What a difference a year or so makes.

It was Spring 2000 the last time we spoke to Dismemberment Plan bassist Eric Axelson. Headed toward Omaha after playing a gig in San Francisco as part of a never-ending tour, Axelson told a woe-as-me tale of a band that just played 20 straight nights of shows, passing a nagging head cold from one member to another while living sandwiched in a squalid van. The Plan had just released Emergency & I on indie label Desoto Records after acquiring the master tapes from Interscope, the major label who had unceremoniously dropped them amidst its now famous reorganization of 1999.

"We just want to make enough money to pay the bills with our music and not have to worry all the time and do jobs we don't like," said a road-weary Axelson.

A much chipper Axelson spoke on a cell phone last week from outside a café while the rest of the band enjoyed a big breakfast after playing a sold-out show the night before at Boston's The Middle East. "We're doing damn well," he said. "Things have been going good. Last year everything just kind of took off."

The Washington, D.C.-based art-rock four-piece, who lists D'Angelo, Joni Mitchell, Talking Heads and Marvin Gaye as recent influences, carved out their rabid fan base by playing incendiary alt/punk rock in smoky clubs along the eastern seaboard. Change continues in the post-punk tradition of Emergency & I and their early Interscope EP, The Ice of Boston.

Forget about their so-called influences and allegiance to the D.C. punk scene. Dismemberment Plan is pure art prog-rock that would have thrived in the days of Yes, King Crimson, Moody Blues, other bands whose basic song structures didn't follow the norm. Their music is squarely focused on going beyond the basic sonic expanses to big, wide-open soundscapes while fusing basic rock and roll elements in a true indie sense. Chiming guitars replace power chords, drums at times resemble hyperactive electronic rattles, and while the bass is pure funk, the rest is held together by a slightly dissonant keyboard and whooping sound effects.

It's hardly music that compliments Pearl Jam's grungy '90s "alternative" noodlings or Eddie Vedder's pleading ballads.

"It was kind of a mixed bag every night," Axelson said of the European Pearl Jam dates. "Some folks were interested in checking out new music. To others, we were just the band that played before Pearl Jam. I haven't had stage fright since I was in high school. When we played in Prague and Berlin, we were in front of 15,000 people. It was a huge, huge rush."

Axelson said the rock star treatment didn't fire-up any hopes of the band becoming an arena staple. "It reinforced the whole club thing for us," he said, "We had to play behind big barricades away from the crowds, and after shows, the bands were rushed off in unmarked vans. I saw what those guys had to deal with -- they couldn't even walk around town without being noticed."

With the high-profile gig, Axelson said major labels have again come sniffing at their doors, but they're not buying. "We're not really interested," he said. "We've been there and seen how it works. With DeSoto we get what we want. It's more about the music than the bottom line. We are living off the band now and touring a lot. We have freedom from the corporate beast. We're lucky. A lot of bands didn't make it out after the majors began to fall."

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