The band will perform Monday at the Santa Barbara Bowl, with Lifehouse and Colbie Caillat opening the show at 6:15 p.m. Tickets, $32.50 to $62.50, are available at the box office, 1122 Milpas St., Santa Barbara; or through Ticketmaster at 583-8700 or http://www.ticketmaster.com . On Sept. 6, the Goo Goo Dolls will kick off a series of concerts at the Greek Theatre to raise money for the Griffith Park Recovery Fund, which supports recovery efforts in the park after the devastating fires there in May; contact Ticketmaster for information.

Twenty-something years of experience by three guys from Buffalo with an inordinate amount of consonants in their names add up to a good band with a funny name, the Goo Goo Dolls, that will be playing at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Monday night.

Once upon a time in 1986, or a decade or so after O.J. Simpson was the football king of Buffalo, the Dolls were three punk rockers — guitarist John Rzeznik, bassist Robby Takac and drummer George Tutuska (since replaced by Mike Malinin).

"Name'' was the band's breakout single from its 1995 breakout album, "A Boy Named Goo.'' Over their long run, the Buffalo boys have played everywhere. And they've even had a bunch of songs in movies, including one with Pauly Shore ("Son in Law").

The group's latest album, "Let Love In," came out last year.

The Goo Goo Dolls at first elicited comparisons to the Replacements, but few favorable adjectives from the critics.

These days, the band has long since found its pop-punk niche, and Buffalo has proclaimed Goo Goo Dolls Day — twice.

During an interview, bass player Takac engaged in a wide-ranging discussion on O.J., weird tour stops, hot dogs, canned beets and such.

Hey, man, where are you?

I'm in Los Angeles; I've probably lived here now for about nine years.

So are you a Dodger fan yet?

Oh, no, dude. I was barely a sports fan in Buffalo, which is nearly impossible.

I'm only a baseball fan because I like hot dogs.

Your band has been around for more than 20 years; you're doing better than those Buffalo Bills.

Yeah, but the Bills have been around longer.

Then again, you don't have the whole O.J. Simpson thing hanging over your band.

Oh, my goodness. Growing up in Buffalo, he was like The Man. Period.

So how do you account for your longevity?

Perseverance. Stupidity. Endurance. Routine and sincere devotion — the whole list, I guess. When you go through that amount of time, I don't think you can attribute it to any one thing.

Did you become the bass player on purpose?

I was the neighborhood bass player when I was 10. I never was, nor will I ever claim to be, the most unbelievable musician in the world, but I'm passionate about what I do.

I was in a lot of bands — I played "Smoke on the Water'' with about 8,000 people, including Ian Gillan (of Deep Purple). How cool is that?

You're gonna be in Santa Barbara. Been there a zillion times?

Man, I don't even know.

Good answer. So what's up with this charity thing at your shows?

It's an amazing, amazing, amazing group of people called USA Harvest. They're based out of Kentucky and I think it started with Van Halen years ago. It's basically an old-fashioned canned-food drive at all the shows.

Time to unload all those cans of beets and sauerkraut?

Well, we try to encourage nice things like Mexicorn, corned beef hash

Not beets?

I like beets. Did you know you can dye your clothes with the juice it comes in?

As long as you're into electric purple.

You can dye your hair with it.

Anyway, we have an amazing group of people that come out to see us play. But it's not like the hipsters. The hipsters don't wanna walk up to a show with a can of Mexicorn. They're busy with their clove cigarettes or whatever. We tend to appeal to the ordinary folks who don't mind bringing a couple of cans of food. So far, they've collected more than 9 million meals over the years we've been working with those folks.

Some fans freak out when bands get too big — "You sold out, man!'' — but isn't that a good thing because it means more music in the long run?

That's part of the danger of being the band you're supposed to be — sometimes you grow out of the little bubble people are comfortable in. Somewhere in Buffalo, there's a dude in Doc Martens and a Ramones shirt who is still so pissed off at us for doing what we did back in 1988? Well, we lost him then.

I wish we could drag everyone along with us, but I don't wanna drag 'em kicking and screaming. If they can't, that's cool — there's a lot of other bands out there and we're just gonna keep making our music and have fun doing it.

Every band wants to get on MTV. How does that happen?

I don't know. MTV's fickle, man, and they don't play too much music anymore. VH1 has sort of become our vehicle because they play music. We've been pretty chummy with the DirecTV people, and they've shown our concerts. It's crazy what's been happening in the music industry. I don't think music is any more or less important in people's lives; it's just the way people experience it has changed. The industry has to grow with it and figure how to operate within it.

What was the strangest gig you've ever played?

We played in a foxhole in Bosnia — we were playing for the troops. We've played on top of skyscrapers, on heli-pads. We've played on cruise ships, on top of volcanoes. We've played on icebergs. We've played in bars in Alaska. We've played everywhere, man. We've played at CBGB's.

Is the music biz like you thought it would be when you began your long, strange trip?

No, no. Way less castles, harems, Rolls Royces — all that stuff. Yeah, it's a lot different, but everything's different when you get there.

What would you tell an aspiring musician?

Number one: Have fun. Number two: Get a lawyer to read over stuff before you sign it.

What's the band sound like to you these days?

My band? It's interesting you should ask that. I think my band sounds a lot more like my band now than it did for a little while.

So the guy in the Ramones shirt might be coming back?

I dunno. There's a new, fresh style that might sound the same to everybody else, but I can tell the difference.

What's the best thing about your night job?

I gotta say it's probably the 75 minutes I'm out there making rock, where it all finally comes together and there's all those people looking at you, singing those words back to you that you wrote in your living room. So it just goes full circle and when that happens, I'm on Mars, dude. I can't even tell ya what happens most of the time because I'm just livin' the moment.

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