From his early records with the Young Fresh Fellows through the wealth of great material he's cut more recently with Peter Buck of R.E.M. and other friends, recording as the Minus 5, Seattle's Scott McCaughey has been responsible for any number of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs of the past two decades.

In a perfect world, he'd have the sales to match.

But things are looking up for McCaughey, the perennial underdog who showed up with Buck on the cover of Harp last month wielding axes and beards, the subject of an eight-page cover story.

"I don't know what they were thinking," he says, with a laugh. "Worst selling cover ever, probably."

Suddenly, outtakes are hitting the streets. And reissues of earlier records. Yep Roc is planning an EP release for October, picking up where last year's brilliant "Down With Wilco" left off. Cut with Wilco as his backing band, it could be argued that the "Down With Wilco" album owes a good deal of its higher profile to hitting the streets in the wake of Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

But McCaughey delivers with a richly orchestrated collection of hook-intensive pop songs with humor and heart, from "Days of Wine & Booze," the melancholy, atmospheric opener, to "Retrieval of You," his finest hour, a song about a failed musician abducting a former acquaintance who made it big.

"I'm a fumbled record star," he sings. "They call me DJ Mini-Mart 'cause that's where I work."

The song was inspired, he says, by an e-mail he got from Jeff Tweedy of Wilco as he was preparing to leave for sessions in Chicago.

Tweedy signed the e-mail DJ Mini-Mart.

"He wrote this kind of silly little poem to me about me coming out there to do that record," says McCaughey. "And I really liked it. It kind of got my mind going, and I sort of took it and turned it into that song. ... He had written this thing, 'I drive by airports practicing retrieval of you,' 'cause he was all excited for me to come out there and record. He didn't mean it to be creepy, but, of course, you know me. As soon as I got a hold of it, I turned it into this really sick thing."

"I drive by airports practicing retrieval of you" became a key line in a darkly comic masterpiece that McCaughey says he's hoping will someday inspire a screenplay.

It's certainly got the raw material.

"I've got a boxcar with blankets and bread," he sings, "in sector nine where no one goes/ I brought a pillow for your precious head/ You'll be fine once you get to know me again."

In February, Yep Roc reissued an earlier Minus 5 record with ties to Wilco, a slightly re-configured version of 2000's self-released "In Rock." There are no Wilco members on the album, but McCaughey wrote the bulk of the songs to do a gig with Wilco as an ad hoc Minus 5.

"Sue Miller [Tweedy's wife] wanted the Fellows to play at the end of Lounge Ax [her Chicago nightclub], maybe even be the last band to play, and everyone was like, 'Well, I don't want to fly out there just for one show.' "

So Tweedy volunteered his bandmates, and rather than make them learn a bunch of old McCaughey songs from a tape, he figured he'd just write some new songs, with an eye toward making them easy to learn -- or not quite learn so much as play without learning.

"I wrote a bunch of those songs about a week before I went out there," he says, "and tried to make 'em simple garage-rock songs that we could play without rehearsing. 'Courage is the Smallest Bird.' 'Lies of the Living Dead.' 'In a Lonely Coffin.' All of those, I kind of wrote to go out there and play with Wilco. And then, I pulled some stuff together that I thought would be cool. I kind of updated 'I'm Not Bitter' to play at that show. And then, once I played that with them, I kind of saved it for recording until I did the record with them."

He recorded the songs back home in Seattle with a band that was quickly becoming an "official" Minus 5 -- two of his R.E.M. bandmates, Buck and new drummer Bill Rieflin, and John Ramberg of the Model Rockets. Guests include John Wesley Harding, Chris Ballew and Kurt Bloch of the Fellows.

The end result is a rock 'n' roll record that sounds a lot more like the Fellows than the Minus 5.

In fact, McCaughey confesses that he would have done them with the Fellows if the Fellows had been doing things.

"We just weren't playing," he says. "And I was just like, well, I've been writing these songs. I should just play them. There have been some songs I've written in the past two or three years that maybe the Fellows played the few times we've gotten together. And most of those I kind of save, thinking we might record another record. Just in case. But who knows when we're gonna do something. So if the opportunity comes for a Minus 5 show and we want to learn a new song or something. ... The Minus 5, when we play now, is pretty much a rock band, so the difference between the Minus 5 and the Fellows has gotten blurrier, as far as the musical styles we play. The records are still pretty different, I would say. Except 'In Rock.' "

In May, the Fellows made their first live appearance in nearly two years at a tribute. To the Fellows.

They played first, a concession to drummer Tad Hutchinson, whose reluctance to play is the primary reason the Fellows have gone missing.

"Tad just isn't really fired up to play live, at least with the Fellows," McCaughey says. "So we just end up turning down most everything we're asked to do. Jim [Sangster] and Kurt want to do it, and Tad doesn't. I get the message. He didn't even want to do that tribute show. They wanted us to play on it, and he came up with the condition that he would do it if we played first, so we played first and then the rest of the night all these other bands played our songs. And it was fine. It was great. But he gets really nervous or something, and he thought he wouldn't have to wait around all night being nervous."

Still, there's hope.

As McCaughey recalls what he labels a "classic Tad" moment, "So the other day, I'm playing a solo show in Seattle, opening for, like, the Makers. I'm playing the third song, and all of the sudden, there's somebody playing drums with me. And I look down, and Tad has come in with this drum set and set up on the floor in front of me and just started playing along."

He laughs and says, "I didn't even see him, you know? I had my eyes closed or was concentrating on playing the song right and all of the sudden, he's just down there on the floor of the club playing drums. And then, he played the whole rest of the set. I guess he likes to play as long as no one knows he's gonna be there playing."

Chances are, he won't be flying in his kit to join McCaughey at Club Cafe, where he'll be playing Minus 5 and Fellows songs Saturday night as part of Harding's All-Male Threesome.