Music > Interviews
Interview with Goo Goo Dolls
09/10/13
It is impossible to talk introduce Goo Goo Dolls without mentioning their global hit, ‘Iris’. It’s not that they were a one-hit wonder, it’s just there was some kind of wonder about that one hit. Billboard recently names it Number One on the top pop songs of the first twenty years (‘92-2012) of their Top 40. It has re-entered the chart four times in the UK alone since its first release in 1998, most recently this year again. To be responsible for such an anthem of an entire generation and then some, it makes you sit up and listen when they continue to release and tour, and when guitarist Robby Tukak is kind enough to give you 20 minutes of his time…
Are you having a good day today? Not too many interviews to do? No, no; just a couple, then the show tonight in Boston.
Good, good. Are you enjoying the run at the moment? Yeah, yeah, yeah; we’ve just had a little bit of time off, now we’ve got five or six shows coming up and we’ve just shot a video for our new single, just a couple of days ago, so it’s busy.
There’s so much I could ask you, so I’m gonna take this chronologically, if that’s OK. If you don’t mind me dragging you way back when, in the year you formed, it was an exciting time for music at both extremes of the US coasts. You had No Doubt, The Offspring, Alice in Chains, Pixies, then hip hop from Cypress Hill and N.W.A. and so on – what can you tell us about the musical landscape you were emerging into? It felt back then that things were a little less fractured, you know, people would be listening to many types of music at the same time. You saw an awful lot of bands getting very, very, very popular, very quickly, y’know. Our first record came out in ’86 I think it was, or even ’87 and things were much different than they were 6, 7 years later. I mean, if you were going to do well playing alternative music, you were going to sell 30,000 records and you’d be done and you’d be very successful. Within 6 or 7 years after that, all of a sudden people were getting signed for outrageous amounts of money and y’know, all those big contracts that were going to the hair metal bands [laughs]… years before were all of a sudden coming to the alternative bands! And so the landscape really changed and there seemed to be a lot more players in it, ‘cause as I said, [when we were] first getting into it, major success wasn’t all that major really. It was interesting to watch, for sure.
There must’ve been some pivotal moments in those early days of your career. You played the legendary CBGB club early on, which is obviously a legendary venue now, but actually how important was that kind of booking for an emerging band? Well I think back then, for us, we were kinda just learning how to be a band. We were three guys driving round in a van and CBGB’s was just a great place to do that. It was just a small, dirty little bar in New York, but if you put a gig on there and you got 100 people in the room, it felt like a great show. Those were great places to learn how to be a good band.
Your breakthrough didn’t really come ‘til around 10 years after you started. There are a lot of bands who’ll give it two years tops, but what kept you motivated and committed to the cause? I guess it was just doing a little bit better every time we brought a record out. We’d sell, I don’t know, maybe 10,000 more copies than the last one and as I said, at first it wasn’t about selling 100,000 records or half a million records, it was just about putting out great records and being able to tour. I don’t know if those records were great [laughs], but they were certainly the best we could do at that moment [laughs]. So we would put those out and go and tour and I don’t know, we felt successful. And every time something more came, we were like, ‘Woah, this is awesome’, so by the time ’95 came, when we could stop having other jobs, and stop having to find new girlfriends every time we came home –
- Yeah, it’s hard work, but someone has to do it… Yeah…! Or find a new place to live, it became a different thing at that point. From that point on, it’s been about managing a completely different type of band.
I’m sure there were times when you questioned the longevity of the band. If there had have been one thing to have ended the band, what would it have been? Well, we had a drummer switch y’know, nine years ago and that was close. What would’ve ended it? I don’t know, you know, I don’t really think in those terms; I more think in terms of ‘how do we keep this thing going?’ I don’t really think about what would tear it apart, you know?! Obviously there’s the standard things that tear most bands apart – egos, money and women –
- The holy trinity - [Laughs] Yeah, exactly, but none of things has seemed to bother us up to this point, so we’re doing OK.
I was a teenager in the ‘90s, so your music kinda soundtracked our first time moments and rites of passage. You must feel a sense of honour that you were one of those bands that people Tippexed on to their satchels and had posters of on their walls? [Laughs] Yeah, I guess! It’s weird, you know; when things start happening and you’re getting more popular, you’re kinda too busy to notice or think about any of that stuff, but I think when I look back on it, it kind of freaks me out a little bit, I guess. I don’t know, you sort of end up in a bubble when you’re in a band, especially when you’re touring a lot, so you kind of end up in that bubble. I don’t know, I try not to pay attention to any of that other stuff and just pay attention to what we’re doing, and try to have a good time doing it.
When you listen to your really early material, your sound has evolved so much over the years. Aside from naturally maturing, what other factors, do you think, played a part in the changing of your sound? Well, I think it’s like you said, the natural maturing of the band, I mean, the band’s been together for a little under 27 years now – actually, 27 years this year, so I think that it feels like any person, you know? If you were a painter, in 27 years you’d discover some things and be intrigued and influenced by some things and some of those things are musical and some of those things are just life lessons, I guess. I just think that our ability to have this career and some longevity has allowed us to develop towards what we were headed for, and I don’t think a lot of bands get to see that journey through fruition. There are also, say, you could be the Ramones for 32 years and that’s good too! I think John was always very eager to try something new and different and I think that’s why, record by record, some of them are jolting jumps from one to the next. Most certainly, and I think that’s evidenced by the body of work, there was at least some growth going on between each release, for sure.
Now Robby, I’m not going to labour the point about ‘Iris’, but I’m not going to ignore it either. When you wrote the song – and I think it was John that wrote it – were you aware that you’d just written a classic? Did the stars align? Yeah, John was in L.A. I remember and I was in Buffalo; we were both living there at the time and John was out meeting the music supervisor. I remember him playing it over the phone to me and I was like, ‘yeah, that’s a good song’, but John’s written lots of good songs [laughs]! So we came in and recorded it and I don’t think it was until we were kind of sitting there and watching the orchestra play the strings along with the song that we were like, ‘wow, this is pretty epic!’ Although I don’t think people were using that word back then, or not as much! It was like, ‘well, there’s no turning back now.’ It was on an album, you know, the City of Angels soundtrack with Peter Gabriel and Sarah Mclachlan and U2 and Alanis Morrisette and I could just go on and on… I forget the rest of them that were on there, but we were just stuffed in the background. We turned the song in to the movie and they rejected it –
- No, really?! Yeah they did! John ended up actually going in and playing it on acoustic guitar and that’s what they ended up using in the movie, with just John singing. Oddly enough, that song ended up being on the soundtrack and arguably being the biggest track on the whole record. Yeah, there are interesting twists and turns that these things take and it was a big one, for sure.
We certainly seem to have a relationship with it in the UK – it’s re-entered the charts four times, and that’s just in recent years. Apart from its inclusion as cover versions on primetime talent shows, what do you think it is about the song that translates so well across all countries? I think that number one, it’s just a great song and I don’t think you’d get anywhere without that, but you know, it’s about the stars aligning too. Like I say, John’s written tonnes of good songs, but that one, for some reason was the right time, it was the right moment, radio really picked up on it and it started a different sort of career for us. ‘Name’ from our ‘Boy Named Goo’ album was our only other hit we had prior to that and that was another acoustic song, and in the States – ‘cause that’s where ‘Iris’ took off the most, and fastest – we were sort of considered to be a sort of mid-tempo acoustic band because that’s the two songs that people knew by us and they’d come and see us play and be like, ‘what the hell’s going on?!’ ‘Who are these guys?’, you know, ‘cause we’d come out like a real rock band! But in the UK and elsewhere, that didn’t really happen enormously at first, so we actually got the chance to be a little more of a rock band in the UK than we did here because I think in the mass consumption of the band in the USA, some of our edges got shaved off a little. But I think without that, I probably wouldn’t be standing here right now, speaking with you countless years later, so it was definitely a leg up for us.
Now, if we moved on to ‘Magnetic’ – and obviously you’ve had plenty more albums between ‘Iris’ and now but I want to talk to you about your latest word – I’m no musician, but there seem to be way more major chords than your usual output. There seems to be a shift in mood, is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah, absolutely; we definitely thought, you know, when the haze of making a record has finished, the craziness of making a record has finished, you kinda get a chance to look back a little bit and I think once we were done with the last record and had a chance to look back over what we had done, everything seemed a little dark. That’s just where we were at the time, and where the world was at, at the time, you know, starting in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. There was a dark sort of cloud that especially came over the US at that time, and I think we kinda got caught up in it. So I mean the idea with this record was to go in and have fun with it a little bit, make it a little more fun to listen to and put a bit more optimism in it.
But for good or bad, discontent has always been a catalyst for creativity – we’ve seen it throughout the arts for decades and more – - Yeah, indeed, yeah!
I know John got married in July, and ‘Magnetic’ is a positive album – do you think you need to shake things up a bit for the next one? What are you gonna do?! I don’t know what we’re gonna do [laughs]! I don’t know, right now we’re gonna finish this tour and then we’ll see where we go from that point, you know.
I think you’ll need to get a goldfish or something, so that it can die and you can mourn it. [Laughs] Ha, there’s enough misery out there, I think [laughs]! I’m thinking if we need to find some, we’ll be able to… [laughs]!
Now ‘Rebel Beat’, which you’ve released as a single, sounds like you’ve known it forever, do you know what I mean? It’s instantly catchy, it’s got a real hook to it – does that come from the fact that you’re both so used to writing a classic pop song by now? Er, John actually wrote that song with Greg Wattenberg, one of the producers – John did a lot of writing with the producers on this record, a lot different than er… He started to do it on the last records, but he felt it was something he really wanted to do on this one. So a lot of the songs started off with a demo, ‘cause a lot of our songs start on the computer now, so you can take your sessions and take all the tracks from those sessions and start to lay those out, working on the demo that you did as part of the record, so a lot of those songs started from demos we had done, you know – I brought my demos in, we laid those demos down and so on. It was kind of a much different process than the past, you know, you were kind of replacing some things, like you’d have a demo and it’d have some weird kinda drum machine on it and some weird synth pad and we’d take that and interpret it into what the band sounds like. It was a really pretty cool process and it gave us a chance to live with the songs for a while as we were working on them. I think it’s a great sounding record man, for sure.
I read a great quote from John actually that said, “For my 10th album I really needed to learn more and collaborate with people and see how I could be challenged and grow as a writer.” Now for someone that’s coming up for a 27-year career, a lot of people would be cocky or complacent – I imagine from talking to you that you’re not like that too; there’s a humility to what you do – do you think that’s important to the way you work? Yeah, I just think you’ve got to keep it in perspective, man. If you get too high on your own fumes, you’re gonna end up pretty dizzy, you know, and not know what you’re doing. If you’re surrounded by too many ‘Yes’ men and they’re whatever, you need to keep focused as much as you can. Life’s crazy, you know, and to be a guy in a band who’s been doing this as long as John and I have, and then you’re trying to figure your real life into being in a band – which you have to do at some point and we didn’t for many years – it’s a whole balancing act, you know. You gotta make sure that you’re being satiated as a human as well as a guy in a band and those were some of the lessons that we were learning as we moved forward and like I said, we’re at a different phase of our lives right now. So just figuring out how to be a band in those circumstances, and if you can figure that out, you’ve reached some level of understanding about where you are and who you are and I think that humility figures into that whole thing.
Well Robby, thanks so much for your time today. You’re coming to Norwich next month, and we’re really looking forward to having you there. What can we, as an audience, do for you to make your night perfect? Oh, just yell and scream as much as possible. Jump up and down, sing, have a great time.
Emma R. Garwood
Goo Goo Dolls come to the Nick Rayns LCR at the UEA on October 21st. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbooking.co.uk.