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Shannon
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Goo Goo Dolls go with the flow when making music
« on: Mar 29th, 2007, 3:48pm » |
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Goo Goo Dolls go with the flow when making music
A harvest of help Although the set list has changed a bit from the first leg of the “Let Love In” tour, one thing has remained the same for this leg of the Goo Goo Dolls’ trek: There will be donation bins for charity group U.S. Harvest at each tour stop. Bassist Robby Takac said the bins will be at the front doors of the theater, and he hopes fans will place non-perishable food items in them before seeing the show.
“Some days it’s huge, and sometimes it isn’t, but in the past few years we’ve helped with 3 million meals,” he said. “The food stays in each city and is usually given away the next day. No money change hands – it’s just volunteers showing up. It’s all above board.”
One of the first hits for the Goo Goo Dolls was called “We Are the Normal,” a celebration of the Average Joe or Jane who was in the audience at the time. Since then, the band has scored several huge hits and plays theater shows, like the one April 1 at Grand Sierra Resort and Casino.
That first hit was appropriate. It’s that appeal to the “normal” that has seen the band weather trends and keep its core audience, said bassist Robby Takac.
“This is not the fairytale world of ‘MTV Cribs,’ and all of that stuff isn’t real anyway,” Takac said with one of many laughs during a phone interview this month. “We’ve still kept that direct access to the things we liked all along and direct access to the people who listen to us, and that’s allowed us to do this for an awfully long time.”
Takac was calling on a day off outside of Detroit. He was spending it working on some music on a laptop, but he said he spends days off differently each time.
“Sometimes you look for the highest hill and climb up it to look from the top, and sometimes you close all the curtains and don’t come out,” he said. “It just depends on where you are.”
Takac said the band has changed its stage show from its first tour for its latest CD, “Let Love In,” which took place in larger venues.
“For the past seven months, we were pretty much doing the same show every night because we had built this video montage and all this great stuff to work with the songs,” Takac said. “The show was awesome, but even we’d get sick of going out there and doing the same order every night. So when we decided to put this shorter leg together in theaters, we wanted to put together a more traditional show. We now move the songs in the set around a little bit and see what happens as the trip progresses.”
A steady climb
It’s that willingness to shift with the tide that was a hallmark of the band’s rise to the top of the alternative rock ranks. According to the band’s biography, John Rzeznik and Takac formed the band in 1986 in Buffalo, N.Y. Both musicians were attending college and playing in rock bands when they decided to work together (drummer Mike Malinin joined the trio in 1995). They recorded their first demos at the studio where Takac worked. One demo was heard by indie label Celluloid, which released the band’s debut in 1987.
After several U.S. tours, Los Angeles label Metal Blade wanted to sign the band as one of its first non-metal groups. Eventually distributed by Warner Brothers, which signed the band outright in the late 1990s, the Goo Goo Dolls’ first breakthrough on commercial radio came with the album “Superstar Car Wash” in 1993.
The band’s 1995 CD, “A Boy Named Goo,” featured a top 5 Billboard hit with the song “Name.” Then came the album “Dizzy Up the Girl” in 1998, which featured “Iris” — first on the “City of Angels” soundtrack — as well as other hits “Slide” and “Broadway.” “Iris” was a massive hit, staying for 18 weeks on top of Billboard’s Hot 100 Airplay chart. Two more CDs followed: “Gutterflower” in 2002 and “Let Love In” in last October.
The first hit from its new record is “Better Days,” a song originally written as a Christmas song but since adapted by TV news shows for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Takac said the song was meant more as a personal song and not political.
“As we (Rzeznik and he) talked about it, it seemed like a good example of what happens with most songs that get to this larger level,” Takac said. “You only have so many words to describe the way you feel in a three-minute song, and the brain is left to fill in the blanks. So, we do that with our own experiences. I think that when all the levees broke and with everything happening in New Orleans and down South, it was so evident that there was a communal feeling of grief, and that song captured that, and that changed the way people looked at it.”
Shuffling back to Buffalo
The new CD also saw a change in producer, from longtimer Rob Cavallo to Glen Ballard, known for his work with Alanis Morrisette and the Dave Matthews Band. Takac said Ballard’s approach was different.
“Glen has a freestyle way of working through a session,” he said. “It would be, ‘Let’s try anything,’ and, as weird as it sounds, if we didn’t want to try something, he’d be disappointed if we didn’t. So that was one idea that we took from him: you might as well try all of it and try to find your twist, your different thing.”
The band already had changed up its methods at the writing stage. It rented space in its former hometown of Buffalo for a change of venue. The Goo Goo Dolls had moved to Los Angeles around the time “Iris” hit.
“As a band, it was a bit of an awakening for us,” Takac said of the temporary move back East. “We felt the (songwriting) process was getting stale. Not really with ideas, but just the whole process of writing and how we did it. So we spent probably eight months in the freezing, freezing cold in this building that was very large. It was an old Masonic ballroom, so we got some great drum sounds in there. It was very inspiring.”
Takac said the band would work for eight to 10 hours a day — and sometimes beyond.
“Sometimes we just go 16 hours a day,” he said. “We like to try things and sit and toil with stuff.”
Takac wants to return to Buffalo for the next CD, and the band is building its own studio there, where it can produce friends’ bands when the studio isn’t in use by the group.
“For the next one, I think the idea is to do what we did last time and record, but hopefully make sure all the sounds we get from the very beginning are usable for the record,” he said. “So the producer wouldn’t have to be sitting there. He could just come in and we could use whatever we could and then if we have to redo something, the drum set is in the exact same place where we recorded it before.”
http://www.gotorenotahoe.com/news/stories/html/2007/03/28/2877.php
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DWG
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Re: Goo Goo Dolls go with the flow when making mus
« Reply #1 on: Mar 30th, 2007, 12:42am » |
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“We like to try things and sit and toil with stuff.”
Okay, that just sounds funny.
I think when I dropped off my food donations for USA Harvest, they ended up being brought back to some college kid's dorm. No bins. Where are the dang bins??
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ChickenCookie
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When he takes me in his arms I see la vie en rose.
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Re: Goo Goo Dolls go with the flow when making mus
« Reply #2 on: Mar 31st, 2007, 11:31am » |
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on Mar 30th, 2007, 12:42am, DWG wrote:| I think when I dropped off my food donations for USA Harvest, they ended up being brought back to some college kid's dorm. No bins. Where are the dang bins?? |
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Think of it this way: perhaps you helped break a poor college student from his Ramen habit. That stuff'll kill ya. 
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