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Cleaning up the Goo/article
« on: Nov 9th, 2006, 11:58am » |
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Thu, November 9, 2006
Cleaning up the Goo
Johnny Rzeznik and his rambunctious rock 'n' roll Dolls are all grown up
By DAVID SCHMEICHEL
Looking for a good way to gauge the changes in the music industry over the last few decades?
Why not ask a group of artists who've been around to experience them, and who've done a bit of changing themselves so as not to get lost in the shuffle?
Like The Goo Goo Dolls, the Buffalo alt-rock trio whose members cut their teeth as Replacements sound-alikes, but became a worldwide phenomenon thanks to some massive-selling singles that marked their transition to far more mainstream acclaim.
Though many listeners are only familiar with their biggest hits -- specifically, the acoustic ballads Name and Iris -- the Dolls have been around for 21 years now, a longevity they attribute partly to the aforementioned industry evolutions.
"Because of the way the Internet works, I don't think things are going to become as passe as quickly as they had in the past," says Robby Takac. "Things will only become as passe as (listeners) allow them to be. And they won't have things shoved down their throats anymore, because all they have to do is move away from it."
Of course, it helps that The Goo Goo Dolls have managed to change right alongside their audience, morphing from the snotty punk band that almost called itself The Sex Maggots back in 1985 to the well-heeled power-popsters whose latest effort -- the recent Let Love In -- was given a mature-sounding sheen by producer Glen Ballard.
"He listens, and he finds these amazing parts that just work," Takac says of Ballard, who also famously sanded the rough edges off albums for Alanis Morissette, Live, and Dave Matthews Band. "He provided us with this musical reckless abandon, to try whatever we wanted."
But it wasn't all Ballard. As Takac and his bandmates -- drummer Mike Malinin and frontman Johnny Rzeznik -- get older, they've become a lot more willing to experiment with softer sounds, he says.
"You get a little bit more brave," Takac tells the Sun from his home in L.A. "With every record we make, we're a little less afraid to turn down the guitars and derive that power from something other than a stack of Marshall amplifiers."
While The Goo Goo Dolls have been branching out on their own in recent years -- Takac runs his own record label, and Rzeznik writes songs for upstarts like Avril Lavigne and Pink -- they're still close friends, and while on tour especially, the duo relate to each other in exactly the same way they did as roommates in their wilder years.
But 20 years later, they're a bit older, a bit wiser, and a whole lot more realistic about their place in the rock 'n' roll pantheon, Takac says, especially where their biggest hits are concerned.
"I remember when I was a kid, my sister bought Phil Collins' Face Value record, and she really hasn't had any need to buy another record since," he says laughing. "For some people, Iris is that song, and we're happy to be that band ... but that song was a phenomenon, and if you base your career on a phenomenon, you're going to be disappointed. Because a phenomenon is nothing you have control over."
Tickets to The Goo Goo Dolls' show are $42.50 and $57.50 at Ticketmaster(www.ticketmaster.ca or 780-3333).
http://winnipegsun.com/Entertainment/Music/2006/11/09/2288781-sun.html
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