Though it's been around since the mid-'90s, the New York band Fountains of Wayne [ tickets ] is just now getting its first real taste of power-pop stardom.

Thanks mostly to their 2003 album, "Welcome Interstate Managers," which came close to topping The White Stripes' bragging rights for most ubiquitous CD on critics' year-ending top-ten charts, and helped by their biggest single to date, "Stacy's Mom," (and accompanying video starring Rachel Hunter), the Fountains are experiencing a well-deserved surge in popularity.

At the Wiltern LG on Saturday night (5/15), the band seemed ready to savor every minute of this new fame with giddy abandon--even if the Lakers playoff game going on a few miles away may have kept the crowd well under capacity.

Led by co-songwriters Chris Collingwood (lead vocals) and Adam Schlesinger (bass), the band plowed through the best of their three albums with a good sampling of rock-star moves (the windmill, drumsticks thrown into the audience) and infectious energy refreshingly free of any indie-rock irony.

Their songs--often tales of people stuck in dead-end jobs, rush-hour traffic or teenage boredom--drew a crowd of literally all ages (try 6 to 60), and a healthy geek contingent ("This is the second show in a row I've seen an ‘I love dorks' T-shirt," Schlesinger commented at one point. "What are you trying to say?"). But this didn't stop the band from playing its proclaimed "drinking songs"--"Mexican Wine" and "Bright Future in Sales"--or from recognizing its classic-rock influences. The opener, "I've Got Flair," seeped into the "Layla" guitar solo, and with a little band conferring between licks, "Radiation Vibe" quickly turned into Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner," Foreigner's "Double Vision" and Kansas' "Carry on Wayward Son," then back to the "baby, baby, baby" of the first song.

But while it's obvious that Collingwood and Schlesinger have spent plenty of time listening to rock gods of the past, Fountains songs are clearly their own creation. Tunes like "Hey Julie" mix happy melodies with amazingly poppy, rhyming lyrics: "working all day for a mean little man/with a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan." And others, like "Leave the Biker," are hilarious, while still filling us with amused, but honest, empathy: "He's got his arms around every man's dream/And crumbs in his beard from the seafood special/Oh can't you see my world is falling apart/Baby please leave the biker/Leave the biker, break his heart."

You get the feeling the songwriters have personal experience with dismal office jobs and unrequited romance--"I used to know you when we were young/You were in all my dreams," Collingwood sings to a high school crush in the great "Hackensack." But now he sees her "talkin' to Christopher Walken/On my TV screen." If all disgruntled workers were this musically talented, we'd have a nationwide corporate walk-out on our hands.

The Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith, who contributed vocals to Fountains' second album, "Utopia Parkway," opened for the band. Another master lyricist deserving much more recognition, you can only hope that--even if it takes a "Stacy's Mom" and a supermodel in a video--he will soon stumble upon some bigger stardom of his own.