Four Guys in Wichita Falls

Bowling for Soup began in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1994.

Jaret Reddick and Lance Morrill had already spent years making music together, most recently in the adventurous, occasionally chaotic coolfork!!. Erik Chandler and Chris Burney had played together in Folk A Dots, a band Jaret admired for its songwriting, harmonies and musical ideas. Chris had come out of Wichita Falls’ Christian-metal scene before that, around the same time Jaret was playing in Terminal Seasons, and by the early ’90s all of those different musical circles were beginning to overlap.

When coolfork!! began winding down and Folk A Dots was doing the same, Jaret was already thinking about a new band with Lance and Erik. The first guitarist he asked was Cody Garcia—coincidentally, the guitar player in Bullytree, a local band featuring a very young Gary Wiseman on drums. Cody declined because college and other plans were taking him elsewhere.

Then Chris wandered into a final coolfork!! recording session.

Jaret and Chris ended up spending the night drinking Zima (yes, really!!), laughing and doing stupid things in the rehearsal space until roughly 9 a.m. the next morning.

Jaret walked out thinking, “I think this is the guy. I KNOW he is the guy!”

Lance agreed. Erik needed a little more convincing—he had already spent years playing with Chris and had imagined doing something different—but eventually the four were in.

Their first rehearsal was June 4, 1994.

There was no grand discussion about world domination. Nobody declared Jaret the lead singer. In fact, the idea was almost the opposite. Jaret wanted “the punk rock Beatles”: everybody writing, everybody singing, different voices taking leads. No real frontman.

The earliest rehearsals mixed songs from the bands they had just left. Folk A Dots songs like “Psycho” and “Oliver” were sped up and rearranged. Cool Fork's “Hit” came along too. Jaret remembers being struck by the sound of all those voices together—and especially by the experience of singing with Erik.

Something was clearly there.

Whether it would last more than a few months was another question.

Even the name wasn't meant to last.

At Cool Fork's final show, Lance told the audience to come see their new band, Bowling for Soup. The name was a cleaned-up variation on a Steve Martin joke about a television show called “Bowling for Shit.” Lance didn't cuss, so “Soup” was substituted.

They needed a name because they had a show booked.

Bowling for Soup would do for now.

They considered changing it. “Rubberneck,” borrowed from The Jerky Boys, was one possibility until another Texas band, the Toadies, released an album with that title.

Then Bowling for Soup started playing shows, making recordings and getting written about.

Eventually there was never a good time to change it.

Their first show came less than a month after that first rehearsal, on July 3, 1994, at Memorial Stadium in Wichita Falls, where Jaret had played junior-high football and where he and Lance had marched in high-school band.

They played on the back of a flatbed trailer on the field.

It was windy. Everyone had long hair. Another band had provided backline to make the day smoother, but there was one issue: the drum kit was behind a plexiglass shield, which meant the rest of Bowling for Soup could barely hear Lance banging the drums.

There might have been 50 or 75 people watching, mostly friends and relatives. But they still managed to get local television and newspaper coverage.

And they already had a look.

Chris had designed a Bowling for Soup patch and sewed it on a used gas-station-style work shirt. The others followed. Luckily, there was a used work-clothes store in the same complex as their practice place. They all picked work shirts—mostly based on the hilarity of the existing name tag—removed the old company patches and sewed on Bowling for Soup patches.

Those shirts became the band's first uniform—and eventually merchandise. Instead of printed T-shirts in those early days, the boys frequented M&M Work Clothes and bought light-blue work shirts by the dozens. Next they would deliver the patches and shirts to Jaret’s grandmother in Lawton, Oklahoma, where she would apply the BFS patches.

There were matching clothes. And there was merchandise to sell. There were already ideas.

What wasn't there yet was the comedy.

That came from necessity.