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The Misfits promotional photo. - Misfits.com

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Thirty years ago, Jerry Only was 19, penniless and stuck in London. His band, the Misfits, had come to England for a tour with The Damned. But when the tour manager ripped them off, they walked off the tour in protest and found themselves in London with a month to kill before heading back home to New Jersey.

One night, at a club called the Music Machine, he spotted Lemmy from Motorhead playing pinball in the corner.

"I walked up to him and introduced myself. 'Hey, I'm Jerry from the Misfits,'" recalled Only in an interview recently. It just so turned out that stingy manager was Lemmy's manager, too. "He wound up buying me drinks all night, and we played pinball. About 4 a.m., I had to give up. He's got three livers."

Both men are appearing on the Orpheum stage next Wednesday, Sept. 10, with resuscitated versions of their original bands, along with openers Airbourne, Valient Thorr and Year Long Disaster.

The Misfits' original lineup hasn't played together in 25 years. The band formed in 1977 and went on to become one of the most influential punk bands of all time, wearing heavy, corpse-like make-up and crafting what became known as "horror punk." The band dissolved in 1983, with lead singer Glenn Danzig moving on to form heavier, darker acts like Samhain and Danzig.

Only went on to form a Christian heavy metal band, Kryst the Conqueror, and tried for years to get Danzig to reform the Misfits. Danzig refused to be part of any kind of reunion. Finally, in 1995, Only settled out of court with Danzig for rights to the band's songs and immediately started it back up. He's continued as the leader and bass player since then, with other musicians rotating in and out.

Right now, Dez Cadena of Black Flag plays guitar, and Robo has returned to the drums after playing with the Misfits pre-1983 and with Black Flag before that. They're working on an album for release next summer, and Only says it's going to be more complex and diverse, like 1999's "Famous Monsters."

Only, born Gerald Caiafa, lives in northern New Jersey with his second wife and baby daughter, and runs the family machine shop business. It's not far from his old high school, where he played football and basketball, got voted most popular in his senior class and threw the best parties in town. ("My mom would help me. We had a swimming pool.")

He's got a hint of the classic Jersey "fugiddaboutit" accent and punctuates his stories once in a while to wheeze out a long, phlegmy laugh. He doesn't really stay abreast of current music, he said, although his grown son sometimes updates him. Instead, he watched the Olympics a lot and keeps up with football. "Hey, never let Brett Favre go! Here in New York, every time he takes a dump, we know about it. The big news the other day was he had to take a left."

Only may have originated the "Devilock" hairdo -- a long, skinny bang that shoots down the middle of the forehead like a downward-facing horn -- but he is a Christian. His faith doesn't really affect his music, but he has tried to cut the swear words off the last two albums, "thus avoiding those parental advisement stickers," he said. "When we first did the band, we were young and reckless, and swore a lot. I wanted to write a really great punk album with no swearing in it and no obscenities. Just straight horror and gore. I think we accomplished that."

After 9/11, the rules for lyrical content tightened. Even without obscenities, the Misfits got parental advisory stickers because of the bloodiness in songs like "Helena," named after the 1993 horror movie "Boxing Helena."

Only blows it off with a laugh: "Whatever. If they feel the kids need to be a little bit more sheltered, that's OK. We can accommodate. I'm trying to make it so that the Misfits is something that anybody can turn their kids and their grandkids on to."

If Only ever gets fervently religious during the interview, it's to worship at the altar of the Misfits: "I think the Misfits is probably one of the most important things that's happened in, God, the last 30 years. It came out of a renaissance of music. Before the Ramones changed the way the Earth was spinning, you were listening to Styx and Journey. I mean, that was the most exciting thing you could go do. The Misfits came along with a really edgy and original look."

He doesn't care what Danzig thinks of the band now. "You gotta realize, Glenn's been out of the band 25 years, and people should get over it."

Do they talk ever?

"Yeah, every day we have tea," Only joked with a snort of laughter, then added: "No. I'm a Christian, and he's a son of Satan. What do we have in common?"

What really keeps Only going is getting out and playing for the band's four generations of fans. And when those kids tell him that the music helped them get through hard times, "all the stuff that you go through to keep it alive, the days you're sleeping on airport floors in Costa Rica or, you know, you're stuck in a train station somewhere and you can't get home for a holiday, it all winds up making sense."

The Misfits were always "repulsed" by the materialistic lifestyle of selling records and getting driven around in limousines, and these days Only feels even more grounded.

"I look at things a whole lot differently than I did before. It's not about the dream. It's about the reality of this world that makes the Misfits important. I'm just going to keep it going; that's what I do."

Before the band kicks off its joint tour with Motorhead, it's heading down to Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico and Tucson, Ariz. for nine shows. "I'm going to be sweatin' it out down there," he said. "So when I roll into Las Vegas to start off our run back to New York with them, forget it -- it's gonna be like an air conditioner. I gotta go to boot camp before I go with those guys. I like to be tested."