Joe Portugal has had a welcome three-year respite from stumbling over dead bodies. He's replaced his amateur crimestopper career with a bad case of ennui. He still lives on the income from acting in a few commercials a year and has settled into a routine of sleeping with his best friend, Gina Vela, and not thinking about what it all means. A trip to an Aerosmith concert convinces Joe he should return to the music career he abandoned thirty years ago. Gina buys him an amplifier for his birthday. He starts to play again.

A couple of months later he comes home from the market to find two weirdoes waiting for him. Turns out they're members of the best band Joe was ever in, the Platypuses, who got together in 1968 at a Hollywood home for wayward teens. Squig Jones, the keyboard player, is five feet tall and a total goof. Bassist Woz Wozniak is a semi-psychotic thug. They're getting the Platypuses back together, at the insigation of vocalist Bonnie Chapman, the girl Joe let get away way back when, now a record company president. Drummer Frampton Washington's already been recruited. This leaves only lead guitarist Toby Bonner, music industry legend, whom no one has seen in twenty years.