One of our readers sent us a VHS rip of a 1988 concert, when the band only had one album under their belt.
Today we dive into history with a full show which took place in California, during the “First Release” tour. Specifically, the concert happened on April 29th at the Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach. Here is the setlist.fm entry for it.
Apparently the video was produced by a website called LAPunk, as the title screen at the beginning implies. I visited their YouTube page and discovered that this show had actually already been uploaded there a couple of years ago. I am not sure if the file I was sent is a YouTube rip, the original file, or a re-worked version of the original file. Either way, I feel like it is worth publishing the copy I got, given the rarity of the material.
Set list is not very long, with only eleven tracks, one of which is a Sweet cover of one of their most popular songs, “The Ballroom Blitz“. Setlist.fm also lists “Torn Apart“, which in the video is not featured as apparently the latter begins in the middle of “Don’t Fear The Reaper“.
I’m actually surprised by the video quality of this release, which is definitely a VHS rip that was most likely upscaled to HD (1280x720p). Upscaling is quite the tough job unless you have the right (expensive) equipment and you know what you’re doing. In this case, I find the final outcome to be extraordinary. So, I feel like saying “amazing performance” to whoever worked on it.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be claimed for the audio part of the show, which I found to be muffled and uneasy to hear throughout the whole session. To me, it was so bad I couldn’t even recognize the songs they were playing. As a result, I did not include time stamps in the YouTube video embedded below. Nevertheless, this material is quite rare and despite its flaws it deserves to be shared and preserved.
In terms of the concert itself, like I said we get ten songs and running time of about 23 minutes. A lot of energy put out by John et al., with them jumping around the stage while interacting with the crowd during the whole event. A common modus operandi the Goo Goo Dolls adhered to during those early years.
Well, I guess that’s all I have to say about it. I’m sure a lot of people in here will enjoy this little unearthed gem. Anything that is pre-1990 is actually quite hard to find.
You can watch the video below. Download links are available at the end of this post.
TRACK LISTING:
- Torn Apart (Not Included)
- Don’t Fear The Reaper
- I’m Addicted
- Up Yours
- Misfortune
- No Way Out
- Different Light
- The Ballroom Blitz
- 7th of Last Month (Or Iggy The Cat Gets A Bath)
- Come On
- Love Dolls
Temple Of Goo - The rarest Goo Goo Dolls releases, for real Goo fans only 
Hey! Nice add!! So I did actually make that setlist.fm entry months ago, but I based it off the other video of this show, which had the ending of Torn Apart. Agreed, the quality is really hard to hear!! I’ve kind of trained my ear to hear what the live sound of the songs are, so a combination of that and a really jacked up volume on my headphones, and I made a setlist.
Oh, I see. I actually have pretty decent ears when it comes to recognizing their songs but in this case the muffling and distortion was so bad I gave up after a couple of random tries. I guess for now I’ll just leave the track listing as is until a better version comes out. Thanks for publishing that setlist entry anyhow, without it I could barely understand what was going on heh.