Sounds From The Junkshop #68 - Bowling For Soup

 

"Since when did Motley Crue become classic rock?/And when did Ozzy become an actor?" - Bowling For Soup - 1985

Similar to Lit a few weeks ago, I should by all rights have hated Bowling For Soup. I've mentioned in this column before how frat-punk, along with nu-metal, was pretty much the bane of my musical life in my early twenties. I mean, don't get me wrong, my 15-year-old self loved the Offspring's Smash and Green Day's Dookie, Insomniac and Kerplunk but by the time I hit my third year at Uni, the formula was wearing very very thin. Both of the abovementioned seemed to have been treading water with their late '90s efforts all generally feeling a bit less special than the one before and by 2001, the Offspring had well and truly bottomed out with the dismal Conspiracy of One while Green Day's Warning was the sound of a band without a rudder before they drifted off into ill-advised concept album territory on American Idiot (a frustratingly inconsistent album which had a few good moments but...I mean, twelve minute multi-part concept operas? Leave that sort of shit to Emerson, Lake & Palmer lads) And with the arrival of all the third division imitators like Blink 182, Sum 41, Alien Ant Farm, Wheatus et al who were substituting "funny the first time, wanting to punch the lead singer in the mush by the third time you heard it" South Park style humour for anything memorable in the way of tunes or choruses, I was out. As one brilliantly scathing review of Blink 182 in Melody Maker put it, about as punk as Woolworths.

Anyway, it was Leeds Festival 2000 if I remember rightly. I'd arrived on the Thursday night, pitched my tent only for the heavens to open overnight and the place to have turned into a mud bath by Friday morning. Trying to navigate my way on to the site, I lost my footing, went over on my ankle and spent Friday limping around the site in agony. It wasn't a fun festival experience, put it that way and due to my lack of mobility I basically ended up hobbling between the second and third stages watching the likes of Linoleum, the Crocketts and the Clint Boon Experience before my ankle finally gave up at the end of Lauren Laverne's set and I reluctantly stumbled back to my tent, grabbed my stuff, threw it in a taxi and headed home (upon getting back to the house, I realised my ankle had swelled to the size of a grapefruit and the festival was over for me that year). However, sitting at the back of the third stage tent feeling sorry for myself, a group of four American guys in big shorts wandered onstage and kicked off a set of Green Day style pop-punk. It should've been the sort of thing I hated but in my decidedly miserable state, it actually cheered me up - the tunes were pure sunny power-pop and it finished with an unexpectedly kick-arse punked-up run through the old Bryan Adams number Summer Of '69 (complete with the singer bouncing peanuts off the decidedly rotund guitarist's head and said guitarist then catching them in his mouth). The band were called Bowling For Soup and I made a mental note to check them out.

A few weeks later, ankle now successfully healed, I was browsing around the Rocks Off record shop in Bradford (RIP) and actually found a copy of Bowling For Soup's Let's Do It For Johnny! album in the discount racks for three quid. I picked it up and, fair play, it was on my listening, erm, list, for the next few months. To this day, I'm not quite sure why I connected with it given my usual disdain for this sort of music - maybe it was that the worst excesses of frat-punk hadn't quite hit at this point (that would come in the next year or two), maybe it was just that the humour was cheerily goofball rather than wannabe-obnoxiously grossout but it was simple good fun to put a smile on your face in the cold winter months with the likes of Suckerpunch (not a Wildhearts cover sadly), Bitch Song and Valentino being simple daft raise a pint and holler the chorus territory. However, a year later, Let's Do It For Johnny! had sort of slowly drifted its way to the back of the CD rack on my desk and I honestly just thought they'd gone the way of so many others who'd aimed for the stars and missed with their first album.

And then two years later, this happened...

Yup, they had a hit - Top 10 no less - with Girl All The Bad Guys Want from the follow-up and all of a sudden, the younger pop-punk fans from me and my bandmates' drinking group at the Rocket in Leeds were all saying "oh these guys are awesome!". I bit my tongue and tried not to remind them that I'd been telling them the same thing 18 months ago... Similar to the songs on Let's Do It For Johnny, despite its corniness, there was something just genuinely likeable about that song and I think the video which ripped the proverbial out of the likes of Staind and Limp Bizkit probably helped endear it to me a bit. The album, Drunk Enough To Dance, wasn't bad either with songs like Emily, Surf Colorado and Life After Lisa packing hooks and tunes to make your mouth smile and your foot tap along.

Bowling For Soup would amp the formula up still further with 1985, the lead-off single from their following album A Hangover You Don't Deserve which saw them jumping on the '80s revival bandwagon just as it started to get up to speed. It should've been a hit but while it did respectably in the States it mystifyingly only just scraped the Top 40 here (possibly they'd been written off when the frat-punk bandwagon crashed with the Darkness' arrival on the scene the year before?) The album was solid enough but they were definitely starting to lose fire a little bit here despite a few stormers like My Hometown and Ohio (Come Back To Texas).

I think this may have been where I started to drift away from Bowling For Soup a bit - for some reason I remember the lead-off single from The Great Burrito Extortion Case, High School Never Ends (a decent enough effort) but I don't think I bothered with the album although I still had a few mates who stuck with them and would occasionally play me the odd song here and there in subsequent years. To be fair, quite a bit of it went into "Bowling For Soup by numbers" where they were over-reliant on the cornball humour at the expense of the tunes but, despite going on hiatus for a few years in the early teens, they're still out there. More recently, singer Jaret Reddick would hook up with Ryan Hamilton, formerly of US indie types Smile Smile, for the enjoyable People On Vacation band which would be my introduction to Ryan's music and a whole other bunch of fun experiences...but that's another story for another time.

Bowling For Soup are, of course, still out there and still the same lovably daft '80s obsessed overgrown 14-year-olds that they always were (as the above video for their most recent single about WWE wrestler Alexa Bliss probably proves). Hand on heart, it's been a while since I was closely following their antics but there was something quite heartening about seeing a group who I'd liked but was convinced wouldn't go on to anything prove me wrong by chalking up some deserved chart success. A new album is due later this year apparently and who knows, we may even have a review here on Nite Songs when it surfaces. Watch this space...