The Goo Goo Dolls were overnight sensations. Some 11 years after they released their first record, they scored a hit - and suddenly, pretty much overnight, people began to talk about how sensational they were.
The band consists of singer and songwriters John Rzeznik and Robby Takac, who play guitar and bass, respectively, and drummer Mike Malinin. Rzeznik and Takac, schoolboy buds from Buffalo, N.Y., have gone the distance together, while Malinin replaced the original Goo Goo drummer in 1996.
Because the band members have always believed in their music, Takac says in a telephone interview, the long road to hitsville - via radio-friendly singles "Iris" and "Slide" - didn't feel quite so long. "It's been marked with mini-victories along the way," Takac says, "as insignificant as a free guitar from someone or as huge as getting a song on Top 40 radio. When the chips were seemed down, things would happen for us to where we felt good."
The band's early records grazed radio playlists and hovered in the nether regions of the charts - enough, Takac says, to keep them going.
"I don't think we were ever remotely considering being successful commercially," he says. "For us, it was just sort of a thing we did and managed to make a meager living out of. The whole acceptance at mainstream radio was kind of a surprise to us at the beginning."
When the hits starting coming, the band members had a meeting to discuss changing their goofy moniker. "We don't like the name," Takac says, "but I think it definitely is memorable - and that may have helped us, actually." (For the record, the original Goo Goo Doll was a mail-order toy the musicians discovered in a magazine ad, way back when.)
In Buffalo, the band has gone around as Sex Maggot. "That was right up until we needed to print something in the paper, and they wouldn't," Takac says. "At that time, they were still a little sticky about stuff like that."
Although the Goo Goo Dolls' self-titled 1987 debut featured Takac on lead vocals, it's Rzeznik, of the scratchy, wounded voice, who has been writing and singing the hit songs. With his scraggly blonde good looks, he's the MTV poster Goo, too.
Takac is OK with that. "It's the success of the group," he says. "John has an incredible knack these days for finding melodies and statements that really work for peoplee. I don't think it's a conscious decision to do that on his part, it's just that those are the songs he's writing right now."
"We've been friends for an awful long time, and we're very different people from each other. We have needs that are sort of exclusive, and I think we sort what each other needs to get out of this whole thing, for it to be something we still feel strongly about.
"It's funny, when I started singing for this group, it was because we hadn't found anyone yet. We were still looking for someone after our first record. I think we just let things naturally fall into place."
