What musician hasn’t daydreamed about receiving a phone call from Clive Davis? Mike Szuter certainly did, and his conversation with the industry mogul changed his life. Only not at all the way he’d envisioned.

“That singular phone call sent me into a six-month depression,” says Szuter, frontman for Vegas hard-rock band Magna-Fi. “It made me not want to play, not want to do anything.”

Just what had Davis said? “He basically said, ‘I think your album is great, and some of these songs are potential hits,’” Szuter says. “And I was like, ‘Cool!’ and then he said, ‘But you guys are too old to do this. Nobody’s gonna sign you, and I wouldn’t sign you, because of how old you are.’”

Szuter, 37 at the time and 40 now, hung up the phone and, for all intents and purposes, ended Magna-Fi, a band that had climbed to the precipice of big-time success after forming in 2000. The quartet had joined the likes of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Slayer for 40 dates on Ozzfest 2004, landed a 2005 slot as the tour opener for Sevendust and, according to Szuter, saw a pair of singles from debut album Burn Out the Stars reach the 30s on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.

But then the band, which had already seen original indie label Gold Circle Records go belly-up, left second label Aezra Records over a creative conflict just before Aezra, too, went under, leaving Magna-Fi to self-record its follow-up, VerseChorusKillMe.

That disc—a professional-sounding 11-song stomp through metal, radio-ready hard rock and Vines-ish garage territory—earned the group a series of A&R showcases and meetings, most of which concluded with concerns over Szuter’s age. “They said, ‘Your lead singer is too old,’” he says. “After that, I couldn’t see a reason to get out there and do anything. If we couldn’t take it to the next level, why do it?”

Although Magna-Fi maintained an active website (magna-fi.com) and sold copies of VerseChorusKillMe through iTunes and CDBaby.com (Szuter estimates 5,000 copies have gone out), the band didn’t play a live show for two years. Until November 12, when Szuter, guitarist Chris Brady, bassist Robert Kley and drummer Charlie Smaldino (original guitarist C.J. Szuter, Mike’s brother, had moved to Ohio prior to VerseChorusKillMe) reunited to open for Mudvayne at the Joint.

“We’d gotten a lot of offers to play over the years, and the other guys were into doing it, but I had to get past what I was feeling,” says Szuter, who plays guitar full-time in the Venetian’s Blue Man Group production. “When that call [for the Mudvayne gig] came, it just felt right. And it was a really good show, really fun. A few people there knew who we were, but a lot of people who were really into it were shouting, ‘Who are you guys?’”

So is Magna-Fi officially back? Not exactly, at least not in the traditional sense—they won’t be playing bars or vanning to Southern California anytime soon. But Szuter says he’s open to performing again; he’s already been approached about doing an upcoming Wasted Space show.

“Ours is sort of a cautionary tale,” Szuter says. “You work for 15 years, and you don’t get a paycheck, but eventually you get to a point where they give you all your paychecks at once. Not getting to that point was kind of a bummer, and I was a pretty unhappy guy for a long time. But I came out the other end. To be able to step back and appreciate what we did has made me a lot happier.”