A Borrowed Walkman

Before music took over, Jaret was perfectly happy listening to Michael Jackson, John Cougar Mellencamp and the Grease soundtrack, the first album he remembers buying. His parents took the family to concerts and events, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Tammy Wynette and nearly anyone else brave enough to try drawing a crowd in Wichita Falls. He saw Gallagher smash a watermelon before he was old enough to understand many of the jokes. By seventh grade, he was watching bands such as Night Ranger and Starship closely enough to study every movement onstage.

Then a kid named Greg Norman brought a Walkman to school and changed Jaret Reddick’s life.

This was fifth or sixth grade, when Ozzy Osbourne was not the familiar voice heard in car commercials and football stadiums. To a kid growing up in the early 1980s, Ozzy was dangerous mythology: the bat, the Alamo and a reputation that terrified parents before their children had even heard the music.

Greg put the headphones on Jaret and played “Crazy Train.”

The opening voice came through.

Then the guitar riff hit.

Jaret had never heard anything that sounded like it. He was not entirely sure what instruments were making those noises. Then Ozzy began singing—and instead of sounding frightening, he sounded melodic, understandable and strangely comforting.

Everything shifted.

His mother took him to Record Town after school and bought him Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman that same day. From then on, music was no longer something he liked. It was the thing around which everything else began to reorganize.

Sports moved aside. Even professional wrestling moved aside, with apologies to the Von Erichs and the Fabulous Freebirds.

Jaret did not forget them completely. In the early Bowling For Soup years, longtime fans may remember him performing as Jaret Von Erich. Kevin Von Erich later acknowledged him as an honorary member of the family, which meant more to Jaret than the joke had ever anticipated.

When Ozzy took Mötley Crüe on the Bark at the Moon tour, Jaret saw how electric, raw and dangerous the band looked. Most of all, he saw Tommy Lee playing drums.

The next step became obvious—at least to Jaret.

He came home and asked for a drum kit.

His father laughed. His brother laughed and probably prayed the idea would pass.

Then Christmas arrived, and there it was: a red-and-black swirl Ludwig kit that Jaret wishes he still owned.

A man named Ken, whom his parents knew through recovery meetings, began coming to the house after those meetings to teach him. Drum lessons started at 9:30 p.m., much to the dismay of Danny, the neighbors and the family’s three toy poodles, who briefly stopped treating the entire house as a toilet whenever Jaret started pounding away.

Ken refused to let the young drummer sit behind the complete kit and bash. He made Jaret begin with a snare drum and learn the rudiments correctly. Technique and fundamentals came first.

Jaret did not understand why.

It felt like The Karate Kid: endless “wax on, wax off” exercises with no visible connection to the thing he actually wanted to do—be Tommy Lee.

Then, well over a year into the journey, Ken began having him apply those fundamentals to the full drum set.

Everything clicked.

Because Ken had insisted on teaching him properly, Jaret made the top band in junior high and later the top bands in high school. He spent four years in marching band—one on cymbals and three on snare—and played timpani in the honors band. That grounding in rhythm and musical structure would later help him teach himself guitar, bass and enough piano to translate the sounds in his head.

Music had already been present in his family, although not in an obvious rock-and-roll form. His mother played church hymns on the piano and taught him a few songs on the family organ. His father was a preacher, although he was not regularly practicing during much of Jaret’s childhood beyond the occasional wedding or funeral.

The family attended the Church of Christ, where congregational singing traditionally happens without instruments. His parents sang strong harmony parts in church and in the car. As a child, Jaret would ask his mother why she was singing the songs “wrong.” Only later did he understand that she was instinctively finding harmony parts.

Jaret still does the same thing whenever music plays.

Now Everett does it too.

He likes the idea that harmony has quietly traveled through the family.

There was always music playing in the Reddick house, especially in the car. With no Nintendo Switch or iPhone to distract him in the back seat, Jaret listened. The songs that stayed with him came from the people he calls the storytellers: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Donna Summer, Neil Diamond and the Eagles. He could close his eyes during “The Gambler” or “Coat of Many Colors” and see the story.

Those songs became his greatest influence as a lyricist.