and asked Hausmeister, who was in Wollongong band The Unheard, to join. When Lewis decided to switch from drums to vocals, Hausmeister drafted in his Unheard band-mate and drummer Steve O'Brien.

At the time, there was never any thought the band could become huge. This was 1990, a few years before Nirvana would come along and completely change the musical landscape.

``Back in those days there was no chance a loud band with distortion pedals was going to make it,'' Lewis says. ``That crossover hadn't happened.

``So you were used to playing The Lansdowne, The Annandale and going down to Melbourne. There was this nice close-knit subculture of rock and roll fans in those days. It had nothing to do with making it.''

When Nirvana broke through with their album Nevermind in 1992 suddenly there was a market for the type of music Tumbleweed was playing.

``If Nirvana hadn't existed I don't think Tumbleweed would have ever been as huge as we were,'' Curley says.

``That whole resurgence of grunge and punk created a situation in Australia where people said `okay we need a band with long hair, gym boots and flannelette shirts' and we fit the bill. We were in the right time and the right place.''

In fact, Tumbleweed saw the change first-hand, supporting Nirvana on their only Australian tour in 1992. As the tour progressed, Nirvana got bigger and bigger and the venues went from seating a few hundred to a few thousand.

``I was only 20 when that happened, I'd only been out of school for two years,'' Curley says.

``Thinking back on it, it was a fantastic experience. I remember those Nirvana gigs, thinking there was something in the air. This band were probably one of the sloppiest I'd ever seen but they were fantastic.''

Things were pretty good for Tumbleweed as well. They'd just released their first self-titled album and switched from the indie label Waterfront to Polydor in Australia.

Most impressively, US giant Atlantic Records signed them to a deal to release their albums all over the world after a label rep walked into a record store and heard a Tumbleweed single playing.

Hausmeister says that news was like ``all our Christmases had come at once''. And he's not alone.

``I thought I was going to be a millionaire,'' Curley says. ``I actually believed that. At that moment I thought we were going to be right because we'd just signed to Atlantic.''

But things didn't quite turn out that way - after releasing a collection of their earlier material as Weedseed in the US, Atlantic didn't like the Tumbleweed album or its 1995 follow-up Galactaphonic and refused to release either in the States.

With the benefit of hindsight, Hausmeister says Atlantic were looking to jump on the grunge bandwagon by signing a band for relatively little money in the hope they'd become big.

``We would have been one out of 20 bands they signed with the same objective,'' Hausmeister says.

``And one of those 20 was a band called Stone Temple Pilots. All (the label) needed was one of those bands to start charting well and the others mean nothing.''

He adds that the band didn't help matters by adopting a somewhat less than ideal attitude when playing in the US.

``We also didn't play well when we toured the States,'' he says.

``It was all an experience and we `overindulged'. There's a level of professionalism when you get to that level, and we didn't quite have it.''

Problems started to surface back home as well. The band had earlier sacked their management, despite Curley admitting ``they were a big part of why we became popular initially''.

And cracks started to open up within the band, with the three younger members (the Curley brothers and Lewis) on one side and the older Hausmeister and O'Brien on the other.

After the release of the band's second album, Galactaphonic and subsequent tour, push came to shove and the younger trio agreed to shove out Hausmeister.

O'Brien says the reason was because Hausmeister wouldn't give up his day job in the engineering records department at BHP (up until that point, Hausmeister had been taking holidays and leave without pay to tour with the band). But Hausmeister himself isn't so sure.

``Nobody has ever actually told me what the real reason is,'' he says.

``I had no idea it was coming. When it happened we'd just finished a tour, we'd just played Perth on a Sunday and I'd flown back for work for Monday. It was either the Monday evening or the Tuesday, I get a call from Lenny `dude, sorry man, you're out of the band'.

``So I never had an exact reason as to why. Quite a while afterwards I heard that was it, I wasn't quitting work.'

'It came as a shock to O'Brien as well, who left the band a short while later, angry at the way his friend had been treated and figuring the same thing could happen to him. (O'Brien and Hausmeister then joined up to form a band called Zero ``cause it's a weed killer,'' O'Brien explains.)

Despite regretting the sense of lost opportunity after being sacked, Hausmeister harbours no ill will.

``Once me and Steve left the band they had a pretty rapid decline and that was kind of satisfying and that was enough for me,'' Hausmeister says.

Both Curley and Lewis now think this could have been handled better. Now older, Curley can totally understand why Hausmeister would want to keep his job and not want to ``commit to something that was under the sway of these younger, rebellious pot-smoking unrealistic people''.

He also thinks the pair leaving the band was the beginning of the end for Tumbleweed.

``The departure of Steve and Paul had a lot to do with the demise of Tumbleweed,'' he says.

``Certain combinations of people create better bands than others. There are just something that happens between four or five guys and you can't just get someone else in to be that other person.

``I think Tumbleweed had that thing with those five guys - we had a chemistry. I realised that chemistry was gone as soon as we started playing live without them. But I had to stick with whatever decision had been made. I had to try and create that chemistry again.

"For the rest of Tumbleweed we were trying to recreate that chemistry that we had originally.''

The band trundled along, releasing Return to Earth in 1996 and asking bassist Jay Curley to leave the band before recording what would be the band's last album, Mumbo Jumbo in 2000.

``It became a real test of endurance towards the end,'' Lewis says.

``The good days were the good days and you tend to remember that kind of stuff. But when you're playing The Entrance on a Tuesday night to nine people and you've got a gig the next night at Taree to 15 people. You're doing the same songs, you've got a sore throat and you don't want to do it but you have to do it anyway. That's a real drag.''

With Curley and Lewis starting families, the pair decide to call it a day. But there was never an official ``final tour'' and the band never officially broke up.

``We just didn't do anything ever again,'' Lewis says.

Curley: ``We were playing at Wollongong Uni one night, it was a great gig the place was packed. We looked up at the wall and the date on the poster. The date was 10 years to the day of our first ever gig. So we said, `hey let's just call it quits', and we did. That was it. We didn't tell anyone. I don't think we even told the other guys in the band. It was just obvious that that was what's going to happen.''

In the years since the band ended, any ill will has passed and Curley, Hausmeister, O'Brien and Lewis all get along fine.

``We don't go to BBQs together or anything like that,'' Hausmeister says, ``but, as far as I'm concerned there's no problems. It's all cool. I don't see them a great deal anyway but when I do see them it's fine.''

``Early on it was a bit rough,'' Curley adds, ``but I feel as though we all get along pretty well now.``Kemblastock's great. We all meet up at Kemblastock, have a chat, our kids all play with each other. There's a bit of weirdness but we're all civilised.''

Musically, the members have gone on to other projects. Lewis started up Richie and the Creeps, Hausmeister and O'Brien formed Monstrous Blues and went back to The Unheard and Lenny Curley is playing in The Pink Fits.O'Brien says there was one New Year's Eve when all four of their bands played on the same bill.

Which sort of brings us to the burning question; will they ever play in the same band?

There's occasional talk of Tumbleweed reforming - Curley says offers come in every now and then. Curley's all for a reunion show, though he's not too keen on playing one of their early tunes, Stoned.

``When we were 19 and had that big single, `Why don't we all get stoned?' that was hilarious,'' he says.

``That's funny when we were 19 years old but it's not the kind of thing you want to go preaching when you're 37.

Hausmeister is also putting his hand up for a reunion gig.

``I'd love to do and have wanted to do it for quite a while,'' he says.

``When I was kicked out it was a surprise and I went from playing really great gigs to not doing anything, overnight. So it's always been a bit difficult to deal with that. I really enjoyed the stuff we were writing and playing, it was really good stuff. I really enjoyed playing live. To be able to do that again would be really good fun.''

O'Brien says a reunion almost came together a few years ago - ``it was 99 per cent there'' - until one member pulled out.

``In a way, I'm glad that it didn't go on,'' he says. ``I think the chance has come and gone ... I don't think it'll happen now.''

So that would mean the band member who pulled out was Lewis. Which makes sense, of all the members he seems to be the one who has put the band behind him the most, the one who decided to end the band because ``it was time to get on with life''.

The other members aren't sweating on him changing his mind; they understand he has his reasons.

``I don't want to pressure him into it,'' Hausmeister says. ``He's probably the most important part of the deal, being the singer. If he's not comfortable with it, it's just going to be awkward anyway. As far as I know, the day he decides to get together and at least have a jam, the rest of us will probably jump at it and give it a shot.''

BAND HIGHLIGHTS

What was your favourite time to be in the band?

Lenny Curley: The best time was before we became popular. The early Wollongong gigs before we broke big. We'd just gotten the band together, we were really enjoying it and everywhere we played, here and in Sydney, we were selling them all out.

Paul Hausmeister: We did the full tour for one of the Big Day Out years (1994), the same year as The Ramones. They had portable sheds out the back of the main stage and each shed was for a band. They put two sheds near each other and a roof between the two so there was this common area.We rocked up to our shed on the first day and went inside. we were thinking, `man, can't wait to see The Ramones'. We step out of the shed an hour later and who happens to be in the shed across from us? The Ramones. For the entire tour we had the Ramones sharing our common area which, for us, was just out of control.

Richie Lewis: For me the camaraderie of the earlier days was something that we've never had since. Everything seemed to be in place and everything seemed to be almost effortless. We were enjoying creating together, enjoying playing. It was on the crest, just before things really started happening. Those were the best days - the first two EPs and recording the first album.

Steve O'Brien: Playing parts of England were great, especially playing with Mudhoney. We got to play at Leeds University, where The Who recorded Live at Leeds. Playing with the Lemonheads at the Astoria (in London) and getting to have a beer in the Keith Moon Bar.