The Dexateens are still together, just not the original lineup. Not since 2000.

That’s 23 years since Craig Gates (guitar), Elliott McPherson (guitar, vocals), Matt Patton (bass), Craig Pickering (drums) and John Smith (guitar) played music in the same room.

On Saturday, they pick up where they left off little more than two decades ago.

“We’re going that many years with no practice and just gonna jump right into it,” McPherson said. “Hopefully it’ll be magical and not a trainwreck. But if it’s a trainwreck, it’ll still be a magical trainwreck, I’m sure. So I just want it to sound good. I want people to have a good time and feel like they’re getting a good show.”

The Dexateens certainly aren’t inactive. Now seven years removed from their latest studio album “Teenage Hallelujah,” they gig on occasion, as recently as last May at Mom’s Basement in Birmingham.

On Saturday after 11 p.m., the original five reunite on the Moon Room stage at Druid City Brewing Company, and at a reunion no less. They’ll close The Chukker Weekender, a weekend event commemorating of Tuscaloosa’s favorite bars, which closed for good 20 years ago to the day on Halloween night.

Matt Patton, The Dexateens bass player also currently playing the same instrument for Drive-By Truckers and leading his own project Model Citizen, organized the event with many others, inviting more than a dozen bands, poets and comics to celebrate the bar they loved — the one that helped the Tuscaloosa-born Southern punk rock band form and flourish as one of the state’s most celebrated groups.

The band formed in 1998, often playing hometown shows at The Chukker downtown and Egan’s on the Strip closer to the University of Alabama. McPherson, Gates and Smith all came from Montgomery, Patton from Jasper, and Pickering from Laurel, Mississippi. They recorded their first two albums “The Dexateens” (2004) and “Red Dust Rising” (2005) with Estrus Records out of Washington before working with Birmingham’s Skybucket Records on “Hardwire Healing,” co-produced by Patterson Hood and David Barbe in Athens, Georgia.

Shortly after, Pickering (known to all as “Sweet Dog”) left the band, and was replaced by Brian Gosdin. The departure splintered the group. ”It wasn’t pleasant,” Patton said. In 2010, after the release of their fourth record “Singlewide” (also with Skybucket), John Smith also left the band, as would Craig Gates.

With Patton going back and forth between the group and the Truckers, that left McPherson picking up the pieces with new members like Lee Bains, Brad Armstrong and Taylor Hollingsworth. They also recorded an album in 2016, called “Teenage Hallelujah,” with Cornelius Chapel Records.

The different iterations, the live shows, the recording — all of it has created distance from any would-be lingering “drama.”

“I think time has healed all of that,” Patton said. “It seemed less weird doing a reunion when other times, it felt weird. Even though we were friendly, all these years, it felt awkward to consider playing together again. But now enough time has passed that all of that stuff has melted away.”

To organize The Chukker Weekender meant bringing back The Dexateens for Patton, who said it didn’t require much heavy lifting. Everyone was down. “It turns out all you had to do was ask. It wasn’t hard,” Patton said. “As soon as I put it out there, everybody was a yes. It just seemed like any drama just sort of melted away, and that was over with. It was simple as could be.”

McPherson said Patton didn’t give the rest of them much of a choice. “I remember he just started talking about, like, ‘This is what we were doing.’ I don’t think he asked anybody’s permission, which is fine. If it was a problem, we wouldn’t have done it. It was a good idea,” McPherson said. “I talk to Sweet Dog now a couple of times a year. I connected with Craig Gates again this year. And we’ve been friends all this time. It’s not that we weren’t friends. It’s just life, as they say. But yeah, we’re all really excited. We’re texting all day, every day about it. It’s really cool.”

Re-piecing the original five would mean something “extra special” for the group and the band’s longtime fans, Patton said. And they also missed out on playing The Chukker’s final show in 2003, so they prioritized the reunion. “Someone hung a Dexateens T-shirt on stage [at The Chukker in 2003] because we couldn’t be there,” Patton said, “and I always thought that was so touching.”

For Druid City Brewing owner Bo Hicks, his fandom stretches back even further, all the way to McPherson’s previous band The Phoebes. He remembers parking on a hill in his hometown Brookwood to pick up the signal for WVUA, the University of Alabama’s student-run radio station that often programmed local music.

“Hearing that first Dexateens album, knowing something that f—ing rocking could come from Tuscaloosa,” Hick said. “I know they’re all nice dudes now, but I remember being so — “intimidated” is probably the wrong word, but so worried I would mess up around all these super-cool people. And it turns out they were like anybody else. They were just dudes who liked to rock.”

A musician himself who played percussion in well-known Tuscaloosa bands like Chinese Dentist and Baak Gwai, Hicks has maintained a foothold in the local scene and relationships with artists who often perform at his brewery. McPherson, who owns a cabinetry business, even built the bar in the Druid City location across the parking lot at Parkview Center.

“It’s gonna blow my mind to see them all back together because they’ve gone through a couple of lineup changes,” Hicks said. “All of them were righteously rock. It’s going to be really interesting, and I know it’s going to be cathartic for them to be back together. Especially as we get older. They have kids. This whole scene, it’s going to be really cool. I’m going to be ecstatic to see them.”

They haven’t played a lick in 23 years. Not one. At least, not together. And they don’t plan to practice before Saturday either. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a plan. Patton said that several years before they ever signed a deal, they had another set of songs that don’t get played very often. They plan to at least give those songs a shot this time. “I’m excited about putting that version back on stage, playing first tunes we came up with,” he said. “People can see where we’ve evolved from.”

McPherson couldn’t help but laugh when asked about what fans might hear from that stage, as though he can’t believe people are excited for this reunion. “The plan originally was to play the stuff that Craig Gates was on, and I think we just realized that’s not realistic,” he said. “So we’re going to do a lot of that stuff. And some of that he sings — good songs, too. We’ll do stuff from the first two Estrus records or the only two, the ones Dog was on. The ones we always would do. It’s going to be the same-old-same-old, plus a couple of different things that people haven’t heard in 20-something years.”

But all these years later, what will it mean to them to connect through music again? They’ve all moved on with their lives, making time for music: McPherson with his cabinetry, Patton with the Truckers. Gates does graphic design. Pickering got his commercial driver’s license and drives trucks. Smith is a college professor in Nashville. Is it just another rock show, or something more?

“I don’t know. My life is going so fast, I really haven’t spent a lot of time to think about it. I figured I would think about it on Sunday morning. But I have no idea,” McPherson said. “It’s amazed me how excited everybody’s gotten. That’s what surprises me, that it’s just important to a whole lot of people. It’s really weird. It’s like a real-life ‘Cheers’ or something, like ‘Cheers for the Weird.’ It’s just crazy. Old friends, like a fraternity of freaks kind of thing. It’s awesome. I love it.”

Patton remembered the early bond the bandmates shared. They idolized a local band, American Cosmic, with whom John Smith also played. They would often jam on their song “Lost and Found,” even covering the song at shows, something they could cherish together as they embarked on a journey that mattered to each of them.

“We may not always get along, but at the core, there’s a real fellowship and brotherhood there, and it’s gonna come back around. I’m so thrilled and happy to see it,” Patton said. “I can’t wait to see everybody. That’s the main thing. We just can’t wait to see one another.”