goo goo dolls

In front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, the center of our attention holds a brush and combs a full head of feathery blonde hair. First to the right side, then to the left, looking for an elusive part, and pausing every few strokes to smile into the camera’s clicking shutter.

Liliana Rzeznik is two months and three days shy of her second birthday, and she holds a hairbrush like she’s used to it. It’s less than ten minutes to showtime, and two floors below, 3,019 ticketholders are waiting for The Goo Goo Dolls–Liliana’s father, Johnny Rzeznik, and cofounder Robby Takac, but tonight also comprising of long-time touring members Brad Fernquist, Craig Mcintyre, and Jim McGorman; 14 additional full-time staff members; a local string quartet and conductor; a hairdresser flown in from L.A.; and videographers flown in from Detroit.

And the Goo Goo Dolls–the whole extended entourage–wait on Johnny.

Moments before, only Johnny Rzeznik and his stylist occupied “Hair and Makeup” (a misnomer, the stylist protests–she’s not doing makeup). “I’m getting my hair machine put in,” he says when he spots me in the doorway. “We’re just tightening the last screws now.” His distinctive style (which has its own Twitter account: @JRzezniksHair, “I have good days, I have bad days”) seems to involve layering parts on top of parts. And it isn’t quite working.

Gregarious, accommodating, and attentive, Johnny banters and answers questions–but right now, facing down three consecutive nights of meticulously scripted gigs, his mind is elsewhere. He wants to have his hair fixed, and to move on to the next thing. One more softball question about the stressors of constant touring could pause the interview.

And any other question might have. But this time, the question is “How is Lili?”

Concentration breaks, reforms; the lamps around the mirror brighten. “You want to see her?” Johnny is out of the chair already, and flies across the hall like something magnetized. The next moment he’s sitting on the floor by a low table Liliana’s climbing. She’s making as if to swim across its surface, her eyes on all the eyes on her. Johnny and Melina, his wife and Liliana’s mother, talk about stretching family across states, a career on the road, and a daughter growing up fast–like her dad, but for different reasons. In his posture, his face, his voice, it’s clear that Johnny is here right now. All of him.

But it is ten minutes to showtime. We’re back in Just Hair, where Liliana catches different angles in the mirror, all of us watching except maybe the stylist, who eyes the back of Johnny’s head and is beginning to understand she won’t be getting her brush back from the kid. Finally Johnny pulls Lili up onto his lap, where father and daughter can watch their hair getting done in the same mirror.

In an all-black tracksuit and thick gel-soled sneakers, Johnny rocks up onto the balls of his feet and releases a commanding, practiced whistle, signaling the band to soundcheck “Iris.” It’s ten after five, almost two hours to showtime; a smell like fair waffles with powdered sugar permeates the stage and wings, probably from the fog machines. The string quartet strikes up, Robby starts the bass line from out in the fourth row of the house, and Johnny starts to sing.

“Iris,” the 1998 power ballad that Rzeznik originally composed for the City of Angels soundtrack, is unquestionably one of the best pop songs of that moment that straddled the millennium. Technically about the experience of an angel (Nicholas Cage) who falls in love with a human (Meg Ryan) and wants to give up his immortality to be with her, the nuances of meaning are annealed in the heat of Rzeznik’s powerful opening chords and the repetitive momentum of the melody, rocked across alternating bars of 4/4 and 6/8, so that most of us only really hear the chorus: I just want you to know who I am...I just want you to know who I am...I just want you to know who I am. But Johnny’s saving his voice, hitting only the first word or two of each iconic line: “Want...Know...Am...Want...Know...Am,” he sings.

Rzeznik and Takac started The Goo Goo Dolls in Buffalo in 1985, and labored for a decade before charting any radio hits–“Name” and “Naked” off 1995’s A Boy Named Goo. But when these songs–“Name,” in particular–caught national attention, the Goos were still holding down day jobs.

Rzeznik spoke to American Songwriter in 2010 about a period of identity crisis–centered on the work of songwriting–following the success of “Name,” and before “Iris.”

We’d made five albums, and then all of the sudden we had this hit song, “Name.” I got this feeling I think a lot of artists get: that I am a complete phony, that was just luck, and I don’t know how to do it again. It felt like I had just won the lottery and everyone was standing around going, “Wow! You won the Lottery! That’s amazing! Do it again!” So it really kind of froze me up. I think it was the period where I finally had to come to terms with the fact that songwriting was now my job.

Johnny, Robby, and cofounding drummer George Tutuska did seem to think of music as work–they were known for gigging relentlessly at Buffalo bars and clubs like The Continental, and eventually criss-crossing the country, when they went without sleep for days, sneaking free showers in gyms at college campuses.

Before that, even during A Boy Named Goo, we still had day jobs so it was a situation where I was always a songwriter and a bartender. I was always a songwriter and whatever other job I had. Then when it became my job it threw a lot of fear into me, Johnny told American Songwriter.

Thirteen years of gigging had started to look like the drawn-out start of a career when, at 33, Johnny wrote “Iris,” a crossover single and international sensation which trebucheted the band into an enduring fame. The song has become an indispensable part of any Goo Goo Dolls concert. But it has an even more exalted place in the set tonight: “Iris” was only one of five top-10 singles on the triple-platinum Dizzy Up The Girl–along with “Slide,” “Black Balloon,” “Broadway,” and “Dizzy”–and we’re here to celebrate the breakthrough album’s 20th anniversary.

Seven bass guitars for Robby. Seven rhythm guitars and one mandolin for Brad Fernquist, touring member since 2006. For Johnny, fourteen acoustic guitars and eight electric guitars–and Fisherman’s Friend mints, Diet Coke, Entertainer’s Secret throat spray on a stool. The Goo Goo Dolls are back in Buffalo, New York for a three-day stay at Shea’s Performing Arts Center–a 1926 silent movie house turned stop on the Broadway circuit, their hometown’s most iconic and opulent venue.

The Goo Goo Dolls never passed through the doors of Shea’s–which in the 1970s of their youth was a neglected exoskeleton, keeping the heat on with a steady stream of lowbrow films–until they headlined the stage as homecoming celebrities.

Spanish and Italian Baroque Revival, exterior by Rapp and Rapp and interior by Louis C. Tiffany–the theatre’s marble lobby, Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers, Corinthian capitals topping twisted columns, the deep golden creatureful cosmos of the decorated ceiling and its twin recessed hyperbolic and rectangular domes, seven stories above the pit–every detail exists to dazzle newcomers and comfort VIPs, then fade into dark and be forgotten as the show starts–Fiddler on the Roof, Hamilton, Jerry Seinfeld, or the Goo Goo Dolls. For the next three days, an additional decoration joins the cartouches, laurels, and fleurs de lis: a gold-framed print of the Dizzy Up The Girl cover, blown up and extended vertically into a gradient black, an impressive 18 feet tall.

And at Friday’s soundcheck, the centerpiece is causing an issue. The Goo Goo Dolls are filming all three nights, and need a centered picture of the whole stage, including the framed print. Manager Steve Masi breaks the bad news to Robby: The only place for the camera is in the center of the balcony, meaning a loss of fourteen seats in two rows.

Technically, they could shorten the centerpiece by about five feet, as they’ve had to do to fit it inside smaller clubs in North America and Europe–but when you have the Shea’s stage, you use all of it.

“If you can’t find a better option–” Robby says, clearly expecting someone to find him a better option. It’s a loaded, leading question, but Robby is so consistently friendly and optimistic that one would have to make a conscious effort to take offense from him.

“There isn’t a better option,” Steve says.

“You’re telling me if we hired someone to come in here tonight–”

“Now is not the time,” Johnny butts in. He’s not happy with the camera situation either, but his attention has a different object, now: the music. He hits a chord, and the whole entourage kicks up “Iris” again.

Both Robby and Johnny are perfectionists. With Robby, at least on this afternoon, it’s the camera, the loss of fourteen seats, the impact this will have on the ticketholders’ experience–and the way it might prevent an impressive full crowd shot in the final video. With Johnny, today, it’s the sound–agonizing in rehearsal over the amount of his “tweeds” in his in-ear monitors, and every nuance of the way “Iris” will fill the sold-out auditorium. He trusts Aaron, the on-stage sound engineer and longtime member of the Goos team, but is insistent on mapping out every performance scenario (“I just want to know we have an escape plan,” he says during soundcheck).

Wherever they’ve played–from marquee clubs to massive Euro festivals to hometown stages like this–they bring the same granular attentiveness.

“No,” says Craig Macintyre, touring drummer since 2014–he is not nervous. The lights go out–the crowd surges, becomes noise. ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” plays, the hype-music to signal that the show is about to begin. “Maybe anxious,” he says. He has been taking a two-sided jade roller to his fingers and palms. “I’ll tell you what, though. It never gets old.” Without another look he leaves stage left, takes his throne and grabs his sticks, kicks the band into “Dizzy,” then “Slide.” Robby rushes onto the stage like a juggernaut in black socks, and Johnny appears stage right in a black and red jacket, flared floods, and high-tops with laces wrapped once around his ankles. The sound is huge, amplified by 3,000 people singing along. A 30-something banker. Two old dudes in foot-long beards and camo gear. Dozens of almost fiancées.

Between “Feel Forever” and “Acoustic #3” Johnny returns to the soundboard stage left. “You and me gotta come in early tomorrow to fix this.”

“Alright,” Aaron says. And Johnny peels back off to retake center stage for the chorus.

During “Amigone” (named for the Buffalo chain of funeral homes) Johnny twice ducks out stage left to give more direction to Aaron. “I need you turn Robby’s vocals down,” he shouts the second time, now a little hoarse, “I think you’ve turned the drums down twice.” Aaron nods, already piloting the band’s transition into “All Eyes On Me.” Sitting immediately next to the sound-board are Melina and Liliana, the latter under alien-green headphones and holding a ragged gray stuffed bunny, clapping along to all the song’s accents. Johnny doesn’t glance over at the two of them. Maybe he won’t let himself. Ready to give the whole of his attention to his family even minutes before the house lights dim, he needs to be equally single-minded now: With the cameras rolling and a constant whole-show click track in his in-ear monitors, he’s working.

When I hear “Goo-Goo-Goo-Goo-Goo-Goo-Goo” in the “Family Room” above the Shea’s stage, it isn’t the kid–it’s the gentle switchback sound of Johnny and Brad practicing scales.

The repetition brings to mind the act of naming required of artists, especially performers. Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan and Farrokh Bulsara became Freddie Mercury–but Leonard Cohen also became Leonard Cohen. Whether a name is new or old, committing art under any appellation is a complex relational act: It severs the artist from older ties and creates new ones.The new responsibilities and obligations to the name are often heavier and more tightly binding than the old cords that were cut. Two Buffalo boys, at least, understand this.

In 1995’s A Boy Named Goo, Johnny and Robby play with this act of naming. In these songs, they are feeling more of the freedom than the obligation.

On “Name,” the band’s breakout single off that pivotal album, Johnny sings “And now we're grown up orphans / That never knew their names / We don't belong to no one / That's a shame.”

Allegedly inspired by an unpublicized relationship with an MTV host, the song is clearly also looking toward Johnny’s childhood in Buffalo, and his only partial departure from it. Literally orphaned as a teenager, Johnny’s coming of age occurred in stages and included taking on, with his bandmates, a new name. One can understand how he felt, in this pre-celebrity moment, that he belonged to no one.

Ironically, the song’s radio play and recognition would bring Johnny to discover his new name’s first binding cord: the obligation to write songs.To be–every day and always–a boy named Goo.

And that’s meant many things for the Goo Goo Dolls. Johnny has written theme songs for movies, sports teams, and even hurricanes; he’s taken turns as an Australian Idol judge, a racecar driver, and a Sirius XM radio host. Robby started the charity Music Is Art, acts as the face of the Goos’ GCR Audio Recording Studios, became a conduit for J-Rock in North America, and is a frequent feature at Buffalo’s City Hall as he attends Council meetings and advocates for various local initiatives.

And tonight, the need to “be Goo” involves a bit of stagecraft that delights some fans and leaves others puzzled. Inspired by a member of crew who worked with the Blue Man Group, this is an intermission-y skit that sees Johnny talking and eventually dueting with his own image, projected on a life-size screen delivered to the center of the stage. Screen Johnny plays the guitar while live Johnny sings–and then, a little weirder, they switch. It’s kind of cool but also undeniably corny. I remember, watching Johnny hammily cajole his own projected image, Robby taking a break offstage, that these are the same longhaired punks who launched themselves into a Jacuzzi-sized vat of egg nog on Letterman.

In a 2002 interview promoting the album Gutterflower, before a show at Niagara Falls’ Riviera Theatre, Johnny mused to a fan-reporter, “It’s a dubious thing to have your dreams come true. It really is. There’s a lot of [crap] you don’t bargain for.” Regardless of how Johnny feels about this version of himself (or the one he’s serenading on the screen), it’s clear the dreamer never bargained for it.

Johnny never looks more like a grown-up orphan than in this moment, doubled in high definition, talking to a recording in time to a click track in his in-ear monitors. But now, he does belong. To himself. To his name. But also to Robby. To his manager Steve, his band, his crew, his entourage. To Warner Bros. To the fans.

And to his family. Above the stage, before the concert, it’s clear where and to whom Johnny Rzeznik belongs. “When I first held her, I thought, Do not fuck this person’s life up,” he says, Liliana sliding across a low coffee table and his arm out to keep her from falling; Melina, beaming, reaching into a vast baby-bag.

“And I gotta work harder.”

Robby charges the footlights. Johnny leans past the proscenium. 3,000 fans surge toward them. Both sides propelled by the final chorus, a final chord. The concert closes with a thunderous flourish.

The show is fun, fast-paced, low-fat. Everyone leaves satisfied–even enjoying saying “I wish they played …” trading and treasuring rarer favorites pressed like leaves among the tracks of the Goos’ ten albums.

Johnny comes off the stage like a prizefighter, hand towel cowled over his head and a rolling gait hinting at hip pain, crew members shining tiny finger flashlights to guide him through the dark. Two floors up, Liliana stomps and turns on her own stage, against a back- drop of laundry machines, with her mother for an audience.

In the East Side of Johnny Rzeznik’s childhood, as in Buffalo’s First Ward and a few other neighborhoods, cozy bars were nestled among the side streets, one or two blocks off the main roads. In their time, they served working fathers and husbands who wanted to nip an extra pint on their way back from the job before a dinner at home.

There won’t be any pit stops for Johnny tonight. He heads straight upstairs, trailing relief, to catch a few moments with his family before Liliana has to sleep.

And before he has to sleep, too. There’s going to be a signing, more photos, more unexpected requests, over two more nights of sold-out shows. And then there’s the question of those tweeds, and Robby’s vocals in his in-ear monitor. He’ll be back onstage early again tomorrow, with Aaron, to get it right.

in print discover issue twenty one