A Brief Nostalgia Tangent: “Desperados”

Some time ago I wrote a post about the two hardest-to-crack mysteries every Goo Goo Dolls fan wishes they had solved. Today I received a message from contributor Christina, which featured her thoughts on one of them.

It is said that the recording sessions for “Dizzy Up The Girl” were a convoluted process for several reasons. The main one being John’s writer’s block and the uncertainty that was surrounding the whole idea of returning to the studio after the failed “A Boy Named Goo” tour, which was successful in terms of attendance but devastating in terms of net revenue generated by the band. The latter ended up suing Warner Records in 1997, citing slavery contracts and monetary obligations towards the label which basically sent John et al. into deep debt to the tune of who knows how many thousands of dollars. Anyhow, that story is for another day (post).

What is certain is that “Dizzy Up The Girl” was not recorded in a conventional way. Usually bands leave their hometowns for the studio and stay there for a number of days/weeks consecutively. In most cases, recording a whole album takes about one month and an half of continuous work. Sometimes, even longer (one of the other bands I follow stayed in the studio for five months straight to complete one of their full lengths).

The Goo Goo Dolls, to my knowledge, did a brief recording session in early 1998, then stopped, then returned months later for a longer session (after “Iris” had already been released) as the latter had injected new hope and adrenaline into the sixth album project.

During the Napster days, it was discussed that in-between those two sessions, or slightly after the second one, a couple of songs had leaked: an unnamed, instrumental demo and “Desperados“, another instrumental take which was supposed to appear as either an intro or ghost track on the album, and that apparently had been fully produced and mixed. Christina shares her thoughts about the latter, which represents one of the two aforementioned mysteries we already wrote about:

Hey again… 

A little tangent before my next dump of videos. I think I mentioned in a previous email that I hadn’t finished reading through your whole blog archive yet — well, this post caught my eye yesterday and while reading through I had an “OMG, I remember that” moment. Well, I REMEMBER DESPERADOS! Haha.  

Okay, so I was a KaZaA girl rather than a Napster user (always a contrarian) and I’m fairly sure that’s where I would’ve downloaded it in the early ’00s. I remember having the mp3 for a while, but sadly it would have been at least 7 or 8 computers ago, and teenage me was much worse about backing up data than I am now. (I’ll try to dig through my old iPods and hard drives to see if I still have it somewhere, but don’t get your hopes up… I looked through a couple already with no luck.)

What I can say is that my memory of it aligns very closely with the description in your post. It was a short song — I was going to guesstimate 2 minutes — uptempo instrumental, guitar-driven, a bit atmospheric, and the production didn’t sound rough. 

What I will also say is that I remember, even at the time, having one thought about the song… this isn’t the Goo Goo Dolls. I have absolutely no way of proving that, of course, but it was my gut instinct after listening to it a handful of times. Something about it felt too out of place with their general sound, and I’d have to hear it again to really pin down why… it sounded a little more prog-inspired and not ’90s alt-rock enough, perhaps. 

As anyone who was on Napster, Limewire, KaZaA, etc. knows, songs got mislabeled all the time (“I’ll Be” by Edwin McCain got circulated as a Goo song pretty often, for example) either out of innocent ignorance, or as a deliberate attempt to troll or spread a song around. My theory was that “Desperados” was a case of the latter — maybe an indie band who just wanted some ears on a song, so they labeled it as Goo Goo Dolls to get people to download it. I could be 1000000% wrong about this, of course — it’d be a silly thing for someone to do, and I certainly want to believe that it was a genuine, unheard Goo track — but “it isn’t them” feels like the most plausible reason that this mp3 would’ve disappeared into the ether while other demos were preserved by fans over the years. 

Anyway, I know this doesn’t help solve the mystery in any way, but I can corroborate that the mp3 did legitimately exist and my memories of it match up with the description you shared. What the song actually is, though… I’d love to know the answer too. Heck, I’d just like to hear it again and see if I have the same opinion 20 years later. 🙂

She may be right about it being a mislabeled track, or maybe just someone trolling. We’ll never know unless we get our hands on it somehow, as with today’s technology it is quite easy to pinpoint to the real copyright holder of a given song.

Many years ago I remember there was a band which song was being promoted as a Goo Goo Dolls song in various P2P channels. Despite similarities in both the singer’s voice and sounds (this one was actually kind of reminiscent of the “Dizzy Up The Girl” era), it was clearly not penned by the band our blog celebrates. I am mentioning this merely to state that when it comes to the P2P circles, oftentimes what you see not always corresponds to reality. For the curious ones, below is the aforementioned tune, which I ended up liking quite a lot even though the Goo’s had nothing to do with it.

Many thanks to Christina for her insights. Maybe one day even this mystery will be cracked by our amazing readers.