It’s one of the guys who does t-shirt designs
for us. It’s just kinda like a traditional American, old school tattoo or
whatever.
With
a Bowling For Soup twist on it.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
How
do you keep yourselves amused when you’re on the tour bus – or is this just the
place to sleep?
Do you see this thing full of DVDs? (Erik
shows us a huge gift bag full of DVDs) We spend a lot of time after shows once
we’re back on the bus – we’ll pop a movie in and I don’t know if most of the
time we’re actually watching the movie, or just hanging out with it on. We
watch the same things over and over again so you know what’s happening. Everybody’s
having a party then a funny part’s coming up and everybody shuts up like “oh we’ve
gotta wait for this - hahahaha” and then we’re all like right back to the
party.
So
you know all the lines inside out?
Oh yeah yeah, we spend a lot of time watching
movies.
When
you’re away from home, what do you miss most?
My bed, my wife – not in that particular
order! It’s so crazy, I’ve had two cats for like years, then I got a dog when
we were taking our last break and so I was at home with my dog for like a year
and a half and it just blows my mind how much I miss my fuckin’ dog! Cats are
great pets and I love my cats to death but the dog is with me all day long. And
she’s small, she’s a Chihuahua Boston Terrier and so whether I’m sitting and
writing or trying to do demos or whatever she’s just constantly right there
beside me and so now I don’t have my little Rexie running around.
You
said she was called Rexie…
Well, yeah Rex.
Rex
for a girl?
I have three pets, females – Frank, Bruce and
Rex. Rex was a placeholder name, we didn’t intend on keeping her because we
were actually speaking with a Great Dane rescue, and so we went from this big
to this big (Erik indicates the size difference between the two breeds). She
actually ran in front of our car when my wife was on her way home from work and
our tour manager happened to be over at my house and we were just having some
beers in the backyard and he was like, “Oh check this out dude, I googled
myself and there’s this thing that lists me and Jaret as the only two members
of Bowling For Soup” and I was like oh right, wow. I’ve never done that, so I
googled myself and it said Erik, bass player for Bowling for Soup, he lives at
home in Texas with his wife, his daughter and his dog named Rex. We didn’t have
a dog, so when this dog ran out in front of the car that day my wife brought it
in and said, “Look at this little rat that just ran out in front of me,” and we
went, “Woah, it’s fuckin’ Rex!”.
It was fitting that she have a boy’s name as well.
When I take her to the groomer, sometimes people are just like why would you
give a girl a guy’s name? It’s a fuckin’ dog! It’s not like the dog speaks
English or has any comprehension of the fact that it has a boy’s name.
You
said you do a bit of writing.
Not so much for Bowling For Soup. Jaret does
[for Bowling For Soup] and he co-writes with friends, people that we admire and
what not.
Have
you had any input on any particular Bowling For Soup songs?
Yeah I – we actually used to share the song writing
about 50/50. Then a few years into the band, actually it was right after Rock
On Honorable Ones, that was the last album where I brought my songs in. The
band just started becoming more Jaret’s song writing style, He and I used to
split the lead vocal duties as well and so once I went out to a bar one night
and I got him drunk and told him that I wasn’t going to be a lead singer
anymore. I was just going to be the bass player and back him up and he was going
to have to stand in the middle now.
Moving
on to your current album, My Wena has an interactive element on the web, where
you can add your own face into the video. Where you guys involved in that idea?
Our managing company is fantastic. They have
these amazing resources because they have quite a large staff that works for
them and so they are constantly coming up with different things that we can do.
It wasn’t us because we didn’t know they had the ability to do that.
Do
you think it’s a good way to get fans involved and passing the single to other
people?
Absolutely. The first day that it was up I
was at Jaret’s house – I moved to South Carolina back in February so whenever I’m
home or whenever I’m in Texas working I stay at Jaret’s house. His wife left
for work, well his wife left the house right when we first got the application.
We were playing with it for three hours and she comes back and the two of us
are sitting in the same spot, still putting different friend’s pictures in the
penis going “Fuck yeah, dude!”.
Bowling
For Soup are always so incredibly upbeat. Is that really how you feel on the
inside, or is it all an act?
Yeah it’s true! I think it is a lot to do
with the fact that we’ve managed to stay together for as long as we have
because we just generally enjoy doing what you do. You know, you come to a
Bowling For Soup show and as wild as the crowd may be getting at any point, I guarantee
you that there are four people on stage having a better time than anybody else
that is there. This is our passion, this is our love. That sounds a bit cheesy
but we really really love doing what we do, and all consider ourselves very
lucky to be able to do it for as long as we have. It’s really cool.
Do
you think there’s going to be another 15 years of Bowling For Soup?
I can’t even begin to project how much longer
we have. We’re all very aware that eventually at some point it will end. It has
to, we can’t do it, at least at this capacity, for the rest of our lives. But, there’s no foreseeable end for us right
now. We’ve still got albums to make and tours to do so we’ll be around for a
while. It’s so great to do the math and really see that we’re gonna hit 20
years – unless something catastrophic happens and we lose somebody and we just
can’t bear to go on anymore. But we’re gonna hit 20 years and that’s – the 15
year party was great, I can’t wait to go to the 20 year party.
What
did you do for that?
We had four shows in various small venues at
home in Texas, so we did two nights at one club in Denton, Texas, which is our
home base and two nights at another place in Fort Worth, Texas – 300, 400 seat
places so it was a very nice intimate kinda show and everybody got to come and
watch us be extremely drunk on stage and slop through our shows. We rehearsed
for the first time in years to get ready for those shows, so that we played
songs from all ten albums and we’ve never ever done that before. It was pretty
cool. It was a nice time.
Was
it quite easy to slip back into the old stuff?
It was really funny yeah, it came back. We
spent years playing all of the songs, so you listen through and you start
playing and you’re like oh yeah I know how that goes. The coolest thing about it
though is that on one of the nights in Fort Worth, our original drummer Lance
came to the show and he sat in to play with us - we didn’t rehearse with him for
the show before. It was so awesome, whenever he sat in and started playing, the
feeling that I had it was like “Oh, yeah!”, because he’s stylistically slightly
different than Gary but it was like I just slipped back into it and it felt
just like it did ten years ago. He got up and did three or four songs with us.
Is
there anyone that you’re yet to tour with or to work with that you would like
to work with?
Lots of people. The thing about it is that
nobody’s ever really taken us on tour. Ever. It’d be cool to, we have lots of idols.
It’d be great to go on tour with Green Day. It’d be great to go on tour with
the Foo Fighters. Tonnes of people that we look up to and that we’ve had the
opportunity to meet and it’s just like, “Can we have a tour with you guys, please?”
So far we’ve just taken it to mean that we’re
so freakin’ awesome nobody wants us to open for them. That’s the way that we’re
going to look at it for now!
If
they agree to that, it’ll be one hell of a gig.
I’d be there!
We’d
hope so! What are you doing for Halloween?
We’re going home! I’ve been informed by my
wife that I will be dressing up, and normally it’s with regard to a party and
some friends’ house They were questioning if I’d be dressing up. Erik only gets
dressed up for Halloween if he can find a costume where he can wear a suit,
that’s it. So I imagine with my glasses and hat that I’m wearing right now I’ll
throw on a suit and be Elvis Costello.
Some
lighter questions now. Have you ever used No Hablo Ingles as an excuse when you
didn’t want to answer someone or something?
That’s something that is essentially the
spirit of the song. Living in Texas, it’s
a phrase - it’s all very joking but it’s something we throw out quite a bit and
that’s basically where the idea for the song came from.
If
Bowling for Soup ruled the world, how would you make it a better place?
All we need is love and beer. Ice cream and a
hug.
Bowling For Soup's latest album, Sorry For Partyin' is available now. Their current single, My Wena, is also available now.
Past interviews: