Goo Goo Dolls
A Boy Named Rzeznik
-- BY JEM ASWAD

On the face of it, the Goo Goo Dolls are definitely a band-least-likely-to become the multi-platinum, hit-single spawning outfit they now are. They have lived in Buffalo, New York for their entire existence. They were formed in 1985 by vocalist/guitarist Johnny Rzeznik, bassist/ vocalist Robby Takac, and drummer George Tutuska as a noisy, irreverent punk rock band called Sex Maggot -- until they realized they'd never get any gigs with that name and changed it to the only slightly better Goo Goo Dolls. On their early albums, their original songs have titles like "Up Yours," "Don't Beat My Ass With A Baseball Bat" and, of course, "Sex Maggot," along with truly dreadful covers of rock classics like "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Don't Fear The Reaper." Despite all that, they never completely fit in with the larger punk rock world, maybe because a lot of their tunes were too, well, tuneful. The band seemed destined for a career of obscurity. But then, in 1990, stuck onto the end of the group's third album, seemingly almost as an after-thought, was a song called "Two Days In February." It's credited to the band, but it was just Johnny with an acoustic guitar, apparently singing on his front porch as traffic and neighbors went by. It wasn't a hit, but its melody and love-lost-oh-well sentiment ("I'm sorry I'm not there with you/But you ain't here with me") were a crystal-clear indication of things to come, whether anyone knew it at the time or not. "I've always written a lot of acoustic songs," Johnny says now. "I just didn't use them because there was no place for those songs in a punk band. But I'm old enough to remember [vinyl] records, and I always try to incorporate that ethic of album-making, that you need slow songs for balance and depth. I've always listened to things like Suzanne Vega, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits." Another key factor in the band's development was producer Rob Cavallo, who has produced their last three albums. Along with his extensive work with Green Day, those albums have helped to make Cavallo one of today's major rock producers. But he really just helped along a process that had already begun. WHAT'S IN A NAME: Goo Goo Dolls songwriter John Rzeznik recently completed dates on the MP3.com Music and Technology Tour with a handful of shows in Southern California. ASCAP's Randy Grimmett congratulates Rzeznik on the success of the tour and his recent move to ASCAP after the Goo Goo Dolls sold out concert at the Bren Center at UC-Irvine on November 17th. "See, punk rock in and of itself is such a limited form of expression, and you have to push out its walls, otherwise it just becomes redundant and nothing more than a fashion statement," Johnny says. "Plus, I really didn't feel a lot of the things that I had felt [when I was younger]. You have to do what is relevant to your life at the time when you're writing, and the writing has to be an honest reflection of where your mind and your heart are at that particular point. If you try to steer it any other way, it's gonna sound fake, it's gonna sound phony, and then you're gonna get stuck playing that shit every night and you're gonna hate it! So you say what you mean, say what you feel, and you can't go wrong. "But we've always incorporated melody and harmony into our music, even when it was thrashing around at 190 MPH. People always ask me who was the greatest punk rock band of all time, and I say the Replacements. They were completely unique and unto themselves. They possessed one of the purest punk ethics I ever saw, and there was an awful lot of emotion going on there. Paul Westerberg is still one of my favorite writers, and he was an enormous influence on my music." That influence should be blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with incredible albums the Replacements released in the '80s. Westerberg was even brought in to write with Johnny for the Goos' fourth album, 1993's Superstar Car Wash, which was also their debut with Cavallo. One of the Westerberg co-writes was "We Are The Normal," which became the band's first hint of a hit. "Writing with Westerberg was intimidating! Intimidating! Believe me, when you dance with that guy, he leads," Johnny laughs. "But he's a great dancer, so to speak." Things broke open with the band's 1995 album, A Boy Named Goo, which sold three million copies on the strength of the hit single, "Name." The resulting pressure to follow that song -- and the looming threat of one-hit-wonderdom -- briefly split up the band, but they re-emerged in 1998 with a new drummer (Mike Malinin) and a new album (Dizzy Up The Girl). Driven by the smash single "Iris" -- a highlight of the City Of Angels soundtrack and for one week the most played song in American radio history -- the album recently passed triple platinum status and has made the band, Johnny particularly, into real rock stars. It hasn't all been roses: at the time of this conversation, they had been on the road for 14 straight months. "Right now, I'm ready for a break," he sighs. "It's all been very strange and kind of disorienting, and I didn't think it would be this stressful.The thing about all this that I like the least is --" Interviews? "Well, interviews with idiots, but this has been a really intelligent interview. The thing I like least is the number of insincere people around. It can be really disillusioning. Sometimes it's really hard to keep things in perspective, but I tell myself all the time how lucky and grateful I am for what I've been given and what I have." Do you find things you'd always thought you wanted turn out to be things you don't want at all? "Yeah, definitely. Mostly, I don't like being called in the middle of the night in my hotel room. I don't like being followed. I don't like the fact that I can't just sit down in the corner bar and have a few drinks with my buddies. But, that's a small price to pay to have been rewarded with the luxury of making a living doing what I love to do." Which is exactly what he intends to do after a post-tour vacation. Work on the new album will commence once "I start to have a life again, then I'll start writing again. It took three years to put out the last album, but I'm not gonna take that long this time. Something that really clears out the cobwebs for me is to do a little side-project -- which usually consists of the guys in the band -- and just play death metal or disco or something ridiculous and write all these songs and slap 'em down on tape in an afternoon, just for fun. That lets you live outside yourself for a little while." He will also, for the first time, be living outside of Buffalo. "I'm moving to Los Angeles, but I'm only gonna live there for a couple of years to work. I love Buffalo, but I've got some offers to do work with films, both songs and scoring. It's interesting because I just switched over to ASCAP, and ASCAP has a program where they teach film scoring. I was totally amazed: I didn't know any of that stuff existed. It sounds great, and that's something that I really, really want to get into because, quite honestly, who wants to be a 40-year-old Goo Goo Doll?"