It’s been 13 years since Berkeley punk heroes Operation Ivy broke up, but the band’s legacy has never stopped growing. Their only album, Operation Ivy (Lookout!), is an all-time punk classic, and guitarist Tim Armstrong and bassist Matt Freeman are the heart and soul of one of the genre’s most enduringly popular bands — Rancid. The mid-’90s punk explosion, the effects of which are still being felt today, would never have taken place without them. The biggest punk band in the world, Green Day, are such big Op Ivy fans that they still cover the group’s signature song, "Knowledge," at all their shows.

The most intriguing part of the Op Ivy legend has always been the prolonged silence of frontman Jesse Michaels, whose spiritual lyrics and rousing delivery were at the center of the group’s appeal. About the same time most of his punk contemporaries were becoming rock stars, Michaels was leaving the scene altogether: he spent the ’90s going to college, studying Buddhism, and working as a visual artist, among other things. Then, three years ago, he resurfaced with a new band, Common Rider, featuring bassist Mass Giorgini and drummer Dan Lumley of Squirtgun. Their first album, Last Wave Rockers (Lookout!), was a characteristically uplifting take on the Op Ivy ska-punk template, but they were conspicuously absent from the touring circuit.

Now Michaels is pushing Common Rider to the next level with a new album, This Is Unity Music, on the hot So Cal indie label Hopeless. The band are also taking part in the second annual Plea for Peace Take Action Tour, a benefit for the Kristin Brooks Hope Center suicide-prevention organization that will kick off this Friday at the Palladium in Worcester. It’s Michaels’s first national tour since the Op Ivy days, and the revolving cast of punk luminaries on the bill — Thursday, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, and Snapcase headline the Worcester show — makes it an appropriately high-profile coming-out party for Common Rider.

Speaking over the phone from LA, where the band are playing a short stretch of record-release shows before the tour starts, he sounds excited to be back on the scene. "When we signed to Hopeless, they really encouraged us to tour. We’d been thinking about trying to do Plea for Peace for a while, so it just seemed to be good timing. We always take things one step at a time, and this is the biggest step we’ve ever taken — you know, two months on the road. So we’re gonna see how it goes and then take a break and see what the next move is. But so far, things have just kept getting more committed and more active, and I imagine it’ll keep going that way."

Michaels traveled from his home in Berkeley to record This Is Unity Music in Lafayette, Indiana, where Giorgini and Lumley are based. He and Phillip Hill of Teen Idols contributed the disc’s searing, Clash-inspired guitar work (Hill and guitarist Joe Mizzi are touring with the band, since Michaels doesn’t play guitar live), and Audrey Marrs of Mocket helped flesh out the group’s roots-heavy racket with a couple of quirky keyboard parts. Michaels’s love for ska is undiminished, but he’s a far more sophisticated musician than he was in the Op Ivy days: the propulsive "Cool this Madness Down" makes room for big pop vocal harmonies, and "Set the Method Down" nods to Fugazi-style dissonance.

Michaels also remains a smart, compassionate lyricist, as the slow-burning parable "Small Pebble" attests. "I would say ‘Small Pebble’ very much sums up the ideas on the record. For one thing, it’s political: it’s about the smaller person finding inner strength and overcoming obstacles. For another thing, it’s spiritual, because it’s about strength coming from within. Strength not coming from money or power but strength coming from believing in one’s own heart. We’re not always that serious, but that’s probably the main thrust of our lyrics."

The cover of This Is Unity Music, a cute photo of a baby reaching out a window, is another good example of Michaels’s vision of punk as a vehicle for both righteousness and whimsy. "Someone told me about a survey where they showed a lot of different people images to see what people like. It was for an advertising company, and unanimously, everybody always liked babies. So I thought it would be cool to put a baby on the record. In the picture, the baby’s obviously reaching for the light, and we’re trying to stay positive, so it seemed to match the theme of the lyrics. Although someone did ask us why we were throwing the baby out the window. I guess not everyone gets it, but some people do."

Common Rider perform on the Plea for Peace Take Action Tour 2002 this Friday, September 13, at the Palladium in Worcester. Call (508) 797-9696.