Interview // Bowling for Soup

“Every April” “Steve Martin joke” “October” “Ticket details on www.bowlingforsoup.com” “I love all our albums the same”. It’s daunting when an artist’s Twitter account shows a Retweet from someone making a point that when interviewed, Bowling for Soup are always asked the same questions – those being the answers. How do you even scratch the surface of a band who’ve stayed dominant for over 16 years? You know what the sweet thing is? Bowling for Soup frontman Jaret Reddick would never make you feel concerned, as we found out spending 20 minutes on the line with him…

Where are you right now, sir?

I am at my house, in Dallas, Texas. Just finished taking care of the morning routine round here, taking the kids to school, went to the gym, making a little breakfast and now I’m talking to you.

So the summer tour’s done –

- Yes, all the summer stuff is done, and I guess we’re just pretty much off until we head over to you in the UK in a couple of weeks actually, so it’s quite a slow September for us. We’ve just come back from Cuba, where we went over there to celebrate Labor Day Weekend and played for the Navy over there in Guantanamo Bay, now we’re back and just gearing up for the tour in a couple of weeks.

Tell me how it works – and forgive me if I’m wrong – but isn’t it very difficult for musicians to play in Cuba if you’re from America?

Yes, it’s very difficult, but we were strictly on the military base there, which actually makes it even more amazing for us, because those troops are over there and are pretty much secluded from the world, I mean they can’t leave base, so they’re entertained by what comes to them. Cell phones are a little bit sketchy, internet’s a little bit sketchy, so they’re definitely very, very thankful when someone comes over, and we try and do a lot like that; we’ve played in military bases all over the world. When you’re old and fat and in a rock band, it’s the thing you can do to give a little back!

That’s wicked – do they always react really well?

They do. They’re honestly so starved of entertainment that it doesn’t really matter what we do! I mean it helps that they know our songs, but we’ve played with bands all the time in those situations where they don’t know any of their songs at all, but the reaction is still really positive because they’re very thankful that we’re there, and we’re very thankful of the job they do.

I guess it allows you to go to Cuba too, but it must be quite bittersweet if you don’t get to see much of it.

Well we did see some of it; the base is so big there to give the soldiers something to do that we did get to go to the ocean, and we did get to go fishing. Ironically we went bowling! It was actually really fun. We got to see a lot of beautiful scenery and a lot of it untouched. That was the thing with being in the ocean down there  – you know, I’ve been down to the Caribbean a lot since I was a kid, I’ve seen those beautiful waters – but there, just ‘cause there’s no boats coming in and out of it, it’s just beautiful untouched water.

Not like the Gulf of Mexico then?! It’s lookin’ a little messy right now…

Haha! It was dirty already, but oh man, it’s an unfortunate event, but hopefully they’ll get it cleaned up as soon as possible.

You mentioned going to the gym… were you being honest with me?

I was being honest with you, yeah! We try to take care of ourselves – we’re in our 30s now and it’s not like whenever it was in our 20s, and even our early 30s – we used to be able to jump around on stage two or three times a week, drink as much beer as we want and everything sorta maintained itself. Now you’ve gotta get in there and try to get in at least decent rock shape for 18 shows in 18 dates in the UK in October.

That’s a heavy schedule, isn’t it?

It is for us, but we don’t really like days off, especially when we’re in other countries, you know – we’re not amazing tourists. Doing tourist-y things – unless it’s organised, like doing things with the military or whatever, when we’re just in, say, the UK or Japan there’s so many of us. By the time you start thinking about moving 14,15 people around there’s just not much point. It’s not really worth it. We end up just sitting around, but we try and make all of our days busy and then we can go back home, into our corner and try to recover for the next time.

I can check 4square later then and it’ll show me you definitely went to the gym… Haha

I did! And you can – I checked in!

I will be checking that later just to make sure.

OK, you can, I’m not fibbing!

So you’re down with 4square, you’re on Twitter, you keep a regular blog – and I did watch the amazing first episode of ‘In My Car’…

Haha, thankyou. The social networking thing is crazy. I have Twitter, I have Say Now, I have Formspring, a Facebook for me, a Facebook for the band, then a fan Facebook thing and it just goes on and on. I do a podcast, we do a regular You Stream thing every once in a while and then – THEN there’s this thing called Ping and I don’t even know what the hell that is but I gotta figure that out evidently!

Oh, that’s the new iTunes thing isn’t it?

Yeah, evidently we already have a Ping site, but I don’t know anything about it, so I sort of wait for my managers to educate me on things like that. I’m a very active social networker and I really enjoy talking to the fans. I feel like I’ve definitely got people out there who like my music, who feel like they know me as a person, which they kinda do, ‘cause I put myself out there a lot.

I was going to say – you’re a very fan-focused band and you have a loyal fan base who’ve grown up with you really…

It’s a pretty amazing thing for us, ‘cause we’ve been together 16 and a half years, and we’ve even been coming to the UK now since the year 2000, so all over the world we now have people who were kids coming to our shows, who are now bringing their kids to see the shows. It’s great because today we play shows and see familiar faces, and then we see new faces, and if you’re still seeing new faces after being together for almost 17 years then you’re obviously doing something right.

You are aging beautifully, but tell me what it’s like aging in a band… do you make certain noises when you’re jumping about on stage?! Do you get a bad back from sleeping in the tour bus?
Man, you know, you do sort of get stiffer in the tour bus, hangovers are a little harder; we’re really bad about staying up all night and sleeping during the day – you can sorta see it on our faces after a couple of weeks. But like Gary’s arms, he’s got carpal tunnel so he has to do these arm exercises and I’ve had two knee surgeries, so no more jumping off of speakers for me! In fact, when I had my second surgery my doctor was like “OK, well this pretty much ends the whole jumping around on stage thing!” Now, we’ll go to prancing like Mick Jagger, and I was like “I don’t know if I can really sell the whole Mick Jagger prance thing.”

Can you do the pout?

Yeah, I can probably do the pout.

You’re half way there then.

You’re right. And there’s this funny thing he does with his arms that I can probably do. But yeah, it’s definitely different; it’s good that the voice, and things like that have held up nicely, so we’re pretty fortunate.

You’re probably victims of your own success, because you’re still going so strong that your fans wouldn’t want to give you a let up…

You’re exactly right. It’s funny because sometimes we’re not even done with one tour, and people are already like “When are you coming back to –“ and we’re like “We were just there a week ago!” You know what’s cool about the world today? That you can find out that stuff. If a kid – and when I say kid I mean fan – if they want to say “Hey, when are you coming here”, they could probably just ask me, and chances are they’ll get an answer, whether it’s on Twitter, or MySpace or whatever. When I was younger you had to rely on magazines, and half of that wasn’t real anyway. You never really knew, like when a new Motley Crue album was coming out, you just had to wait, but now you have access to everything. It’s a pretty cool thing.

I’m a bit interested in what it was like growing up for you – you grew up in Wichita Falls, is that right?

I did. Wichita Falls basically rides two hours north of Dallas and two hours south of Oklahoma City, so it sits there right on its only little thing. It’s a fairly small town – there’s about 100,000 people there, but it’s big enough to have places for people to eat and schools to play sport there. We talk a lot of snack about our hometown, because that’s what you did when you were a kid, but looking back it was quite a good place to stay out of trouble, and you pretty much knew everybody, you know, it wasn’t that crazy. One of the reasons I got into being in bands is that if I didn’t I was just gonna end up getting in to trouble all the time. It was a nice little city, and it was great, so the music population was really small, so it was always really easy to find people to play in bands with. It was nice – a nice little growing up experience.

That’s cool, but did it make it harder for you to get initial gigs and gain reputation if the music population was small?

It was really hard and frustrating at first when I was a kid, and when I was in bands before Bowling for Soup, but then there just weren’t a lot of places to play and it was hard to get people to come out to shows because there was no music scene to speak of. This was before the internet and things like that, so even publicising a show was like pulling teeth; you still had to go printing out flyers and go hand them out yourself. I think that’s kind of a good thing though; our whole rise to being able to do this for a living was very, very slow. We started this whole thing in 1994, and we were in a van ‘til 2003 – we didn’t get a tour bus ‘til 2003. Some of us even had jobs ‘til I think around 2001, 2002. It was a very slow thing, so it taught us ‘don’t take anything for granted.’ We don’t get excited about anything, because look, this is just part of the whole rollercoaster ride of doing this. But everyone’s been great since we left there, and it sort of prompted the move to Dallas.

Did you live in Denton as well?

Well Denton is actually where I’d call home, but when I talk to people outside of the US, I usually just say Dallas just because Denton is a pretty small town and everyone knows where Dallas is.

But Denton has got such a massive reputation for producing great music, hasn’t it?

Yeah, it’s been such a good thing; one of the best colleges for making music is in Denton, so basically you get a lot of people coming into Denton to study music and then there are three fairly large colleges there for music. It’s right outside of Dallas and right outside of Forth Worth, so there’s a lot of stuff to do. Lots of people come to Denton to play music and just end up staying. We were part of that whole movement, or whatever, and we were part of that whole scene, then those bands go away and other bands come in and so it’s a great place to live.

For us, this tour will be the first time we hear the songs off ‘Sorry for Partyin’ in a live environment – there’s a lot of fun on that album…

Oh, thankyou. Yeah, for us it’s one of those things that’s super hard. I think we could probably tour over there in smaller venues for five or six months, you know, before we could hit every city, but we can’t and we get in trouble for that from some of our fans. With us, I think you know that we’re always gonna come back.

But do you know, the UK’s so small that if someone can’t travel to the next town to see their favourite band, then they’re not putting the effort in.

I say that all the time! Your public transport system is amazing, so I’m always like “You’re a 20 minute train ride from the show!” I have to drive like 50 minutes to go see a band in Texas!

We’re very lucky you’re coming to Norwich, but what can we expect from the tour?

First of all we’re very excited about our support; we love the Dollyrots and we’ve actually forced them to come with us and I don’t think they’ve even had a release in the UK yet. Then Forever the Sickest Kids are from right here in North Texas, and they’re a really amazing, energetic band who I think people are gonna love. And then A of course, who were one of the first English bands we were ever turned on to on our second trip over there. We ended up meeting them in about 2001, and then I’m like all the time, “We gotta do a tour, we gotta do a tour!” Adam and I, and Jason have been going back and forth for years about how we gotta do it, and Adam even toured with us for a while as drummer of the Bloodhound Gang, but still no tour with A, so it’s great we’re finally doing that. Then as Bowling for Soup, we’ll just kinda do our thing. We’ll play a bunch of songs that you know, and hopefully you’ll know some or all of them, and there’ll be a few surprises thrown in too. Not necessarily songs you won’t have heard of; I don’t really know if we’ll play a lot of new stuff, because I know for me when I’m a fan, it’s only your really, really hardcore fans that you can get away with playing new stuff to, otherwise if you start to play new songs – like if you say “Hey, here’s four new songs”, that’s when everybody chooses to go to the toilet!

So for a really daft last question, a friend of mine asks “What flavour’s the soup?”

Haha, it depends on who you ask; Chris’ is Wisconsin Cheese, mine is Minestrone, which we still haven’t clarified if it’s a soup or a stew – Gary goes Brocolli Cheese and Eric goes straight up tomato soup! He’s easy to please.

Emma Roberts