Goo Goo Dolls
by Helen Barradell

Picture this. It’s Christmas Eve 1986 in freezing Buffalo, New York. Over a nauseating loaf of pineapple Spam, a “totally shitfaced” Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls dial the president of their record company and proceed to scream all the reasons why he ruined their Christmas. Within 24 hours this notoriety finds them expelled from the label. It also scores them their first manager in Artie Kwitchoff.

1987. At a Los Angeles Goo Goo Dolls gig, heavy with the presence of hungry record execs on the prowl for fresh meat, Robby Takac instigates a fight from the stage by kicking a bunch of angry Suicidal Tendencies fans in the head then leaping, feet first, into the crowd with his wireless guitar. The evening closes with Takac being belted across the face by a kid in a wheelchair. They are immeadiately signed to Metal Blade Records.

1988: The Dolls scale the entire US east coast in a windowless vehicle for their infamous Cram The Van tour. Driving across Florida with their manager Artie at the wheel, they begin to notice alarming highway signs. Do Not Stop reads one. Do Not Get Out Of Your Car warns another. Caught up in the danger, Artie manages to miss the only stop for petrol in a 100-mile radius. Takac awakens from a hangover to explain it might be a good time to refuel; the needle is pinned on empty. Suddenly the engine dies. Outside the window piles of alligators crawl over the road. When they finally make it to the show, a drunk, furious and exhausted Rzeznik throws himself into a fountain, drenching the crowd in cold, dirty water.

Fast forward to 2006. Robby Takac – founder, bassist, part time vocalist and all round badass of the band – is on the line, which means this conversation is going to be one hell of a ride. The Goo Goo Dolls' rock and roll tour book reads like something from a National Lampoons Vacation movie script. From their down & out beginnings as a Replacements style punk act in 1980s New York state to becoming one of the most commercially viable, radio friendly, alternative rock acts in the late 90s to now, the drama, the madness and most of all the humour, has never let up.

“We were in Alligator Alley. How crazy is that?” Takac cackles down the phone about the Florida Cram The Van incident. “Hahaha man, oh goodness, there’s so many,” he says of the infamous experiences that have haunted each tour. “The wildest one was when we had our plane crash in Sicily. We were in a military plane and the wheels broke off and when we hit the ground we spun on the belly of the plane for a while and the tail piece broke off and we had to jump out the back of the plane!”

I ask him if he’s fucking with me. If he’s beginning to push the envelope when it comes to plausibility.

“I’m serious!” he defends himself with laughter. “It was right after we got shot off of an air craft carrier. We played on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Persian Gulf and they choppered us on from Bahrain. We played Bosnia right before that and…oh, we were in a little paper cup over the ocean somewhere, on our way to Bosnia, and the door popped open when we were flying over the ocean… so that was a pretty wild few days there. You just do what you gotta do. We’ve flipped off the road in vans before, slid on ice patches and flipped over, lost wheels on vehicles, oh man… we’ve played in Volcanoes, just about everything. We played the absolutely most unbelievable rainstorm I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s on video too,” he says, referring to the Goo Goo Dolls most recent DVD release: Live In Buffalo. “We’ve played in storms that bad many times in our career. See, over 20 years stuff like this is just bound to happen, bands just don’t stay together this long. It’s probably not that unusual, we just have longevity on our side.”

Longevity is something Takac, frontman John Rzeznik and drummer Mike Malinin at times have battled to sustain. Founded in 1986 with ex-drummer George Tutuska, the band's early days saw pipedreams of what Takac describes as wanting to be the “biggest hardcore band on the face of the earth”. They played infamous punk clubs like CBGB’s on the back of early albums such as Jed, Hold Me Up and Superstar Carwash, which give way to gritty, alternative soft rock releases and a string of top ten singles, beginning with Name off their 1995 double platinum release A Boy Named Goo. This was soon followed by the 1998 triple platinum blockbuster Dizzy Up The Girl which, propelled by the hype surrounding their City Of Angels theme song Iris, made the Goo Goo Dolls a household name.

To mark their 20th anniversary comes their new release Let Love In – full of Goo Goo Dolls trademark, sad-eyed pop rock that has won them fans the world over. Rzeznik writes radio gems: unabashed, heart-on-sleeve anthems, with the occasional punk-tinged ditty thrown in for good measure by Takac. Why Let Love In feels like a timeless Goo Goo Dolls release is due to the fact that the threesome escaped the vortex of Los Angles to return to their hometown of Buffalo for the album's early session work, setting up shop in a century old Masonic ballroom. It was a move that rattled Rzeznik and Tackac to the core – going back to your roots, exploring memories that span the spectrum of human emotion. Returning to their hometown together relit the fire of their writing partnership, something that had dulled to an ember since their Superstar Carwash days.

“You know, it’s weird when you write songs about real stuff,” Takac reflects. ”No one is so unique that the feelings that they have are original to them. Feelings are a pretty universal thing and I think that you spend a lot of time in your career trying to come up with a way to express yourself the right way and sometimes you’ll touch a nerve with somebody. I remember the other night, about a week ago, John was talking about one of the songs that he had written at a show that we were doing. John’s talking about what the song is about and somebody yells: 'Bullshit that song’s about me!' I remember laughing and thinking to myself ‘wow’, that’s funny, you know? Sometimes you can connect with people that way and that’s a pretty heavy thing.”

Before Takac bids me farewell to prepare for his bands North American tour, we discuss an incident I witnessed back in 1998 when I saw him singing to a toy sheep at The Palais theatre. It was, to say the least, one of my more bizarre live gig experiences.

“Oh I do remember that!” he laughs. “That was a great tour man. We will definitely be back because we’ve had great shows there and great success there for the last few years, so it’s a lot of fun! Awesome!“

We await the next tour story instalment with baited breath…

Let Love In is out now through Warner.

[source]http://www.beat.com.au/article.php?id=302[/source]