THE WONDER YEARS Written by Lizy Goold Photographed by Catherine Powell
“I was six when [Green Day’s album] ‘Dookie’ came out, I think, and there’s that line in [the song] “Basket Case” where he says ‘I went to a shrink to analyze my dreams, she says it’s lack of sex that’s bringing me down. I went to a whore, he said my life’s a bore,’ etc. etc.,” recalls Dan “Soupy” Campbell, vocalist of The Wonder Years. Campbell is standing in small closet-like room backstage at the Gramercy Theater after the first of two sold-out headlining shows in New York City describing how important music was to him as a child. “In my head I assimilated shrink and whore, both people who help you and I just thought they were the same thing. And I was at the beach and my Grandma said something like ‘She needs a shrink’ and I said ‘Yeah Grandma, or a whore!’ You don’t always grasp it right away, but I was on it from when I was a kid.” Being raised on punk rock music from birth really shaped Soupy’s ethic and view on life. His father, who was also in attendance at this show at the Gramercy Theater, was a rocker. “When I was riding around in the car with him, Nirvana was just breaking, so it was that kind of stuff,” Soupy explains. “A lot of people were like ‘my parents would listen to The Rolling Stones’. I still don’t think I’ve heard a whole Rolling Stones record in my life. My mom was into the poppy side of things, and as a kid you love that.” He attributes his continued “do it yourself” ethic a lot to his upbringing in Lansdale, Pa., a town northwest of Philadelphia. Soupy was born to young parents in this fairly wealthy area. Soupy’s family lived in a wealthy part
of Lansdale, though they were middle class. In comparison, to his friends he was lower middle class. “Not that we were in any way poor, in direct comparison my friends could have anything that they wanted, and we lived tighter to it,” says Soupy. “I think [that] developed a lot of the ethics that I now carry and the reason that the band is able to be successful.” As a teenager his peers started playing music because they wanted to be like the bands playing in stadiums at the time, bands like Blink-182. But there was a big gap between starting a band and playing shows. The question was how to get from having a bass guitar to actually playing in the stadiums. 35