Visit Barbie & Ken (Live, 1996)

It’s time to talk about one of the weirdest Goo Goo Dolls bootlegs out there, which at the same time also presents one of the best audio quality performances I’ve encountered so far, something that can be quite rare for fans-recorded concerts.

Here I present to you “Goo Goo Dolls Visit Barbie & Ken”, a bootleg capturing two separate concerts which took place in 1996 at two different locations. The bootleg was “officially” released in 1999. The concerts took place at the Aladdin Theater, Las Vegas, NV, USA, on March 10th, 1996 and at the Tacoma Dome, Tacoma, WA, USA, on April 26th, 1996.

The bootleg itself features two CDs, a physical copy for each concert. Like I mentioned above, quality-wise they are very very good. I would complain a little about the Las Vegas one, as apparently reverberation seems to be a bit off the charts. Not sure if it was a recording issue, or the audio technician messed up during rehearsals and that’s how the band performed. Either way, overall everything sounds great.

I have no further info about this bootleg, besides the covers I posted below. I have zero clue in terms of why they would name it after the Barbie and Ken franchise. Maybe there is a reference out there I am completely missing. It’s got to be one of the weirdest titles for a bootleg I’ve ever seen indeed.

As you can verify, both concerts featured the same amount of songs (11) and the same set list as well. Just like “Naked Dolls“, whoever created the bootleg did not exhibit a well-documented knowledge of the original titles of the songs, whereas they utilized plenty of creativity when it came to attribute a title to the whole thing.

Contributor Ryne also located a picture of a ticket stub for the Tacoma show, which you can find below:

You can listen to it below. Download links are available at the end of this post.

PLEASE NOTICE: The files are encoded in the .m4a audio format. It may not be compatible with all the players out there.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Naked
2. Impersonality
3. Fallin’ Down
4. Burnin’ Up
5. Eyes Wide Open
6. Long Way Down
7. Only One
8. Hey
9. Slave Girl
10. Name
11. Flat Top

UPDATE: A user reached out to me stating that most likely the title “Visit Barbie & Ken” is a reference to the tour the Goo Goo Dolls were sharing at the time with the band Bush. It was probably an inside joke whereby the would refer to Bush’s lead singer Gavin Rossdale as Ken, and his girlfriend Gwen Stefani as Barbie.

DOWNLOAD (Main Source)

DOWNLOAD (Mirror 1)