It's moments
before the Goo Goo Dolls are set to perform on The Rosie O'Donnell show,
and lead singer and guitarist John Rzeznik has just thrown everyone out
of his backstage dressing room. Behind closed doors he starts making low,
gurgling sounds, followed by a succession of screeching howls. Has the
band's success driven Rzeznik, well, goo-goo?
Not exactly. Back at his hotel room after the show, Rzeznik (pronounced
Rez-nik), 33, explains, "I have a cyst on my vocal cords from singing wrong.
A vocal coach who works with everyone from Bjork to Pavarotti gave me a
tape of exercizes to warm up my voice. I get so embarrassed by it, but
it really does help." Of course, this is just a minor obstacle compared
with the tortuous 12 year climb the band has taken to the top, complete
with bad record deals, internal band battles and troubled marriages. Now
with a Grammy nominated single ("Iris," from the City Of Angels soundtrack),
the platinum album Dizzy Up The Girl and a current tour with the Rolling
Stones, Rzeznik and his bandmates- bassist Robby Takac, 34, and drummer
Mike Malinin, 31, - can't help wondering how they got here.
"It sounds cliché: The poor kid from the wrong side of town does
good," Rzeznik says. "I was talking to a friend of mine about the ridiculous
twisted path that leads to right now, and for the first time I was able
to see myself growing up and all I went through, and it made sense. If
I had my ass powdered and pampered, I probably wouldn't be here right now."
Rzeznik's mother and father divorced when he was 11 but continued living
together in their modest Buffalo, NY home. "My mom was like 'he's a drunk--we
get into fist fights,' " Rzeznik recalls. "So they get divorced, and then
my father moves into the back apartment," Rzeznik adds, still amazed. "It's
like, who are you kidding?" When he was 15, his father, Joseph, a postal
worker, died of complications from alcoholism. Not much later, his mother,
Edith, a second grade teacher, died of a massive heart attack. "After the
old man went, I started to notice a fragile quality in my mom that I had
never seen before," he recalls. "She died right there with me in our living
room." Rzeznik was left in the care of his four older sisters, who lived
nearby. "My oldest sister, Phyliss, became my legal guardian," he says.
":She helped me get an apartment. My sisters didn't have anything for themselves,
but they were there for me."
After graduating from McKinley Vocational High School in 1983 at age 18,Rzeznik
says, his life began to stabilize. It was around that time that he met
Takac in a bar. "Robby's mom makes Beaver Cleaver look like a latchkey
kid," Rzeznik says. "The first time I saw how his family interacted, I
walked outside and cried. How come I didn't have a family like this? There
was so much love." That same year, Rzeznik started playing in a punk band
called The Beaumonts with Takac's cousin Paul Takac. But when Paul left
the group, the Beaumonts fizzled out, and Rzeznik and Robby Takac decided
to form their own band. They made Takac's friend George Tutuska their
drummer and formed the first incarnation of the Goo Goo Dolls. At the time
they played hard, fast punk music and called themselves the Sex Maggots-
until a promoter made them change their name. They found their new moniker
in the back of a True Detective magazine, in an add for a doll with a moveable
rubber head.
In 1985,
the Goo Goo Dolls signed with the French company Celluloid records, which
agreed to pay them a measly $1, 500 for six albums. "We were 20 years old,"
says Takac. "The record company told us we had to sign the deal by midnight
or it was void." The band broke the deal in 1987 by "ignoring it," says
Takac, and signed a contract with the Warner Bros. subsidiary Metal Blade
Records. It turned out that the new deal wasn't much better. When their
fifth album, 1995's A Boy Named Goo, went platinum, the band members felt
they weren't fairly compensated. After a nine month legal battle, they
left Metal Blade and negotiated a new deal with Warner that gave them better
royalty rates.
It was
during this time that relations between Rzeznik and Tutuska broke down.
"It was an accumulation of nine years of miscommunication," says Rzeznik.
Takac simply couldn't navigate the differences between his two friends
anymore. "I spent many years being the Henry Kissinger of this group,"
he says. "The last couple of years we were together, I don't think we said
more than a couple of words to each other." In 1995, Rzeznik and Takac
fired Tutuska. A few weeks later, they hired
Malinin, who had played with
a friend of theirs in the L.A group Careless. "I was a wide eyed kid when
I joined," says Malinin, laughing. "And these guys were all bitter and
s---."
Once considered
too hard for mainstream success, the Goo Goo Dolls have turned into a pop
sensation with such pretty ballads as 1995's "Name" and last year's "Iris."
"'Name' was a big song, but nobody knew who played it," says Malinin. "'Iris'
put a face to the song and got us noticed." Rob Cavallo, the producer of
Dizzy Up The Girl, adds: "Even though there has been a change in the sound,
they did it gracefully. It was a natural development."
But while
the band member's professional lives were finally sorting themselves out,
their personal lives were falling apart. In 1997, after three years of
marriage, Rzeznik separated from his wife, Laurie, a one-time catalog model
he had met in 1988 at a punk bar in Buffalo. "She is the coolest, sweetest
woman I ever met," he says. "There are no bad feelings." That same year,
Takac and his wife, Tammy, a registered nurse he met through mutual friends
in 1991,also split. " I got engaged,
married and divorced on out
last tour," he says.
After
struggling for so long, Rzeznik- who along with Takac, still lives in Buffalo-is
conflicted about his success. "The disparity between being a 10 year old
boy playing air guitar, wishing I was a rock star, and the reality of the
whole thing is insane," he says. "A girl will throw her bra onstage, and
I say to myself, if I was the guy that pumped you gas today, would you
still throw your bra at me?"