Thanks to my teenage daughter, I’ve been listening to Bowling For Soup for about two years now. As a Mom, I am on record as officially disapproving of the casual profanity. But… I’ve taken the kid to see them live twice, and I’m impressed in spite of myself. While the casual profanity still bugs me because that’s my KID digging on it, I found them to be really rather respectful of the fact that the majority of their audience is very young. When the young’uns started crowdsurfing, the band cautioned them to be careful; when one kid in the audience started looking a little peaked, the lead singer signaled a stage hand guy to get the kid a bottle of water, and then reminded the audience that it was great to get into the music, but if they were starting to get dizzy, they should take a break and rehydrate.
They put on a decent show, good music and fun banter that doesn’t incite the rowdies while still working the crowd. Then they dedicated their big hit “1985” to “all the moms who were cool enough to bring these kids out tonight.”
Good grief, pravnik, don’t let my daughter get wind of that. She’s still crowing about the IM conversation she had with Chris the day before he got married. After the first show I took her to, there was a meet & greet, and she mentioned to Chris that she had IMed him, and told him her screen name - he said, “Oh yeah - I remember. We were talking about comic books and I had to go pick up my tuxedo.” The kid was FLOORED, I tell you. They do seem like nice guys.
