A Bit Mercurial by Nature

Mercury Rev is a band that had a lot of reasons to call it quits over the last decade--with various members experiencing everything from a nervous breakdown to a religious pilgrimage. Through it all, however, the upstate New York rock group was widely admired by critics, both here and in England.

Now, it looks as though Mercury Rev’s resilience is paying off. Not only has the group’s latest album, 1998’s “Deserter’s Songs,” brought the band increased radio exposure, but the group has also landed the coveted opening spot on R.E.M.’s summer tour, which kicks off Monday at the Greek Theatre.

“They’ve always been a very popular band at college radio,” says Glen Sansone, editor in chief of CMJ New Music Report, a trade publication that focuses on college and alternative-rock radio formats. “This recent album just showed a lot more diversity and that this band is really worth all the accolades that have been heaped onto them.”

Unlike the chaotic sound of its 1991 debut album, “Yerself Is Steam,” the music on “Deserter’s Songs,” while not losing the band’s guitar-driven edge, is endlessly romantic, with softly layered tracks that could be the soundtrack to some imagined European film, where the bowed saw is as much a core instrument as the guitar.

“There’s a lot of emotions tied up in the record,” says singer-guitarist Jonathan Donahue. “We went through a few tough years. It’s just a very genuine, honest record. You can’t buy that or fake it in the studio. I think that’s what people pick up on, the sincerity there.”

Donahue is joined in the latest edition of Mercury Rev by a guitarist called Grasshopper as the last original members from the original sextet; brothers Jason and Justin Russo on bass and keyboards respectively, Adam Snyder also on keyboards and Jeff Mercel on drums round out the current group.

On this afternoon, Donahue and Grasshopper, both 33, are sharing drinks and fish sandwiches at an Irish pub in the Miracle Mile district, both of them dressed entirely in black.

They trace the group’s career back to a series of recording experiments at the end of the ‘80s, first culminating in “Yerself Is Steam.” While the band was unable to immediately find a label to release the album in the U.S., its arrival in England unexpectedly touched a nerve.

“Six days later they called and said [the band was booked for] the Redding Festival. At that point we hadn’t even played a live show,” recalls Donahue, who had briefly been a guitarist with the Flaming Lips. “It was peculiar, the six of us at home, fighting over the rent and pizza money, and the next thing you know you’re in some foreign country playing to 20,000 people. We just got up there and were basically laughing our way through 40-minute sets.”

The subsequent buzz led to a contract with Columbia Records, but whatever momentum the band enjoyed hit a wall with the 1993 recording of the frenetic “Boces,” which left much of the band at creative odds and with various personal problems. Disintegrating relationships within the band ultimately led to the departure of founding vocalist David Baker. The record still brings only grim memories.

“It’s pretty painful,” Donahue says of the period. “Not musically--there’s a lot of stuff we love on it. But emotionally. It’s like seeing an ex-wife or girlfriend, and it just brings back a lot of failed hope.”

But the troubles weren’t yet over. The release of 1995’s “See You on the Other Side,” for Columbia’s sister label Work, again failed to find a large audience, and band members were left to find regular jobs. Grasshopper (whose real name is Sean Mackiowiak) worked midnight to 8 a.m. in a plastic-bottle factory, and Donahue was often bent over a sledgehammer.

“When we get home, we’ll still get calls for construction work,” Grasshopper says. “Sometimes it’s good to do it anyway. It brings you back down after being on the road.”

A disastrous 1995 tour had the band hurtling between gigs in a low-budget van, flooded with exhaust fumes, with no heater, no muffler and a rotting transmission. Back home in the Catskill Mountains, Donahue suffered a nervous breakdown, and Grasshopper spent several weeks in a monastery.

“Things sort of went down to the bottom,” Donahue says, “and as they began to come back up again, we began to reconnect a lot of the nerves that had been severed over time.”

It was there in the semirural Catskills that Donahue and Grasshopper first met Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band, both of whom joined Mercury Rev in the studio for select tracks on “Deserter’s Songs.”

“They’re just great people, the way they carry themselves,” Donahue says. “You learn a lot just by staying silent and listening. You really do. An hour with Garth is like 10 years’ worth of road experience. An hour with Levon is worth 15 rock ‘n’ roll encyclopedias. And it rubs off in a good way.”

The resulting album, released by V2 Records, has led to some of the best times of the band’s career. “In the early years, to be honest, a lot of the looks that we got were just complete bewilderment,” Donahue says. “You’d see 3,000 people going, ‘I didn’t know they could do that onstage. . . .’ But now you see couples kissing and swaying back and forth during [a song], and that’s a great feeling. After all we’ve been through, it’s the best.”

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R.E.M. and Mercury Rev will perform Monday and Tuesday at the Greek Theatre, 2700 Ventura Canyon Road, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $25-$40. (213) 480-3232. Also Wednesday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Road, 8 p.m., $25-$35, (949) 855-2863.