One of the best tribute acts in the Bay Area is hanging up the fly shades after 20 years. U2 lovers Zoo Station, one of the most popular and tirelessly gigging bands locally, will mark the “retirement” with four shows, including a St. Patrick’s Day extravaganza at The Chapel in San Francisco.

“Yeah, this is the end. It’s been 20 solid years, and I think we’re all in a good spot where we’re excited to play these last shows, and really just go out and have some great times and make memories, and maybe cry a little bit, hug a little bit and drink a lot,” said bassist Scott Schulman, who performs as Adamesque.

While U2 famously began when drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. posted a flier at the high school all of the band members attended, it was Schulman who got the ball rolling for Zoo Station in 2001 with a Craigslist ad. After some experimentation (Schulman originally wanted to be the guitarist), the final lineup was set with singer Joshua Fryvecind as Bonalmost, guitarist Mike Horne as The Sledge and drummer Skott Bennett (who writes for this publication) as Barely Larry.

“What a nerd Barely Larry is! How do we find that guy?” Fryvecind said. “He just knew all the songs! What a jackass!”

While the band’s popularity began to grow quickly by word of mouth—this writer found them around 2005 playing Dan’s in Walnut Creek and became friends soon after—what they didn’t expect was to become as close as family.

“How I met three of my absolute best friends through absolute chance; I don’t know how to explain it,” Fryvecind said. “People will ask me, because they just assume I started the band, ‘How did you start the band?’ I’m like, ‘No, they let me be in their band, man,’ and after 20 years they didn’t kick me out … until now.”

For all 20 years, Zoo Station operated under one main “ethic:” What would U2 do? All of the members agree that the typical band squabbles were few and far between—mostly over setlists and wardrobe. But there have been some epic shows over the years.

In its early years, Zoo Station shared bills with puppet shows, comedians and dancers. But as its popularity grew, the band started experimenting with themes and technology. In 2008, they played at Slim’s as the Dalton Brothers—the fake cover band the real U2 performed as while opening for itself in the late ‘80s.

Bennett said that one of Zoo Station’s biggest fans asked him, between sets, who the “woman —“Betty Dalton”—that had joined the band on stage was. It was actually Schulman.

“He really sold it! I don’t think I appreciated how meta it was at the time,” Bennett said. “A tribute act imitating a real band doing a tribute act. We always looked for those opportunities to recreate U2 at their most extreme.”

There was a private show for Oracle employees on Treasure Island in 2004 where the members believe some people thought they were the actual U2; they were opening for the real Tears for Fears, after all. Oracle rented out three airplane hangars that housed the entertainment, including Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe.

At that point, Zoo Station could only play about 20 to 30 songs, and, as Schulman said, didn’t know what it was doing.

“When we started in this airplane hangar, there was nobody,” Fryvecind said. “We had like an hour-long set. By the time we got like five songs in, there were probably 3,000 people in this place. And by ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ people were jumping up and down. It was insane. … By the end of it, we learned that the support act does not ask for an encore, but they gave it to us anyway because the whole airplane hangar was now full of people listening to us and just going crazy. That was a special night.”

Tears for Fears’ set was delayed because all the attendees were still watching Zoo Station.

Horne points to the band’s first sold-out show at Slim’s in January of 2007, during which Bonalmost sprayed champagne over the crowd.

“We love the songs, and we know we didn’t write them; we’re just playing them; we’re just the conduit,” Horne said. “And it was just like a communal … melding of songs and friends and crowd and Jameson come together. It’s magical.”

Over the years, the band has performed with belly dancers (a la U2’s Achtung Baby era), a choir and a brass section. Their friends joined in on the fun such as the night when Mary J. O’Blige joined Bonalmost to sing “One.” There was the St. Patrick’s Day show at Last Day Saloon where the band played 45 songs across three sets, and the floor seemed about to collapse as fans went wild during “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

Schulman singles out one performance at Redwood City’s Music on the Square, which Zoo Station has played numerous times. There was a videographer following Bonalmost around as he walking through a packed crowd, mobbing him along the way.

It was an impressive feat considering Bennett’s original goal was to get some free pints of beer playing in a bar.

“My imagination was not dialed into the kind of scope and scale where we’d be hearing 4,000 people sing ‘With or Without You’ back at us at the top of their lungs,” he said.

Added Schulman: “We reached a large number of people and made them feel something. We made them feel exactly how we feel. Those memories and those feelings will surpass the 20 years we played together. Being able to have experienced a little bit of that—it just makes me proud of everything that we’ve done as a band and as a family.”

Because of the varied song selections and audience participation, no two Zoo Station shows have been exactly alike. But when the band threw in a theme or era night, such as ‘80s, ‘90s or ‘00s, with costumes, wigs and production elements—something with which the band has become exceptionally advanced over the years—performances went to another level. A few times, the band has attempted to cover all three decades within a single night.

“Think about when we used to do the ZooTV nights,” Horne said. “We’d drive around looking for big fucking tube TVs, console TVs, that people were just putting out to get rid of. We’d carry them all. We’d hook them up with coax, because there was no HDMI…”

The TVs would be rachet-strapped together and synced to play coordinated images. The four learned on the fly how to edit video to sync with its backing tracks and burned a DVD that Bennett would have to start and pause between songs. They were frequent patrons of Radioshack.

“Those are my favorite nights. We would go through and do the different outfits and everything all in one night,” Fryvecind said. “What idiots do that? We do.”

Zoo Station did PopMart themed nights, too.

“I screen printed costumes in my bathroom, and Sledge actually built a full, functional yellow arch,” Bennett said.

A few years ago, Fryvecind moved back to his home state of Iowa. There, his family of three is actively involved in the theater scene, acting in numerous productions yearly. That began to limit how many shows the band could perform.

The pandemic affected Zoo Station just like all other artists. Then, partway in, Bennett and his family moved to L.A. Coincidentally, the drummer, who works in the tech and graphic design spaces is also a lifelong “Stars Wars” fan, and he made a background acting appearance in an episode of Disney+’s “The Book of Boba Fett.”

The mutual decision to end the band was affected by the pandemic, but the timing seemed right anyway, as all four members were in different places in their lives. The 20-year mark, after the band had played about 600 shows, seemed like a natural stopping point. So did playing one last St. Patrick’s Day show.

Fryvecind and Bennett said these shows are a chance for Bay Area U2 fans to celebrate together once more, and to acknowledge the last few difficult years.

“Those moments, we now know, aren’t given,” Fryvecind said.

“These shows are going to be a great backdrop for a whole range of extreme emotions,” Bennett said. “A tribe coming back together after two years … celebrating 20 years of the band, and, of course, saying goodbye.”

Zoo Station is planning on covering about 50 songs over the four nights of its last run. Diehard fans of U2 shouldn’t expect much of the band’s newer material, however.

“I listen to that stuff, but how do you not play almost all of Joshua Tree or all of Achtung Baby?” Horne said.

But Schulman added that there will be numerous surprises along the way, both planned and unplanned.

“You never know what Joshua might do in the middle of a song. I love those moments, and I am really looking forward to having those moments again on stage with three of my best friends,” he said.

If the band plays “Zooropa,” fans should know (finally) that the slow-burn melodic intro to the song includes a recording of Bennett drunk-calling his bandmates after they left him behind to find gyros in Seattle. “‘I don’t know where everybody is!’” Schulman mimics. It’s in there, alongside numerous other anxiety-ridden voices. Just listen for it.

And speaking of the Cold-War-steeped Achtung Baby and Zooropa U2 albums, Zoo Station will have a thing or two to address now that life seems to be repeating itself. The band is aligned with the political and social leanings of U2.

“U2 has always been big at fighting any kind of dictatorship out there in any political regime,” Schulman said. “If you’re asking if we’re going to bring anything up in any of our shows: I mean, 100 percent.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.