Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
One of the biggest rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s is about to “slide” right into our area.
The Goo Goo Dolls rock Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, this Friday night.
“There’s 12 or 13 songs that we would probably get murdered if we didn’t play — they would be out back with pitchforks,” bassist and vocalist Robby Takac told WTOP. “We do our best. Music is a powerful thing, man. It’s like your sense of smell or your sense of touch, it makes things react in your mind and a lot of these songs that we’ve been playing for all these years take up a really special part of people’s psyche, so we try to play those songs.”
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1964, Takac met singer John Rzeznik and drummer George Tutuska in their hometown.
“John was in a band with my cousin in the early ’80s,” Takac said. “I had filled in with their band a few times and we felt a kinship and moved into a house and started driving around the country in a van in ’86, released our first album in ’87, sold 9,000 copies and thought we were killing it, recorded another one that sold 30,000 copies and thought we were killing it more — a lot of little victories until ’95 when we had ‘Name’ and everything changed.”
While Takac was the lead singer for the first four punk-inspired albums, Rzeznik took over as frontman for the fifth album, “A Boy Named Goo” (1995), featuring singles like “Long Way Down” and their breakthrough hit “Name.”
“John wrote ‘Name’ and we recorded the initial demo in a studio that I still own in Buffalo,” Takac said. “That song was very different and got to be a hit on a lot of different radio stations. … We’d come in to play events for light rock stations and we’d always play ‘Name’ last … so the first 40 minutes were us pasting people against the back walls of the room! They didn’t know what band they were coming to see. There was a bit of an identity crisis.”
They found their identity on the next album, “Dizzy Up the Girl” (1998), thanks to the smash hit “Iris” from the movie “City of Angels” (1998), a Hollywood remake of Wim Wenders’ German gem “Wings of Desire” (1988). It was the biggest success of a stacked soundtrack that featured plenty of other hits like Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.”
“I remember John and I looking at each other like, ‘A door just firmly slammed behind us with this song,’ we felt it, there was a shift in the band at that moment,” Takac said. “We turned it into the movie and they rejected it, so John went into the studio and recorded himself on acoustic guitar singing, so that’s what’s in the movie … but they agreed to let us put the full version on the soundtrack … ‘Iris’ was at No. 1 for like 26 weeks, man. It was crazy.”
The same album also featured another No. 1 hit in “Slide,” which is instantly recognizable from the opening guitar riff. It’s the type of romantic song that you’d sing with a group of friends around a bonfire on a college campus.
“It’s one of those songs that come early in the set because you know everybody knows that song,” Takac said. “You can play a few songs and there’s a chance that there’s people in the room that don’t know them, even if they’re kind of big songs, but ‘Slide,’ they’re gonna know that song, so that’s when everything falls into place during the show. … ‘Slide’ is a poppy little toe tapper, but listen to the words; he’s touching on some pretty heavy stuff.”
Their heaviest song remains the heartbreaking “Black Balloon” about losing a loved one to heroin addiction with the chilling lyric, “Coming down the world turned over, angels fall without you there, and I go on as you get colder.”
“John wrote that song, so he’s more qualified to answer this, but I think when you have subjects like that and you’re able to breach them in a beautiful way that allows people to experience what you’re saying and still feel that warmth of a good song, I think it serves a double purpose,” Takac said. “He knocked it out of the park with that one. … You mentioned things being ‘cathartic.’ … To be able to let go of that emotion, that’s good stuff, man.”
The massive album featured yet another hit in “Broadway.” The chorus of “Broadway is dark tonight” may have had one meaning when it was released, but it took on new meaning during the pandemic as Broadway shut down.
“Broadway is a neighborhood in Buffalo that John grew up in,” Takac said. “That neighborhood became very impoverished over the years, so that song is just sort of addressing what happened to those neighborhoods in Buffalo and to the people who were in those neighborhoods at the time. That’s the beautiful thing about music in general … you write about things that happen to you and people’s journeys aren’t always that much different.”
The band followed up with the album “Gutterflower” (2002), featuring the hit song “Here is Gone,” followed by “Let Love In” (2006), featuring the uplifting “Better Days” and a catchy cover of Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit.” Devoted fans stayed with them for “Something for the Rest of Us” (2010), “Magnetic” (2013), “Boxes” (2016), “Miracle Pill” (2019), “It’s Christmas All Over” (2020) and their latest album “Chaos in Bloom” (2022).
“You’d think it would get easier and easier when you’ve got 14 records out to put a set list together, but it gets harder every record we put out, because all of a sudden there’s more songs and you still have to fit them in the same amount of time,” Takac said. “First-world problems, but it’s still a problem!”
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
