The chance of a band like Fountains of Wayne having a hit with a pure power-pop song about a kid having a crush on his girlfriend's mom seemed about as unlikely as Jay-Z getting on stage to jam with Phish.

		Fountains of Wayne With: The Breakup Society. Where: Hartwood Acres, Hampton. When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission: Free. Q & A with Fountains of Wayne Fountains of Wayne meet the Beatles Benefit for Innocence Institute

Oops, that actually happened.

Just goes to show how thoroughly weird and unpredictable the pop biz can be, even in these corporate-driven times.

By most accounts, Fountains of Wayne seemed destined to be just another cult band from the '90s with a thoroughly inexplicable name.

The New York City band's roots are at Williams College in Massachusetts, where co-songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood started playing in bands together in the mid-'80s.

Taking its name from a lawn ornament store in Wayne, N.J., Fountains of Wayne took shape with the addition of ex-Posies drummer Brian Young and Belltower guitarist Jody Porter. They released two albums -- a self-titled debut (1996) and "Utopia Parkway" (1999) -- which endeared them to power-pop fans and music critics who saw in the band a throwback to great things like the Beatles, Big Star, Elvis Costello, etc.

Atlantic Records saw a band that wasn't moving product like the angst-powered nu-metal bands were, so in the great purge of the new millennium it dropped Fountains of Wayne from the label.

Four years went by during which the band shopped for a new label and slowly worked on what would become "Welcome Interstate Managers."

S-Curve stepped up to sign them. It's hard to say whether even Schlesinger would have signed the band given his expectations for the record, which were ...

"None," he says. "Honestly, we really expected it to be ignored, because we had been away for a long time. The record before that didn't exactly burn up the charts, and we just kind of figured it would have a small release and maybe our die-hard fans would be psyched that it was out, but we didn't expect much else to happen."

Enter "Stacy's Mom" and Rachel Hunter, a Sports Illustrated model and estranged wife of Rod Stewart who agreed to be the new Mrs. Robinson in the video.

The next thing you know all the kids on the street -- who are really into hip-hop -- are suddenly singing "Stacy's mom has got it goin' on ...," a song that sounds like a collision of The Cars, Buddy Holly and Squeeze.

"It was just a goofy idea that came together real quickly," Schlesinger says. "It was just a made-up story, but it was partly inspired by a friend of mine who would covet my grandmother when we were about 12. I thought writing about a grandmother would be a couple steps over the line."

To be sure. But a hot divorcee down the street was just the ticket, and "Welcome Interstate Managers," already on the verge of becoming one of the top critical picks of the year (No. 3 after OutKast and the White Stripes on the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop Poll), was also a hit.

"A young audience got into it, and actually a young female audience got into it, which I really didn't expect," Schlesinger says. "For some reason, that song was really popular with young girls and even with moms. I guess everybody took to it the right way. If anything, I was kind of worried that it would be a song that young guys thought was funny and girls thought was gross."

The shock of a hit single for a band like Fountains of Wayne, besides the influx of cash and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, is that suddenly music geeks who were into them all along are shoulder to shoulder with young kids coming to the show to hear that one song.

"It's a little bit strange, but there are worse problems to have," Schlesinger says. "It's definitely true that if we play at a festival with a bunch of bands, you see a portion of the audience coming to check us out because they're waiting to hear 'Stacy's Mom.' Hopefully, they get into the other stuff we're doing and stick around. We try to put it in the middle of the set, because we don't want to do the thing of playing it last, but also know that if we put it at the beginning we might lose some audience."

The "other stuff" on the 16-track "Welcome Interstate Managers" consists of various degrees of jangly, guitar-driven pop, ranging from the crunchy "Little Red Light" to the countrified "Hang Up on You" to "Hey Julie," which could have been a Simon & Garfunkel hit.

But does Schlesinger consider it power pop?

"We see ourselves as a pop band. The term power pop to me ... I certainly don't get upset if people call us a power-pop band. But I think there's a negative connotation that implies that you're obsessed with re-creating some sort of golden era of pop music that doesn't exist anymore. And that's not really what we do. We try to incorporate a lot of influences that we like, but we try to do something original. We try to put our own personality into everything we write. We're not just trying to sound like our favorite records. "When I hear the term power pop, the negative connotation in my mind is someone trying to be Cheap Trick or be Big Star or whatever it might be. But we definitely are a pop band and we definitely play with loud guitars sometimes, so I guess in the simplest sense, that's power pop."

"Stacy's Mom" fit the definition perfectly, as did the follow-up single, "Mexican Wine," the subject of another expensive-looking video with scantily clad women. This time, Fountains of Wayne ran into a snag.

"MTV and VH1 didn't jump on it. There were issues with them wanting us to take some stuff out of it when we handed it in. Which maybe was brought on by the whole post-Janet Jackson picking up of standards."

The video has Drew Carey hosting a talent show where twin girls are lip-synching the opening verse to "Mexican Wine."

"MTV didn't want to show underage kids singing about drinking. But they weren't even signing. It was Chris' voice coming out their mouths, so it was a weird thing. We had to take that out and a bunch of other stuff. In the end, they ended up not showing it, and there's no way of really knowing why not. We got really lucky. Because if 'Stacy's Mom' had come out after the whole Super Bowl thing, they probably never would have showed it. It got in under the wire."

Schlesinger says "Mexican Wine" followed the course of many other Fountains of Wayne songs that they hoped would be hits, but, he says, "I kind of think that it was such a miracle that a band like ours was operating in that Top 40 realm to begin with. I didn't expect it to become a regular thing."

Some bands that have that little spark of mainstream success have a hard time going back to their core fans. Schlesinger doesn't think Fountains of Wayne fans were trying to keep the band to themselves.

"I think for some reason we're the kind of band where even our die-hard fans were kind of rooting for us to have a hit. It's not like we were Sonic Youth or something before. We were always writing these poppy kinds of songs, and a lot of people were saying these other songs should have been hits before this. So the fact that we actually had a hit single this time around in most people's eyes was a positive thing, rather than saying, 'Oh, they sold out.' "

When he's not working with the band, Schlesinger has his hands in a properly retro side project -- a Broadway musical version of the John Waters movie "Cry-Baby." David Javerbaum, a writer for "The Daily Show" and The Onion, is working on the lyrics, while Schlesinger writes the music. Schlesinger has some experience in this area, having written the title song for "That Thing You Do," the charming Tom Hanks movie about a one-hit wonder in the '60s.

"You have to write songs that fit the story, but it's nice to have some that will stand on their own," Schlesinger says of the format. "There are some that will only make sense within the context of the show, and there are others that are going to be like pop songs you can pull out. But everything is set in 1954, early rock 'n' roll, rockabilly vibe."

How comfortable is Schlesinger, now 34, with going back that far?

"The late '60s stuff I do better than the '50s stuff," he says. "I'm having to do a lot of homework for this show."