Bowling For Soup life and biography

Bowling for Soup (often typeset as ¡Bowling for Soup! or abbreviated as BFS) is an American pop punk band which originally formed in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1994. Now based in Denton, Texas, the band is best known for its singles "Girl All the Bad Guys Want" (a 2003 Grammy Award nominee), "Almost", "Punk Rock 101", "High School Never Ends", and SR-71 cover "1985".

"The main thing we wanted to do was make happy songs and sing," Bowling for Soup lead vocalist and guitarist Jaret Reddick told John Sinkevics of Michigan's Grand Rapids Press in 2002. "That seems to be a lost art." The quartet's music has been classifed as power pop and pop-punk since its members came together in 1994, but perhaps the best label would simply be party music; Bowling for Soup has created high-energy, often humorous songs in which women and alcohol are the most common themes. Capable of both irresistible musical hooks and lyrics that veered from predictable paths, the band emerged into the pop mainstream with its 2004 hit single "1985," from the album A Hangover You Don't Deserve.

Bowling for Soup had its origins in the small northern Texas city of Wichita Falls, where Reddick and other members of the band grew up. "We shot BB guns and sling shots and fished for crawdads," he told the VH1 website. Reddick and guitarist Chris Burney knew each other in high school, where they were the "class clown dorks," Burney told the Grand Rapids Press. "We weren't cool enough to be the official class clowns. We were the ones who the class clown stole his material from." As students in the 1980s, they grew up on the commercially successful heavy metal music of bands such as Quiet Riot and Ratt, but were also influenced by the zippier punk rock of the Ramones and later Green Day.

The rotund Burney owned a Wichita Falls coffeehouse with a music stage, where he and Reddick met bassist Erik Chandler and drummer Gary Wiseman in the early 1990s. After forming a band called Rubberneck, they took the name Bowling for Soup in 1994. They have offered various stories about the origin of that name, several of them mentioning the wild-and-crazy-guy routines of comic Steve Martin. In its early years, Bowling for Soup honed its music and stage presence by playing in a series of small Texas and Oklahoma towns that other bands avoided. They moved their headquarters to the college town of Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, and released several recordings on the small FFROE label there. By 1997 they were opening for punk and ska bands on national tours.

Bowling for Soup released its full-length debut, Rock On Honorable Ones!!!, on FFROE in 1998, experimenting with ska-style horns themselves. Thanks to the following the group had amassed during its several years of touring, the album sold well enough across Texas to attract the attention of national label executives, and Bowling for Soup was signed to the Jive label. One consequence of the signing was that they began to include a cover version of fellow Jive artist Britney Spears's "... Baby One More Time" in their concerts. Jive released Bowling for Soup's Let's Do It for Johnny in 2000. Although it reflected the influence of the commercially successful punk band Green Day, that album failed to break through on the charts. But the band's touring radius expanded, and they traveled to England in 2001.

The songs on Bowling for Soup's sophomore major release, 2002's Drunk Enough to Dance, reflected the band's long track record of barroom experience. Mostly written by Reddick, they featured strong melodic hooks and lyrics that managed to be humorous and original even as they centered predictably on women and wild times. The biggest success was "Girl All the Bad Guys Want," in which Reddick sang self-deprecatingly of his pursuit of a girl who was "out of his league." Although Bowling for Soup was little known nationally at the time, the song garnered a 2002 Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group.

Reddick got the news of the nomination by phone while his wife was in labor delivering the couple's first child. The band No Doubt took the Grammy that year for their song "Hey Baby," but Bowling for Soup got a taste of the fast lane, sitting in identical tuxedos in the fourth row of the audience and meeting an icon of their 1980s youth, onetime "Family Ties" star Michael J. Fox. Reddick told the Plan 9 Music website that the nomination "was a big deal in newspapers and Entertainment Weekly and People ..., where our grandmothers could take those issues to the beauty shop and say this is what my grandson is doing. That's where we benefited the most."

Bowling for Soup was on tour in Europe before and after the Grammy ceremony in 2003, and the award made them more of a marquee name at big venues. Still, they kept their show fresh with such bits of craziness as a segment in which they appeared naked (but partially concealed with their guitars). At one point they changed their last names temporarily: Reddick became Jaret Von Erich, Chandler became Erik Rodham Clinton, Wiseman was dubbed Gary Wiseass, and Burney parodied the name of a famed Swedish guitarist with his new moniker, Chris Van Malmsteen. Bowling for Soup toured nearly nonstop, but didn't seem to tire of the road. "If it wasn't fun, we'd break up," Von Erich-Reddick told the New York Post. "That's always been the plan."

For their next Jive album, 2004's A Hangover You Don't Deserve, the band didn't tamper with a formula that seemed to be working. The album's biggest hit, "1985," was featured on the MTV cable television channel and cracked the top ten of Billboard magazine's Top 40 Mainstream chart. The song was a name-check of a roster of top 1980s entertainers seen from the perspective of a bored middle-aged woman fondly remembering her metalhead years. The song originated with Reddick's guitarist friend Mitch Allan, and was first recorded by his band, SR71; Reddick reworked it heavily. "To me, writing about the '80s was easy because I was a teenager in the '80s," Reddick told the Arizona Daily Star. "That's what shaped my being. All of the stuff I say is all from John Hughes movies."

The year 2005 saw Bowling for Soup riding high with new projects. They contributed a punkified theme song to the television reality show The Real Gilligan's Island, and they appeared in cult horror film director Wes Craven's Cursed, performing a version of the 1966 Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs hit "Little Red Riding Hood." "We have officially turned the corner," Reddick told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Our crew outnumbers the band, which is a really weird position to be in. Now you got five crew people and a driver, and there's only four people in the band. ... It feels like a day care."

Following the release of their covers album, Bowling for Soup spent most of 2006 readying their seventh studio album, entitled The Great Burrito Extortion Case, which was released on November 7, 2006. They released the first single off of that album, "High School Never Ends", to iTunes on September 19, 2006. The UK release of the album was on February 5, 2007.

The band's first live DVD, Bowling for Soup: Live and Very Attractive was filmed over the course of the UK Get Happy Tour October 2007 and premiered at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. Advanced screenings took place on March 31 and April 2, with the DVD being released in the summer. The release date for the two disk uncensored, and the single disk censored edition for the UK is set to be the 7th of July. There was a limited edition pre-order deal for the DVD which included a T-shirt, drinks mug, exclusive poster and more besides the DVD. Jaret sang lead vocals and Erik sang backing vocals for the song "Endless Possibility" for the video game Sonic Unleashed.

On January 20, 2009, Jaret released a video onto the web via their Myspace page and both YouTube accounts about their new album. According to him, the band's eighth full length album was set to be released in September 2009, and that the band had very recently started recording. He released the name of the album, saying that it was to be titled Sorry for Partyin'. The video was the first of a few that will be released during the recording process of the album. Also, in one of their YouTube and Myspace videos you can hear part of one of the songs on the album called "I Don't Wish You Were Dead Anymore".

Bowling for Soup released an acoustic album, Jaret & Erik 2010 UK Acoustic Tour Limited Edition CD, during Reddick and Chandler's acoustic tour in the UK in April 2010. The album was released after the tour on the band's online UK and US stores. Reddick has also stated that an acoustic album is very possibly for their next acoustic tour, which was planned for April 2011, but nothing came of it.

Discography:
-Bowling for Soup (1994)
-Cell Mates (1996)
-Rock on Honorable Ones!! (1997)
-Tell Me When to Whoa (1998)
-Let's Do It for Johnny!! (2000)
-Drunk Enough to Dance (2002)
-A Hangover You Don't Deserve (2004)
-Bowling for Soup Goes to the Movies (2005)
-The Great Burrito Extortion Case (2006)
-Sorry for Partyin' (2009)
-Fishin' for Woos (2011)

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