THREE OAKS — At the time, it seemed like just another weekend night in Waukesha, Wis.

Waukesha South High School classmates Sam Llanas and Kurt Neumann had just arrived at a party. Llanas walked from girl to girl striking up conversations, while Neumann inevitably planted himself in a corner near the stereo speaker listening to whatever music was playing.

“I wasn’t a big talker at the time,” Neumann says by telephone from his home just outside of Austin, Texas. “After a few hours of sitting there and lots of drinking going on, a girl finally walks up, staggers a little, looks down at me and says ‘What’s the matter, Mr. Sad Clown?’ I was kind of a reclusive person and that always stuck with me. I thought by calling me Mr. Sad Clown that girl really had me pegged in a moment.”

Thirty years later, Neumann not only used the impromptu pseudonym in the lyrics of the bluesy ballad “Today,” but he and Llanas – better known as the roots rock band The BoDeans – also used “Mr. Sad Clown” as the title for their ninth studio recording.

“A lot of the songwriting on this record is a little more introspective in that way,” Neumann says of the April release. “It deals with a more reclusive attitude and with subjects we haven’t dealt with in music before. With some of our other stuff, sometimes I’d write as if it was almost something separate from myself. With this record, I didn’t feel that way. The songs were more as if I were just speaking to you. That was a real different process for me, but something that’s been really fulfilling.”

“Today,” and several other tracks off “Mr. Sad Clown,” will be included in Saturday’s set when The BoDeans perform in front of a sold-out crowd at The Acorn Theater in Three Oaks. The concert is part of a series of stripped-down shows the band has been performing in support of the record. It will include segments with Llanas and Neumann performing as a duo as well as selections backed by band mates Noah Levy on percussion, Ryan Bowman on bass and Bukka Allen on accordion.

“It’s that ‘(VH-1) Storytellers’ idea,” Neumann says. “We still bring the same energy, but the whole show has a different vibe. We try to take down the wall between us and the audience and play some different arrangements mostly to give a better perspective of how a song was written.”

In 1977, when Neumann and Llanas met as high school sophomores, they seemed an unlikely duo to start a band. Neumann, who had played the drums since he was 8, had only started dabbling with a guitar and Llanas didn’t even play an instrument.

“I didn’t sing at all, and Sam didn’t play guitar at all,” Neumann says. “I think for our first band we threw together some guys to play in my basement for my 18th birthday. We knew about 20 songs, mostly Stones and Chuck Berry tunes. It wasn’t until after that gig that Sam started to learn to play guitar and when we tried to write our own songs Sam would encourage me to sing, and he’d sing with me. From the first time we really made an attempt to do it, it really felt kind of magical to us. We decided to stick with it – as long as I could talk him into it because he was going off to college.”

Neumann’s argument was compelling enough for Llanas to leave the University of Wisconsin in 1980 to join him in pursuing music full time. By 1983, Neumann and Llanas had officially become The BoDeans, and a year later the duo added drummer Guy Hoffman, bassist Bob Griffin and had inked a deal with Slash/Warner Records. But it has always been the contrast between Neumann’s electric guitar and melancholy vocals paired with Llanas’ acoustic guitar and high-pitched vocals that have defined The BoDeans’ sound.

“It wasn’t until we started singing on recordings that people started commenting on our voices together,” Neumann says. “They were throwing comparisons around like The Everly Brothers, which to us seemed impossible. But we learned pretty quickly that there was something interesting to our voices together. Playing guitar together was just a way to try to fill out our sound.”

Neumann also credits T-Bone Burnett, who produced The BoDeans’ critically acclaimed debut, 1986’s “Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams,” with helping the band find its musical voice.

“The first time T-Bone came to see us, we were playing in a little club with 20 people there,” Neumann says. “He told us we were great but we needed to go home and learn to play. He just sort of left that with us. That’s the way T-Bone is. He’s just great, straight-forward, honest.”

“Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams” was not only critically acclaimed, but led to The BoDeans being named “Best New American Band” in a Rolling Stone readers’ poll. It was their fifth studio album, however, “Go Slow Down,” that sparked the band’s biggest commercial success. That album’s 1993 single “Closer to Free,” which became the theme song for the hit TV series “Party of Five,” peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s pop chart.

“It was nice to experience having a hit like that on the radio where it’s just everywhere nonstop,” Neumann says. “I can’t say that’s a bad feeling. But I think in the end it was kind of a curse. I tell people all the time that that year was kind of the worst for us going out and playing shows. People do just know you for that and you do feel like they miss the whole picture. If I could go back, I would be glad not to have the hit and continue to build the band the way we were.”

Although The BoDeans have never captured that same kind of commercial success, they are a much healthier band for it. After a break in the late ’90s to work on solo projects, and after realizing, as Neumann says, that “the sound we made together was bigger than the sound we made apart,” The BoDeans have released three studio albums this decade – 2004’s “Resolution,” 2008’s “Still” – which reunited them with Burnett – and last month’s “Mr. Sad Clown.”

Lyrically, “Mr. Sad Clown,” is designed to reflect two guys in their late 40s from the perspective, “been down that road a little bit longer,” Neumann says, “and looking back a little more, as opposed to the early years, when we wrote about love and hope and sex and dreams.”

Neumann and Llanas wrote and recorded 23 songs over eight months in Neumann’s home studio before deciding on the final 15 tracks.

“We didn’t try to guess what our audience wanted to hear or what radio might play,” Neumann says. “We focused on the same musical theory that’s always been behind our music. Real simple song-writing. Good harmonies. Just real American music.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com