The Moody Goo’s (1996 Article)

Today we share an article which was released in 1996. It’s an interesting one because it offers some more insights into what was going on with the band at the time, including details on the internal conflicts between George Tutuska and John Rzeznik.

Most of it is about the struggles the band underwent before their fifth release actually took off. There are some interesting bits of trivia in here, including some stuff that has to do with former drummer Tutuska, such as:

• Studio sessions for “A Boy Named Goo” filled with anger and tension between him and John. Apparently, George was removed from the band as soon as production for it had been finished.
• George and John barely spoke for years before the events which led to the former being taken aside.
• Robby claims the “Fallin’ Down” royalty cheques dilemma was for the amount of $600. I am not sure about this number, it seems a bit low to me.
• John’s former wife Laurie Farinacci was managing a Disney store by the time this interview took place.
• Robby Takac got married on January 1st 1995. I actually didn’t know about it until now.

Every good band deserves a hit single (It just took the Goo Goo Dolls a frustrating nine years to get theirs).

It’s Wednesday afternoon, the easy side of hump day for most Americans. Folded into well-worn flannel and denim, the hardworking heart and soul of Goo Goo Dolls—otherwise known as bassist/vocalist Robby Takac and guitarist /vocalist Johnny Rzeznik–are slumped in patio chairs at a restaurant called KWGB. A diner that poses as a radio station, KWGB comes complete with a smarmy deejay and an oldies-stocked deejay booth. It’s tucked into a prefab shopping center called Universal City Walk, smack-dab in the heart of a film studio that attracts visitors as an amusement park posing as a city. It’s confusing, but this is L.A., where everything’s a little unreal. As frustrating as it would be for your average low-key burger-hawker to jockey for attention at City Walk, it’s been even more difficult for Goo Goo Dolls to grab a spotlight in alternative rock’s image-conscious universe.

Faced with the prospect of another album barely making a dent in American radio, Goo Goo Dolls were dismayed. “There were a thousand times when we just said, ‘This is it. We’re done. It’s over,'” Takac admits. Even though rocking hard and living lean is fine fuel for the Goo Goo Dolls’ angst-ridden, truth-probing music, they were feeling the demands of adulthood: The time to consider more profitable occupations was rapidly approaching. From its home base in Buffalo, New York, the band had been gene rating strong-armed guitar rock for nearly a decade. That’s also how long Rzeznik, 30, and Takac, 32, had been trying to carve a niche for themselves in the music industry. Their records languished in CD bins, their songs weren’t being played by radio, and their product wasn’t being pushed by their L.A.-based label, Metal Blade/Warner Bros…

Just a year ago, Goo Goo Dolls had practically given up the struggle. Rzeznik and Takac were fully prepared for the band’s quiet, dignified demise. Yet, here they are at KWGB. Rzeznik lazily scoops up more Sloppy Joe Fries and makes a last-ditch attempt “It certainly feels like we’re pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks up the side of mountain most of the time,” he says. “But it’s starting to happen.” “There’s a wheel on it this year,” Takac says. That wheel is a little-song-that-could , a soft rocking, hard rolling acoustic wonder called “Name,” from A Boy Named Goo. Produced by Lou Giordano (Pere Ubu, Husker Du, Sugar), Boy is the Goo Goo Dolls’ fifth album and the band’s lauded since 1990’s Hold Me Up. If you haven’t heard “Name”‘s modal, Eastern-tinged guitar line and heartachy lyrics, you haven’t been listening to your radio for a while—like five months maybe, since that’s how long it’s been in heavy rotation. A programming director at Los Angeles radio station KROQ first recognized the potential power of “Name”‘s snaggletoothed rhythms and sweet yet unstable melody.

Ignoring Warner Bros… choice of “Flat Top” as the album’s second single (after “Only One”), program director Kevin Weatherly jumped ahead of the label’s promo schedule and started spinning “Name.” The song slowly swept onto radio stations up and down the dial, Rzeznik’s husky vocal soaring and dipping through a roller coaster of yearning and regret. The success of “Name” and the Goo Goo Dolls’ subsequent higher profile has transformed the late-blooming A Boy Named Goo into a platinum album. “It took eight months for this album to even have a potential of a life,” Takac says. “I think that sort of gave us–and I hate this whole concept–that sort of ‘alternative integrity’ prior to getting a Top 40 hit. We were slugging it out to a hundred people. I used to bring my girlfriend out with us for four or five days just so that she could experience what the hell I was going through. ‘Look, there’s no one here, you understand this?’ And she’d be like, ‘Can I go home?’ ” Rzeznik doesn’t take Weatherly’s decision to play “Name” lightly. “The next time I see him I’ve got to shake his hand and say, ‘You know, dude, you changed my life. Probably in one fell swoop.’ I never realized the gravity of one person’s decision, but it really set in motion a completely different course of action.” He leans back, amazed at the change. “It’s been really exciting.” Not that the band didn’t have some fun along the way. “We were on a really shit-hole pattern of life nine years ago,” Takac explains. “We were completely out of our minds. We were utterly out of control. We would do absolutely anything ’cause we thought it was funny.”

He’s describing the era that spawned the band’s eponymous debut and, two years later, the dark Jed, which was released by Death Enigma; Hold Me Up followed in 1990. Even after 1993’s more polished Superstar Car Wash, Hold Me Up, with its bumptious, rough energy, has become the barometer for die-hard fans. But by the time A Boy Named Goo was being recorded, the fun had degenerated into grim, bitter squabbles. Studio sessions exploded into door-slamming, boot-stomping showdowns between Rzeznik and drummer George Tutuska. Things devolved so drastically that Rzeznik and Takac split from Tutuska as soon as Goo was in the can. “I did my best to hold it together,” Takac says. “But John and George had completely lost communication, weren’t even speaking for years.” (Tutuska maintains that a fight over $600 in royalties brought about fracture.) They replaced Tutuska with 29-year-old Mike Malinin, who has been with the band for a year now. “we’re dating,” says Rzeznik when questioned about Malinin’s status as a full-fledged Goo Goo Dolls. “we’ve just gotten over a divorce.”

After 10 years of touring and living hand-to-mouth, and despite the Dolls’ uncompromised love for their brand of high-energy rock ‘n’ Roll, the whole situation was too strange. By the time Malinin had been recruited, it was getting downright embarrassing. Now all that’s changed. “It’s amazing what a hit song will do,” says bassist Takac, with just a hint of irony in his sandpaper-rough voice. Ironically, when Warner Bros.. fired the label’s oldest and most respected luminaries Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker in what’s been the most publicly scrutinized executive reshuffling at a major label in years, it turned out to be a boon for the band. “Luckily, the right people were there now, people who came up through the company with the band,” Rzeznik says. “A guy who was our product manager–he wound up becoming the president of Warner Bros.. So we have a lot of friends there, and they really stuck by us through a lot of albums that didn’t make them any money.” When the band’s future looked bleakest, Rzeznik and Takac made a last-resort pitch to save their relationship with the label. “We wanted a legitimate show, and they were cool enough to give it to us.” Rzeznik says.

Rzeznik recently cut his blond hair to chin-length, and he now more closely resembles the late Kurt Cobain than he does Dave Pirner. But Rzeznik’s scruffy good looks and the Dolls’ staying power account for numerous Priner/Soul Asylum comparisons. In fact, Soul Asylum’s mainstream entree, “Runway Train,” did for that group what “Name” is currently doing for Goo Goo Doll s. The “Name” video clip is spliced into prime-time TV shows, and the Dolls are familiar faces with the VH1 set. “[We have] ‘the work ethic of Soul Asylum,” says Takac, mocking a journalist’s pat description. “That’s ’cause we both kick ass as far as touring goes. We go out and we tour and we tour and we tour, and then we go to radio stations everyday.” Takac and Rzeznik may joke about their band’s new top-of-the-pops position, but there’s no doubt that Goo Goo Dolls are suffering from a new rocker’s disease that might as well be called Soul Asylumitis. Its symptoms? A hard-edged alternative-rock band struggles for years, one of the band’s softer song gets picked up by stations, the band is dismissed as a sellout by longtime fans. Case in point: Goo Goo Dolls were voted Readers Poll as the “Next Hootie & the Blowfish.” In fact, the Dolls’ name might be one of the most damaging strikes against them, from a newcomer’s perspective.

The name emerged in one drunken night 10 years ago and was inspired by a rubber baby’s head in True Detective magazine, During this morning’s appearance on dinosaur rock station K LOS’ popular Mark and Brian show, a caller inquired about the name, and Rzeznik, clearly tired of explaining, said half-defensively, half-jokingly, “It’s a stupid name that we came up with when we were 19 and really drunk. So, you know, deal with it, man! It don’t mean nothing.” Takac doesn’t think their popular ballad or dumb name will preclude people’s interest in their Cheap Trick-meets-Replacements raveups. “We have the perfect crossover song,” Takac says. “That’s close enough to what we do, structure-wise and melodically.” The song is really no great departure for the Dolls, since they’ve included a ballad on almost every album they’ve made. Listen to Hold Me Up’s cynical breakup song “Two Days in February” and you’ll see that “Name” was brewing in the band’s subconscious for at least four years. When asked whether their next single, the harder, rollicking “Naked” is going to confuse newly won-over radio stations, Takac says, “I don’t think so. We did and incredible remix, tagged-on this clean beginning, this little entrance on [the song] so that programmers don’t immediately go to the stop button.”

The Goo Goo Dolls’ music remains as gusty, ballsy, and hard-rocking as any hardscrabble Buffalo band’s. They are dedicated, practicing every week when they’re not together, “24-7,” as they have been over the past year. Both Rzeznik and Takac are married (not to each other, but sometimes they must wonder). Rzeznik’s devoted too an ex-model who manages a Disney store, while Takac’s still brushing off the rice from his New Year’s Day wedding in Las Vegas. Today the pair decided to take a breather and plunge deep into the bowels of the movie studio/theme park Universal Studios. Here they thrill to simulated earthquakes, chill to fake floods, and, unfortunately, recall some best-forgotten postpardy queasies. “My bedroom ceiling used to spin like that–not a fond memory,” Takac says, caught in the relentless swirl of a make-believe avalanche. (After yeas of partying heavily, the Dolls Our stoic, streaked-blonde tour guide tosses off jokes that have accumulated the dust of 20-plus years. “Know what kind of wood that tree’s made of?” she asks, pointing to a painted fiberglass semblance of a scraggly oak. “Why, that’s Hollywood!” Ughs and oofs all around. Rzeznik, who’s been immersed in a conversation about art solitude, merely winces. But Takac, a great sport armed with an infectious barroom cackle, issues a truly pained howl. When our drive, Chuck, takes a phony wrong turn toward Psycho’s Bates Motel and the guide calls with ground-zero emotion, “Chuck! Chuck! We’re not supposed to go up here, this isn’t part of the tour,” all the unscheduled stops on the Goo Goo Dolls’ rocky road to success come to mind.

At 15, Rzeznik was an orphan. Before then he had navigates a life like so many others, in what he describes as a “tightly knit ethnic community” on Buffalo’s working-class East side. He grew up on the corner of Clark and Kent streets; as kids, he and his four older sisters called it “Superman Corner.” When Rzeznik’s mailman father and schoolteacher mother died within a year of each other (his father of alcoholism; his mother, according to Rzeznik, of loneliness), Rzeznik’s life took a dramatic turn. He got an apartment on his own and started hanging out with “shady people.” Rzeznik was the only “punk” (his quotes) at Buffalo’s McKinley Vocational High School, where he studied to be a plumber. He made himself a target with a Mohawk and a penchant for everything from the Cure and Depeche Mode to the Damned and the Replacements. “I was little skinny kid with no athletic prowess,” he says. “I got beat up for listening to an Echo and the Bunnymen record. I brought it to lend it to a friend. And, you know, the usual idiots in high school: ‘Ah, what kind of fuckin’ fag!’ Fag-the teenage boy definition of fag is anything I don’t understand or anyone I don’t understand.” Rzeznik laughs. “From my background, if you become a plumber or a carpenter, then you’ve done a lot for yourself. Not that it’s not something to aspire to, that’s real work ’cause it takes your back and your brains. But you just followed along, did what everybody else did. I just decided it was a bunch of bullshit.” Takac was a suburban kid with a Brady Bunch-style background who was completing broadcasting college while playing in a heavy metal outfit with Rzeznik’s cousin. When the two future Goo Goo Dolls met, Rzeznik was ready to channel his cynical edge into songwriting and acting out on-stage. Takac’s parents, however, weren’t exactly thrilled by their son’s decision to join a power trio. “This was a horrible experience for either years,” Takac says. “Their son graduates from college and says, I’ hitting the road with a band.” Rzeznik still seems freshly introspective as he leans forward in his chair, contemplating the life he has been asked to rehash a thousand times. “Now it’s a real source of energy for me, to think of where I’ve been and where I am,” he says. “I’m just glad to be here.”

After years of struggling, you’d think that Goo Goo Dolls might be able to rest on their laurels and pay a few bills, but now they’re caught up in the uncomfortable rock star position for having to apologize for such slow-moving fame. But Rzeznik’s probably as confused as anyone, who remember s the Dolls’ old days, and he wants to assure their steadfast fans that Goo Goo Dolls don’t plan on crossover status for very long. “We’re just driving though the neighborhood,” he says with finality. “We ain’t movin’ in.” Rzeznik continues, “That’s the neighborhood of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Phil Collins….” Not exactly the scruffy home you’d expect for a band that cites Bad Brains, Killing Joke, and Husker Du as influences. Takac agrees. “Every person on [the Top 10] is a millionaire–I have $80 in the bank!” They might be rubbing elbows with Carey and touring with Bush, but there’s no doubt Rzeznik and Takac are real people, just a couple of regular, hardworking guys from Buffalo. They take out the trash when they go home; they shovel snow. “I’m not some kind of musical virtuoso or anything,” Rzeznik says. “I find myself being exactly who I am at that moment when I pick up a guitar. It’s kind of comforting, because I can never sell out. I’m not talented enough to contrive something like that. “My wife’ s known me for six years, and when I ask her, ‘Has there ever been a day since I’ve know you that I haven’t at least been on the phone once about [the band]?’ And she’s like, ‘No. Never. Not one day.’ I want to stay as hands-on with the whole thing as possible because we’ve worked so hard for everything.

For average guys who’ve struggled for so long for a smidgen of recognition beyond cultish bar-based following, they must feel confused wandering a world of splashy privilege and getting recognized walking down the street in strange towns, even though they haven’t even begun to reap the spoils of their success. At times, Rzeznik and Takac must wonder whether, one day, someone’s going to call them out, snatch back all those Billboard “Heatseeker” T-shirts, revoke all the late-night talk-show spots, and send them packing. “Johnny and I always joke about Mariah Carey’s husband [Sony music President Tommy Mottola] goin’ , Who the hell are these guys? I want them off the charts. Now!” Rzeznik completes the drama: “Like we’re going to be sleeping in our hotel rooms, there’ll be a knock on the door, and, boom, they’ll blow us against the back wall.” “And then we’ll sell records!” Takac says with a laugh.

Taken from here. (Archived version here).