When it comes to the Goo Goo Dolls’ breakthrough album “A Boy Named Goo”, only two studio sessions are in our possession: the Pre-Mixing Cuts (which we published here) and today’s release.
Robby Takac’s Rough Demos is a very small collection of demos written by the band’s bassist and vocalist in 1994. These two songs were likely recorded in a studio (given the pretty good audio quality they feature) and both tunes ended up in the final version of the full length.
To my ears, these were likely one of the final versions, if not the final version, of the songs before they hit the mixing/mastering processes. I came to that conclusion because they sound very close to the tunes that ended up on the finished album.
According to this list (which link was provided to us by contributor Javier), there are only two “A Boy Named Goo” sessions releases, like I stated above:
- “A Boy Named Goo” Roughs/Demos (12 tracks, Only One instrumental track): This is actually the Pre-Mixing Cut I briefly wrote about and linked above.
- “Robby Roughs: 1994 Sessions” (7 tracks, random rough oddball Robby recordings, some of these are questionable): This is what I am presenting to you today. What about the other five songs? Not written by Robby, and just randomly put in there by whoever released this thing. They are songs from another band, which name I cannot remember as of right now. I know for a fact, because I own this CD which I bought years ago from one of my sources. The singer in those five songs does not sound like Robby at all. To further test my theory, I uploaded them on a website which tells you whether or not a given song is copyrighted by analyzing its audio spectrum. They all returned a positive copyright claim (not a Goo Goo Dolls one), along with the name of the band and the song itself. The remaining two, which we publish today, are the real deal.
Further browsing through that list, we notice another interesting release: GUTTERFLOWER session DEMOS!
Even in this case, I happen to have this CD, also provided to me by the aforementioned source. Why haven’t I posted those Gutterflower demos yet? Because, just like (almost half) the Robby’s Roughs CD, it is a fake release.
In the Gutterflower Demos CD, you can hear all of the 12 songs which ended up in the final record but in a different order, and with very low audio quality. My interpretation: Someone was playing the album in the background and recorded the whole thing with a low-quality recorder, from a distance. If you pay close attention, the songs sound exactly the same as the ones included in the final release, but it feels like the source playing them is located from afar. In a nutshell, it’s not the real deal at all. At least the Robby’s Roughs were a real deal, even if for only 30% of what the release was claimed to be.
Alright, now that that’s out of the way, I will simply leave you to enjoy these two Robby’s demos, which we gladly add to our archive.
You can listen to them below. Download links are provided at the end of this post.
TRACK LISTING:
- Burnin’ Up
- Somethin’ Bad
Temple of Goo - The rarest Goo Goo Dolls releases, for real Goo fans only 