Saturday promises to be a very good night for Opie Gone Bad.

But no matter how sentimental and satisfying the iconic Denver funk-rock band’s “Straight Outta Mayberry” 11-year reunion show turns out to be at the Gothic Theatre, it probably can’t get any better than it already has been:

• The nine largely sold-out shows at Red Rocks. The lines stretching around the block outside of Herman’s Hideaway.

• The couples, like Derek and Khara West, who met at an Opie Gone Bad club gig, got married and are coming back for Saturday’s concert with their two now college-age daughters.

• For lead singer and ringmaster Jake Schroeder, the very best of the Bad was holding a benefit concert for Englewood police officer Brian Mueller, who was in a horrific on-the-job motorcycle accident in 2003. “And there he was singing along to our songs, even after suffering a brain injury,” Schroeder said. “That was staggering to me.”

Opie Gone Bad is the rare band that in 1992 wrote its commitment to charity into its inaugural business plan. Which also makes Opie Gone Bad the rare band that started with a business plan. The band played just about anywhere for just about anyone, to its own economic detriment. In all, it raised about $3.5 million for innumerable charitable causes between 1992-2013.

But more than all that, it’s just been a whole lot of stupid fun. “It’s not poetry,” Schroeder jokes of  his good-time catalog. It’s a party. The band has about 40 original tunes in its repertoire – and there is a reason only two of them are ballads.

“Our entire reason for existence was to bring as much joy to people that we could,” he said. “We were a serious band – but we don’t take ourselves real seriously.”   

When Opie Gone Bad announced its anticlimactic breakup in 2013, without having even played a farewell show, Schroeder told local music journalist Ricardo Baca, “I’d be surprised if we ever play any kind of reunion show.”

(Surprise!)

After 20 years of Opie, Schroeder was branching out. He was well on his way to singing the national anthem at more than 1,000 Colorado Avalanche home games. And the proudly patriotic piper was moving to France part-time to launch a nonprofit called D-Day Leadership Academy. “We bring underserved students to Normandy to learn about leadership based on the lessons of D-Day – and it is so powerful,” he said.

But his bandmates were all lifetime professional musicians who needed to play to get paid, so Schroeder set them free – whether they wanted to be free or not. (They did not.) 

A decade later, Schroeder is no less busy. In fact, he’ll be on a plane for France not 48 hours after Saturday’s show. But it’s easier to put together a (maybe) one-off reunion show than it is to keep a band together for the long haul. As for why now, Schroeder says right now is the right time for the simplest and sweetest of reasons.

“I think we just kind of wanted to spend some time with each other,” he said.

A star-studded opener

Saturday’s opener could not be more full-circle perfect. It’s the 17th Avenue All-Stars, Denver’s longest-running a capella group at 35 years old. Schroeder was an early member of that cultural mainstay, whose six present singers were not yet breathing, much less harmonizing, when Opie Gone Bad played its very first set on the patio of the downtown Rock Bottom Brewery in 1993.

Over the years, there have been more than 20 Baddies. Heck, there were nine of them at that first show – including a conga drum player. On Saturday, the familiar lineup will consist of Schroeder on vocals, Randy Chavez on guitars, Windall Armour on bass and Tarell Martin on drums. 

The band’s story starts with Schroeder, who was born and raised in Boulder and graduated from Boulder High School. He started his own ‘80s a capella band called The Wayfarers but, back in those days, he says candidly, “I was such a little (bleep).” And whatever word just came into your mind to fill in that blank most likely fits what he called himself.

“In 1989, I got kicked out of my own band – and for very good reason,” he said. “I was just so full of myself and thought I was so cool.”

Schroeder then started singing with Norm Silver of the All-Stars and stayed with the group for five years. The All-Stars were on a tour for the U.S. Department of Defense, in fact, when Schroeder’s life took a consequential turn. “We were playing on an airbase called Galena that is so remote, you have to fly in,” Schroeder said of a former military station 350 miles north of Anchorage.

“This was so close to Russia, these guys were always at the ready,” he said. “They were either at war or they were playing basketball. That’s it.”

On this day, they were playing basketball – with Schroeder and bandmate Jeff Harrison joining in. For this story to work, you have to imagine a younger Schroeder with ginger hair.

“These two super-nice brothers were like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m in a band and we’re going to play tonight.’ So they came to the show and they were all hammered and one of them says to me, ‘Man, you look like Opie – but you sing like a Black man.’ And the other guy goes, Opie gone bad!’ And I was like, ‘I’m stealing that name for a band!”

Over the years, Opie Gone Bad played everywhere from Belize to winery weddings to a prom at the Kent Denver Country Day School. Of all their legendary stories, the saddest might just be that they never played North Carolina – home of Opie, the band’s fictional namesake from “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“No, we didn’t really get too far east of the Mississippi,” Schroeder said. And that’s largely because the band never scored a major-label deal and the international acclaim that went to contemporaries like Littleton’s Big Head Todd and the Monsters.

“If I’m being honest, I think I always really, really wanted that,” Schroeder said. “We went through this peak period in the late ‘90s when we were really in the game – but then the pendulum swung and funk was just not happening at all. Suddenly, the labels were only looking for straight-ahead stuff – and The Spin Doctors were as greasy as they were going to get back then.”

The writing was on the wall when one label sent a representative to an Opie show and afterward, Schroeder asked if the A&R guy had even bothered to show up. Oh yes, he was told: “But he was back at the bar with the strippers the whole time you guys were playing.”

Schroeder was pretty zen about it all. “I really believe in our music,” he said. “It wasn’t the right time, and it just wasn’t going to happen for us. That’s how the music business is, and that’s OK. We were a really good band, we had a lot of fun and we made a living doing this for 20 years, while a lot of bands that signed with labels were lost forever.”

Opie Gone Bad did release four proper records and two Christmas compilations, all produced by guitarist Randy Chavez, who has a wild story of his own. Born in Northglenn, Chavez began his classical training at age 6. “I was raised as a studio musician,” he said. By 17, he had played with Bob Hope, Ella Fitzgerald and Ginger Rogers. And because of all the incumbent pressure, he also had an ulcer by 17. By 19, he was playing guitar in the Denver Symphony with peers 40 years his senior.

“There are a million great guitar players,” Chavez said. “But I was raised as a studio player, which means you can play every style and you can read your ass off as good as you and I are talking – and there are less than a handful of those kind of players in Colorado.”

What to expect on Saturday

Saturday’s show, Chavez said, will be all about giving the people exactly what they want. The 17-song set list was largely determined by a Facebook poll. That means “Little House,” “Big Mess” and an enduringly popular cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

With hindsight, some of the song titles now seem hilarious (“Monkey Love”), while others admittedly make Schroeder cringe. Like, “Could We Please Have Sex?” – which he will not be playing Saturday. (“To be honest, that was never a comfortable song for me to perform,” he said.)

But one cheeky song he will sing with tongue fully in cheek is “Cougar,” a tune that’s about exactly what you think it is about. Believe me, at age 56, Schroeder gets the joke.

“That song is totally immature,” said Schroeder. “I was in my 30s when we wrote it – older than I should have been, frankly. But it’s going to be hilarious playing it on Saturday because the cougars are now 20 years younger than we are – and the guys out there are 40 years younger than we are.”

While social norms have drastically changed in the past 10 years, Schroeder isn’t going to get too worried about saying – or singing – the wrong thing now.

“I think hip-hop has taken all the pressure off,” he said. “There’s nothing I could say that’s going to even come close to the same universe as some of the hip-hop stuff that’s out there, and that’s OK, too. I think people are still writing whatever they want to write and I think that they should. I believe in a great big broad paintbrush for the entire universe.

“I haven’t always been an angel, but I also never operated my life with any ill intent toward anybody. It was always playful and it was fun. And even the stuff that’s kind of biting was stupid. It was like a fart joke. That’s as bad as it ever got. Nothing that’s going to stunt somebody’s growth.”

‘We made a real difference’

When Opie pulled back in 2013, the Colorado Symphony snatched up Chavez, who will turn 65 in a few weeks. Of late, he’s played symphony shows with Bernadette Peters, the Wu-Tang Clan, Cypress Hill and Stuart Copeland of The Police. But nothing in his considerable repertoire, he said, will ever compare to his time with Opie Gone Bad.  

“I’ll be truthful: I was not happy about Opie ending in 2013,” Chavez said. “I was really struggling with it when a good friend of mine said to me, ‘You realize every relationship in your life is going to end at some point, right? And I mean your relationship with your car, with your house, with your family – It’s all going to end, either by a death or in some other way. And you have to be prepared to continue life without that relationship.’

“That made me realize that all this is meant to be. And it’s OK.”

In terms of legacy, Schroeder harkens back to those who gave him a hand up, like Todd Park Mohr, Hazel Miller and Chris Daniels. “These are people who were really patient and good with me when I was a (bleep)head and full of myself until we got to the point where we were really helping a lot of people – truthfully – and we were making a real difference in a lot of people’s lives,” Schroeder said.

“I’m just really grateful. I’m grateful to Randy and to the guys and to all the people who have come to see us play over the years. Just think about someone paying a cover to come see your band play, and what a generous and kind act that is. That’s incredible.”

Schroeder’s idea of a successful reunion on Saturday is already achieved.

“I am just looking forward to be getting to sit in a room with these three guys and hear them play and sing with them and be around them,” he said. “I just love them.”