This week Columbus sons Watershed will celebrate the release of their fourth record, The Fifth of July. Released on Dallas-based Idol Records, the album is the culmination of a career that’s had many ups and downs since guitarist Colin Gawel and bassist Joe Oestreich first came up with the idea to start a band on a playground 20 years ago.

While still attending high school in Worthington, the two recruited classmate Herb Schupp, donned themselves the Wire and began attempting to emulate the sounds they were listening to on records by Aerosmith and the like.

“When we first started,” Gawel remembers, “I wasn’t old enough to drive. I’d load my amp onto a COTA bus to go to practice at our drummer’s house. We started playing on campus when we were 17.”

In addition to earning the ire of local bar owners for playing too loud and bringing in a crowd too young to drink (but not too young to attempt to get served), the trio caught the ear of locally renowned musician Willie Phoenix, who agreed to work on some songs with them and also advised the band to change their name to escape their bad reputation.

“He called on a Super Bowl Sunday and said we were going to work on a song,” Gawel recalls. “He told us none of our songs were good enough so we were going to do one of his. We did it for 12 straight hours, doing it fast, doing it slow. At the end of the day, he said, ‘I just want you guys to know if you’re ever going to make records, that’s how it’s going to be. And if you ever write a song that’s good enough, then you can record your own songs.’ It was a good check on ego right off the bat.”

Along with Mike “Biggie” McDermott, the band’s official non-performing member, Watershed, as they were now called, started attending Ohio State, now in closer proximity to the bars they were playing on a regular basis. But after McDermott returned from a stint as a guitar tech on a Toll tour, he was convinced that the guys should quit school to focus on rock ’n’ roll.

“It was easy for Mike and Herb to say they’d quit because they’d already been kicked out of school anyway,” Gawel laughs. “But Joe was an honor student and I’m hanging on with C’s. But then I was driving home and I heard “Racing in the Street” by Springsteen and just decided we should do it. So we lived right around the corner from Stache’s on Patterson, and we booked gigs, chipped in and bought a van and played everywhere we could.”

That dedication ended up paying off. Gawel sent a tape of the band to a guy his girlfriend’s friend was dating and who ran sound for Kiss. The tape ended up reaching the ears of Jim Steinman, known at the time for his work with Meatloaf. Next thing the band knew, they were in New York recording a demo for Steinman to shop around to labels.

“Who would have thought that Jim Steinman of Meatloaf fame would have been the guy to say to us, ‘You guys are really good. I think I can get you a record deal’?” Oestreich ponders.

Steinman did land the band on a label, Sony-owned Epic Records. Assigning the band to the Spin Doctors’ A&R man proved detrimental to the band’s future with Epic, however. When the Spin Doctors’ second album tanked, the exec was let go and Watershed was too, a mere six weeks after their full-length debut, Twister, was released in 1995. But rather than break up, like many bands would, Watershed persevered.

“We try to look at it like well, we had someone pay to have a record get made and it was in every store in the county,” Gawel says. “It’s embarrassing. We didn’t even want to be in Columbus so we toured like crazy. That’s the point where most smart bands break up, but for some reason we felt like we had more so we kept rolling. Once you break through that wall, it has nothing to do with anyone outside of your band. This is just what we do.”

That attitude would keep the band going through awful tours opening for the Insane Clown Posse, Schupp leaving and the label expected to release their next album, Star Vehicle, going out of business before it hit the streets. Recruiting Dave Masica to hit the skins, the band continued to log miles on the tour van.

Working with Epic did have some benefits. In addition to getting the band’s name into cities around the country, the band was introduced to Irv Karwelis, who worked in Sony’s Dallas office before leaving to start Idol Records.

One of Karwelis’ first releases was a split EP with Watershed and another band, Hoarse, that had each band covering one of each other’s songs. Producer Tim Patalan recorded Hoarse’s portion of the record, and liking the cover, wound up producing Watershed’s first album for Idol, The More It Hurts, The More It Works. The producer pushed the band to play better than they ever had before.

“We showed up with a whole album’s worth of songs,” Gawel recalls. “He liked two choruses of two songs and told us to go home and write some more songs.”

“The reason why Tim is a great producer,” Oestreich adds, “is because he doesn’t just make us as good as we can be, he makes us better than we should be and then we have to catch up.”

The band was so pleased with the results, they chose to work with him again on The Fifth of July. In the interim, they had brought in second guitarist Mark “Poochie” Borror to help create the sound that had advanced on the last album live. While the band was more prepared for Patalan’s high expectations, the producer remained rigorous, making the band do 74 takes of “Small Doses,” for example, before he was satisfied.

It’s hard to argue with the results, though. The Fifth of July gleams with the pop hooks for which the band has become known while showcasing the talents of what has become a well-coordinated rock force. “The Habit” is one of the fiercer songs the band has recorded, while “Slowly Then Suddenly” follows in the tradition of memorable Watershed singles. The band may be older, but it retains its passion for what it’s doing, as indicated by the album’s closer, “The Best Is Yet to Come.”

“We’ve been going at it for so long the whole idea of trying to become a big national band is not even part of the equation now,” Oestreich says. “It’s almost like we’ve come full circle to the way it was when we were 15, when we just did it for fun.”