It's official: Bowling for Soup has hit legal drinking age.
Texas' premier pop-punk band launched 21 years ago in Wichita Falls before eventually moving to Denton and breaking nationally. Since those early days of nightly rehearsals in their small town, the thrills of touring and recording have yet to stop for Jaret Reddick, bassist Erik Chandler, guitarist Chris Burney and drummer Gary Wiseman (who joined in 1998).
We chatted with Reddick by phone recently, on the actual 21st anniversary of Bowling for Soup's formation. He said that despite the challenges that face all legacy acts in staying relevant, he feels that his once-Grammy-nominated band is in as fruitful a place as ever.
Following its successful run on last year's Warped Tour and this year's briskly selling retrospective album of rerecorded hits (Songs People Actually Liked, Vol. 1), Bowling for Soup is back on the road celebrating its milestone anniversary. Fans seeing the guys at House of Blues on Saturday should look for plenty of tomfoolery and drinking on stage, but should also expect tightly delivered takes on two decades of melodic, catchy material. So far, the crowd reactions to the current tour have exceeded Reddick's expectations.
"We're drawing three times more people in every city than we were a few years ago," he said. "A lot of our fans are seeing us for the first time but have been listening to us since they were 11 years old."
Here's more from the chat with Reddick.
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Take me back to the beginning of the band - what kind of guys were you back then and what motivated you to chase the music dream?
By the time Bowling for Soup started up, we had all been in successful bands around Wichita Falls, so we knew where to go to make T-shirts, and do gigs, and market ourselves and all that stuff. We held down day jobs — I was working a few, actually. But there wasn't a lot to do outside of working and going home to watch TV. So we threw everything into it, not for any other reason than we enjoyed it. We'd rehearse six nights a week. A couple of years into it, it started to seem like we had something unique. We still didn't have a lot of fans, though. That's what drove us to Denton, where we immediately caught on. Being in Texas, there was nobody that sounded like us at the time.
You hit at a time when pop-punk was king and got signed to Jive Records. What has been your approach to staying current and productive since then?
Once "Girl All the Bad Guys Want" and "1985" and "Almost" were huge on pop radio, we were never going to get back into the mainstream of being a punk-rock band. But lyrically, I feel like country has influenced me a lot over the years. I write songs on acoustic guitar, and they always sound like country songs first. But as far as our longevity, I told the guys from the beginning, "Let's not get U2 big, because that fall is gonna suck. Let's get Everclear big, where we play for nice crowds and people know who we are, but nobody has a chance to get really sick of us." I have to laugh looking back because that was 19 years ago, and that is sort of what we did. We just got to a really cool plateau, and we're going around making a living at it. I'm 42 years old and I'm playing every House of Blues in the country.
And you still have as much fun doing it as you always did?
Yes. Thing is — and we do this to ourselves — but we do get tired faster. We don't have a filter. My fiancée asks me, "Do you ever think you'll go out on the road and just act like a grown man?" And I'm like, "No, no I'm not." We get on that bus and everybody's 22 again. ... The big thing that's changed is we have people doing different jobs now. We have a tour manager, a guitar tech, that kind of thing. But as far as the overall touring vibe, it's the same.
