The legendary folk pop trio refuses to be forgotten, and returns to Bainbridge Friday.

Told that the phrase “Will Uncle Bonsai ever go away?” fits perfectly in the allotted space for a feature headline, Arni Adler laughs.

“Thanks a lot,” says Adler, one-third of the long-running, satirical folk pop group. “I assure you, someday we will permanently go away. It seems to happen to the best of us.”

After a moment’s thought, she adds:

“Maybe what you’re doing is giving us a compliment by saying there’s serious staying power in this kind of songwriting approach.”

That much is true.

If you were anywhere in the vicinity of a college radio station in the mid-1980s, you couldn’t escape such Bonsai ditties as “Cheerleaders on Drugs” and “Boys Want Sex in the Morning,” which provoked FCC ire but delighted free-thinking listeners nationwide.

Twenty years later, there’s still a market – intel­lectual, if not obviously commercial – for wry songs that dissect male-female relationships one minute, family restaurants or highway billboards the next, all in exquisite three-part harmony.

Uncle Bonsai returns to Bainbridge Island at 8 p.m. Friday at Island Center Hall. It’s an encore of sorts to last year’s sold-out performance at the same venue, their first island engagement in nearly two decades.

The trio – Adler, Ashley O’Keeffe and eternally po-faced guitarist Andrew Ratshin – crossed paths in the late 1970s at tiny Bennington College in Vermont. If it was fate that brought them together, that fact was not immediately apparent.

“We actually didn’t like each other,” Adler recalls. “You know how you have that chemistry with people when you meet for the first time? We didn’t. We had friction for each other. It set us off on this weird footing to begin with.”

While none of the three were originally from the Northwest, they all wound up in Seattle after college in 1981.

Adler, who hoped to pursue a career in theater, and music-biz aspirant Ratshin were sharing a house with a mutual friend – still generally at odds, but with a common taste in music – when they answered a newspaper ad from a woman named Ashley who hoped to sing with a folk group.

“Andrew said, ‘well, how many ‘Ashley folk singers’ can there be in Seattle?’” Adler says. “He had a hunch it was her. Little did he know, it was a life-changing hunch.”

Sure enough, the notice had been placed by their non-chum from college. But this time, they found enough common ground to put together an act.

Their first gig was at Bumbershoot – actually, outside the festival gate, where they busked their way to admission fare.

“We had like three or five songs,” Adler says, “but the lines were moving, so we could keep repeating them. When we had enough money, we went in.”

Up, then down

A year later, they were welcomed through the gates not as concert-goers but as performers, opening for Firesign Theatre in the Seattle Opera House.

A date with Louden Wainwright III in Manhattan garnered positive notice in the New York Times. Soon Uncle Bonsai was hopscotching music clubs and KOA campgrounds across the country, playing with Suzanne Vega and They Might Be Giants.

A series of independently released albums followed, and the band even came close to getting a big-label contract, requisite for success in the days before small bands could market their own music through the internet.

On the cusp of signing with Island Records and a celebrated producer, Bonsai’s career hit a wall – their champion at the label unexpectedly died, and with him, their chance at a big-time deal. Another major imprint came knocking sometime later, but by then, the bloom was off the bonsai.

“We were getting bored with each other and ourselves and the music,” Adler says. “We needed a break. We’d spent too long in a motor home together.”

For their finale in 1989, they played before 8,000 concert-goers at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Adler, who was nine months pregnant, celebrated the end of one phase of her life and the beginning of another.

The hiatus lasted nine years, during which time Adler did mom things along with stints with Microsoft and the Experience Music Project. She now does staff development for a non-profit agency promoting the arts and literacy in struggling Seattle schools.

Ratshin started his own record label and does gigs as the Electric Bonsai Band, which is neither.

O’Keeffe wound up in the Midwest, where she works for John Deere and delivers eggs.

“She has a completely different life,” Adler says, “because it’s Iowa.”

Since 1998, the group has reconstituted itself a couple of times a year for gigs as opportunities come up. But long-time fans shouldn’t expect an oldies revue; Uncle Bonsai shows these days include about one-third classics, two-thirds new material.

“Songs that you did when you were 25 feel different, and in some cases feel completely, I don’t want to say inappropriate, but you just don’t relate to them anymore in your 40s,” Adler says.

One song Bonsai no longer performs is the one for which they’re probably best remembered: “Penis Envy.”

A withering critique of Freudian phallocentrism, the song concludes with a lyrical brick hurled at the corporate glass ceiling:

“If I had a penis I’d still be a girl/but I’d make much more money and conquer the world.”

Adler thinks the song is still contemporary and relevant, even if it has fallen from Bonsai’s live repertoire.

“I kind of wish we still sang it,” she says. “Women (still) don’t make as much men, there aren’t as many women in Congress, there hasn’t been a woman president. Just look around – it’s clear that women have not quite achieved equal pay for equal work.

“I stand behind that song, so to speak.”

The Bonsai catalog has had its share of serious, even poignant songs. But if newer material like “Doug’s Divorce, Part 2” treads similar ground as oldies like “I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, I’m Trying to Read,” Adler says only this: “There’s a dark cynicism that’s constant. But that’s just who we are.”

So will Uncle Bonsai ever go away? Adler admits that changing life circumstances make it increasingly difficult for the trio to get together, even though the folk idiom is wholly forgiving of performers in early middle age.

“I can speak from personal desire and wishes,” she says. “I think that there’s this body of material and there are these three people with a specific relationship, and I don’t see anyone else doing quite this kind of thing. Although that’s maybe an external way to look at it.

“As long as it’s the fun thing to do and people want to listen to it, maybe we won’t go away, dammit.”

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Funny uncle

Seattle-based folk-pop trio Uncle Bonsai plays at 8 p.m. Friday at Island Center Hall. Tickets are $17 advance at Glass Onion and Vern’s Winlsow Drug, $20 at the door. The band’s CDs are available online at www.unclebonsai.com.