Goo Goo Dolls survive by maturing, bassist says

The band has outlasted many bands from the '80s and '90s.
By JOHN J. MOSER
THE (ALLENTOWN, PA.) MORNING CALL
Goo Goo Dolls bassist and sometimes singer Robby Takac can hardly bring himself to say it.
But after struggling a bit, he utters what he calls "that horrible 'm-word,"' but only after prefacing it with: "I guess after this many years you can use it without feeling too creepy."
What has Takac tied up in knots is a question about how the Goo Goo Dolls have outlasted the late-'80s post-punk bands the Buffalo, N.Y., group came up with as well as the alt-rock bands that became popular when the Goos did in late-'90s.
"I think how we've managed to stay around is we've let our band grow up," Takac offers over the phone from his hotel room in Calgary, Canada. "We've let ourselves -- I'm going to use that horrible 'm-word' -- we've matured -- as people as much as we have as a band. And if you're trying to keep it real -- keep it old school, like they say -- that's going to happen if you're staying true to yourself."
Never the same thing twice
Basically, the Goos have outlasted the competition by repeatedly tinkering with success. The band's eighth album, "Let Love In" (Warner Bros.), which was released in April, sounds not only different from The Replacements-like rock of the Goos' early days, but even the radio-friendly vibe of such hits as "Name," "Slide," "Black Balloon," "Broadway" and "Iris" (which spent an unbelievable 18 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart).
"Let Love In," which made it into the Billboard Top 10 and is the second-highest-charting disc of the band's career, shifts the Goos to a lighter, adult contemporary sound. The album's four singles have all hit the chart, including the latest, which is the record's title track.
The change started with the unlikely 2004 remake of Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit" -- the Goos' biggest hit in six years -- which Takac says was a fluke.
Frontman Johnny Rzeznik had sung it as part of a Gap store television commercial, and the band threw it into its set for the taping of the DVD "Live in Buffalo."
"As we were putting the record together we had actually recorded another song that was going to go in its place, but actually [the remake] one seemed to fit much better," Takac says.
Burned out
At that point, Takac says, the Goo Goo Dolls were a bit disillusioned with the music business after two years of touring behind the album "Gutterflower," which went platinum, but fell substantially short of 1998's triple-platinum "Dizzy Up The Girl."
"When we finished the tour, quite honestly, we were a little burned out," Takac says. "We had gone out and sold a million records and had people look at us and go, 'What happened?' And we're like, 'What happened? We sold a million records. What do you mean, what happened?'
"I don't know if you want to say [we were feeling] unappreciated," he says, growing quiet. "I just think that we sort of felt like the vibe maybe went off a little bit with the record company."
But he laughs heartily when asked about a VH1 story that the band considered breaking up. "No, we never, ever discussed it. But I certainly wouldn't say to you that there wasn't potential at least five, six times in the past 20 years," he adds, laughing again.
Instead, the band took off for six months, during which Takac and Rzeznik produced records for other artists, then regrouped with drummer Mike Malinin in a California studio. "We had all our gear up but all we really did was sit around and talk about what went wrong on the last record. Was it us? Was it them? And we'd go back and we'd listen to the record again and we'd be like, 'Man, we like this."'
Moved to Buffalo
So the band decided to get out of Los Angeles, "away from the potential success or failure of our next record," and ended up in a 100-year-old Masonic ballroom in Buffalo.
"When we sort of put ourselves into this isolation for a little while and were able to focus on the music, we started to hear what the record was going to sound like and we got really excited," Takac says.
The next step on the road back, Takac says, was "Better Days." The Christmas-themed tune was recorded for NBC-TV and was to be released through a retailer -- "I think it was Target." But it fell into the hands of CNN, which used it as its theme for coverage of hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
"We had heard that they were going to use it for something," Takac says. "We really didn't know that it was going to be on CNN every five minutes for two months."