OK, so maybe Bowling For Soup isn’t technically classic rock, but would you believe us if we told you that Denton’s finest pop-punkers are celebrating 30 years in the game? Frontman Jaret Reddick is just as shocked.
“It's pretty wild to think about. It's over half of mine and Chris [Burney]’s lives,” he says. “For lack of a better word, it's triumphant. None of us would have told you 30 years ago that we would be doing this in 30 years. I feel very lucky.”
Bowling For Soup’s origins date back to the early '90s in Wichita Falls, where Reddick and guitarist Chris Burney went to high school together. Reddick calls his ability to remember every show he’s ever played over the years “uncanny” and a “curse/gift.” If he can’t recall off the top of his head, he says he can usually get it with one or two context clues. So when we asked about the first show the band ever played, he was quick to answer, despite the decades that have evaporated.
“Our very first show was the citywide fireworks display festival for Wichita Falls," he says. "And so at our first show, we already had TV coverage and a stand full of people. We weren't very good yet, but we certainly started off with a bang.”
Bowling For Soup soon relocated to Denton, which they’ve always considered their homebase, and the rest is, well, history. They signed a deal with an independent local label and released their first EP within three months. Before long, they were scooped up by Jive Records and charting a course to mainstream success. Their second record with Jive, Drunk Enough to Dance, dropped in 2002 with their first big hit “Girl All the Bad Guys Want,” which got major radio play and landed the group a Grammy nom in the Best Pop Performance by Duo or Group With Vocals category.
“We sort of burned it all down — we sold everything or put everything in storage and just went for it,” Reddick says. “It's hard to even think about where we would have landed, had it not worked out. But I think that's probably why it did; we literally gave it everything we had.”
Success certainly didn’t come easily, though. The group toured in a van for a grueling nine years and, during that time, they stayed wherever it was affordable, but Reddick and original bassist, Erik Chandler, “pretty much lived” in that van, the singer says. Despite the challenges of the early days of Bowling for Soup, Reddick remembers them fondly.
“We were privy to the fact that we were actually experiencing what would be the absolute best times of our lives," he says. "We laughed constantly although we went through hardships together. We’d leave out for a few months and go on tour and when we got back, I literally divided up all the money and, that's what you got. I mean, that's what you had and to live off of until we did it again. But, you know, it's funny I wouldn't trade any of it, because when we go to start telling stories, 90% of them come from those days.”
Back in “those days” (the late '90s and early aughts) and unbeknownst to them in the moment, Bowling for Soup was literally creating a new genre of music. Pop-punk was in its infancy at the time, and the Texas natives were coming up alongside heavy hitters Green Day and Blink-182, who were still more punk than pop. Reddick recalls that here in the Lone Star State, where groups such as Tripping Daisy, The Nixons and Toadies reigned supreme, the genre was even slower to gain traction.
“It was a little strange for us because we didn't sound like anybody else. There were bands that did punk, and there was a lot of rap-rock back then," Reddick says. "We sort of felt like we were on an island. But what got us shows was that we were funny, and so bands would have us come out because they were like, ‘Oh man, our crowd's gonna love you.’”
Indeed they did. Bowling for Soup quickly gained a well-deserved reputation for their endearing onstage banter, something that has not changed at all over the years. They know how to keep a crowd engaged. But being known for their antics wasn’t all fun and games — sometimes the music took a backseat in fans’ minds.
“There's a lot of respect for our band now, where I think in the past people sort of shrugged us off as being silly, just because we were funny and light-hearted and didn't take ourselves seriously,” Reddick says. “Once you get this longevity, that sort of all just fades away. We haven't changed; we haven't tried to evolve into something else. We've gotten better, at least as players and as writers.”
A Long Bowl
This year also marks the 20th anniversary of Bowling for Soup’s most popular album, A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, which gave us some of our favorite pop-punk anthems: “1985,” “Almost” and “Ohio (Come Back to Texas).” Reddick says that the group went into the creation process feeling very little pressure, since they had already had a hit with their previous album. “There is no way I thought it was gonna be as big as it was," he says. "I mean, just the fact that every morning when we’d turn on the TV, we're on VH1 and, you know, just how big it was all over the world. To talk to you now, 20 years later, there's those songs that are gonna live forever, and that's wild to me.”
Yeah, yeah. We know that if the song “1985” came out now it would be called “2005” (sighs in millennial). Reddick is well aware of the parodies that circulate on social media, too, and he loves seeing them.
“It never gets old for me,” he says. “People keep asking when I'm gonna rewrite it and I'm like, ‘Man, I don't know that I have to'; I feel like everybody's handling it for us. I’m always just so flattered and, and it's so interesting for me to hear people put their perspective on it.”
To commemorate both major milestones, Bowling For Soup will take over Lava Cantina in The Colony for two nights. On May 31, they’ll play a retrospective set celebrating their three decades as a band, and on June 1, fans can hear A Hangover You Don’t Deserve in all its glory.
But don’t worry, these pop-punk pioneers don’t plan to stop anytime soon.
“If 20 years ago, you would have asked me how much longer are y'all gonna do this? I'd be like, ‘I don't know, you know, not very much longer, I guess. It's not like I'm gonna be in my 50s doing this.’ And here I am, I'm 52 years old,” Reddick says with a laugh. “There's a resurgence in pop-punk; everybody's out there doing it … it's a good time to be in Bowling For Soup.”
