Robby Takac

Robby Takac is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to his artist interview. 

Robert “Robby” Takac, Jr. is a musician, songwriter, producer, and arts advocate who was born on September 30, 1964 in Buffalo, N.Y. His father, Robert, Sr., was a banker and his mother, Kathy, a teacher. The family, including a younger sister, moved to nearby West Seneca when he was seven. Takac graduated from Medaille College in 1986 with a degree in communications, with a focus on radio broadcasting. While in college, he interned and worked with a local radio station. He also learned to play the bass and performed in several area bands, including Monarch, his first, and later the Beaumonts. It was through the latter group that he first met guitarist/singer John Rzeznik. When the Beaumonts broke up in 1985, Takac and Rzeznik recruited drummer George Tutuska and formed a new group which they initially named the Sex Maggots before they were persuaded to change it in 1986 to the more marketing-friendly “Goo Goo Dolls.”

The earliest incarnation of the band played loud, fast, and intentionally crude punk rock in Buffalo venues like the Continental, gradually combining covers with more and more original material. Takac was the frontman, handling most lead vocals and writing the majority of songs. As their musicianship improved and their local popularity grew, they began touring the country, building a devoted following one small club at a time. Their eponymous debut album (a.k.a. First Release) was recorded in three days in the winter of 1986 for $750 and first appeared in 1987 as a vinyl LP on Mercenary, a sub-label of a larger independent label, Celluloid.

The group then signed a longterm contract with the heavy metal-oriented indie label Metal Blade, which released their second album, Jed, in 1989. Named for the painter Jed Jackson, an early advocate of the band who had taught Takac in an art class at Medaille, the LP featured a painting of Jackson’s, “Arkansas Sunset,” on the cover. The year 1990 brought the power-pop-oriented album Hold Me Up, the group’s first release to earn significant nationwide college radio airplay. The band was invited to contribute songs to various film soundtracks and continued to tour heavily, and in 1993 they released Superstar Car Wash, hailed by reviewers as an artistic breakthrough for the Goos although it failed to sell as well as anticipated.

By this time, Takac had begun to take a supporting role in the band, as Rzeznik handled more and more of the songwriting and lead vocals. In 1995 the two musicians dismissed Tutuska and hired Mike Malinin as replacement drummer. The same year, the band had its first major commercial success with its new album, A Boy Named Goo, after a rock station in L.A. began playing Rzeznik’s ballad “Name.” The song was officially released as a single and became a Top Five hit, while the accompanying album went platinum.

The significant increase in album sales intensified the group’s dissatisfaction with the royalty rates in their contract with Metal Blade and led to a lengthy legal battle, the end result of which was a move to the label’s parent company, Warner Brothers. In 1998, the band contributed another Rzeznik ballad, “Iris,” to the soundtrack of the film City of Angels; it spent 18 weeks at number one on Billboard’s airplay charts and was nominated for three Grammys.

“Iris” was included on the group’s next album, Dizzy Up the Girl (1998), which contained several additional hit singles and sold over three million copies. Around this time,Takac and Rzeznik both moved to Los Angeles, where each would remain for several years, though Takac eventually returned to Buffalo.

Commercial success brought Takac many opportunities to support his hometown. In the year 2000 he and Rzeznik opened the recording studio Chameleon West in downtown Buffalo, relocating it in 2008 to the site of the former Trackmaster studio, where Takac had worked as an intern in his youth. Takac eventually assumed sole control of the studio (subsequently renamed GCR Audio); in addition to its use by the Goo Goo Dolls (most notably on their 2010 album Something for the Rest of Us), Chameleon West has served many other local, national, and international artists.

In 2003, Takac launched the Music is Art Festival, an annual event featuring bands, DJs, art installations, craft vendors, and other attractions. “MiA” soon became a year-round endeavor devoted to bringing music into children’s lives via education programs, scholarships, instrument donations, and other means.

Another of Takac’s long-lasting Buffalo-based projects also began in 2003, when he started the Buffalo-based indie label Good Charamel with a compilation album of music from the MiA festival and a roster of Western New York acts (the up-and-coming bands Juliet Dagger, Last Conservative, and Klear, followed by the first solo album by longtime Buffalo rocker Terry Sullivan, a friend of and influence on the Goos in their early days). After a 2006 tour of Japan by the Juliet Dagger, however, the label’s focus shifted to Japanese rock (or “J-Rock”) acts, including Shonen Knife, DJ Sashimi, and Pinky Doodle Poodle. Good Charamel is run by Takac and his wife, Miyoko Takac. (The couple have one daughter, Hana.)

In addition to the Goo Goo Dolls, Takac has participated in a side project, the electronic/dance/performance collaborative Amungus, on an irregular basis. 

In 2008, he was named to the Medaille College Board of Trustees. In 2015 the Burchfield Penney Art Center designated him a Living Legacy artist. 
 

Robby Takac is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to his artist interview. 

Transcription below:

LLP Artist: Robby Takac
Interview date: c. 2015
Transcribed by: Jordan Anthony
Transcription date: June 5, 2020

HG: This is the Living Legacy Project, normally at the Burchfield Penny Art Center. But today we are at GCR studios with Robby Takac.

RT: Yes.

HG: And the first thing I want to ask you GCR stands for Good Caramel—or is that how you say it? Okay.

RT: Well, that's our… Yeah, that's my record label Good Caramel Records.

HG: And is that what the space is?

RT: Well, that's, that's, I guess. Yeah. What we named it after. But yeah. And there's a few studios in this building, as well. Yeah, we rent out some space downstairs to a couple of filmmakers, and a couple of local producers. And so, there's a lot of stuff going on here.

HG: Well, as I've been interviewing more and more musicians, I've been running into the questions of how musicians like to refer to themselves, you know, I, from where I stand, you know, I see it as such a creative process. And I refer to musicians as artists as well. But when you conceptualize of yourself, do you identify as an artist as well? Or do you really identify as more of a musician?

RT: Yeah, I mean, I guess “artist” sounds like a lofty term, but, you know, if you're masterful at something you do, you know, you're an artist and so yeah, you know, I guess I do consider people who make music or people who can make a nice cabinet by hand. You know, I think that yeah, I think they're all artists. Yeah.

HG: That helps me with how I want to talk about some things. So, Robbie, you were born in West Seneca?

RT: Yes.

HG: And you lived here most of your young adult life and then, you know, as the Goo Goo Dolls took off and things like that, you traveled, and you came back to Buffalo. The first question I’d like to ask is what inspired you to want to be a musician or how did that start for you?

RT: I guess when you're young you look for a place to fall. You know the your place to fall into you know, the group of people you know, you can fall into and you know, there's sports, people fall into sports, people fall in academia, there's people who you know, are great painters and drawers and, you know, I fell in with a group of people that weren't necessarily “the musicians”, but we were the kids that liked rock music. And we like that kind of thing. And although I took some lessons myself, you know, the things that I was always trying to do, you know, the things we were trying to do when we as we were growing up, you know, was to put together a great band, you know, that could go out and fall into our place as you know, “the band” and that's what we did. And, you know, I think we got, I think we got all the lessons that people got through sports with that, you know, I think we learned teamwork and we learn, you know, practicing and, you know, we learned, you know, devotion to something, you know, that meant something to you enough to give up other things for and that sort of thing. So, yeah.

HG: When did you start playing your instruments, circling playing bass guitar.

RT: I started playing in bands probably like, third grade, probably Yeah, and the kids were older that I was playing with. So, sort of like when you end up goalie, you know, because you're the kid, like I sort of ended up bass player because I was a kid, nobody really wanted to be the bass player. So, I ended up playing bass, and many bands, and that just became my instrument. So

HG: Do you still feel deeply connected to that instrument? Or have you branched out to like, what are some other instruments you play?

RT: Well, I mean, I play not well, many things, you know, you know, with the computer these days, you can play an awful lot of things. You know, I think I'm a pretty good bass player, because I've been doing it for 30 some years, you know, on a pretty consistent basis. So I'd become good, you know, I don't think I'm necessarily an amazing musician, or anything like that, you know, but I know how to do a good rock show, you know, I know how to go in and make a record sound good. And you know, so like I said, you do this for 30 years, you know, you learn some of that stuff along the way if you're paying attention.

HG: One of the things that I find so fascinating about you and your career, and where you've been, and where you are, is the energy you've put back into Buffalo in many ways, and I know that you get a lot of praises for that here in town and that sort of thing. But I see a lot of what you do both with producing as well as a form of creation. And, you know, it's helping forms of art be realized and be, you know, come into existence. And I see the same thing with Music is Art. Yeah, and some of that, and at some point, I really actually, like things that I find most interesting that I think a lot of people have talked you about your time with Goo Goo Dolls. You know, that's, those conversations have happened.

RT: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's, you know, that's all part of being, you know, I mean, Goo Goo Dolls has been through so many phases. You know, we've been through playing in vans we've been through I mean, we've done pretty much the spectrum of the things that are to be done and, and we continue to do you know, we have a, you know, we're working on album number 11 in the next couple of months, you know, that That's wild to me. You know, but with Goo Goo Dolls, you find the things you do real well within that organization and within that creative process, and those are the things you do, but some of the things slip away that you used to do when the band first started, you know, we used to, you know, make our cassette covers, you know, used to, you know, write up contracts, you know, it's, um, you know, just no book gigs, you know, I don't know, whatever, just make tours happen, you know, make recordings happen, you know, so being in Goo Dolls, and doing lots of other things like Music is Art, like helping boost the arts here in town, you know, by producing local bands here in town. You know, my wife's from Japan, like releasing Japanese music over here, and North America like implanting tours for those bands and, and, you know, doing all these sorts of things like just exercises different parts of your mind. You know, makes you do different things, you know, deal with graphics on a level I don't deal with, with my band, you know, deal with layout, you know, deal with, you know, things like that I do some of that with my band. But, you know, we got, we've got an army working with us, you know, scattered all over the country and so I find all these other things. Like, personally, for me, it lets me do all this cool fun stuff that I like to do that, you know, I don't get to do in the context of Goo Goo Dolls, which I get to do amazing and fun things and so, so, uh, you know, if I can, if I can figure out a way and it looks like, you know, I feel like I have, you know, had some success in of satiating that need in myself and helping out some people around here, you know, it takes some work, I'm not gonna lie, it's like, there's a lot of meetings, there's a lot of, you know, obligations, you know, that come with doing that kind of stuff too. But, you know, you just got to be willing to do that and make That commitment. And you know, it's so worth it in the end.

HG: That's a fascinating set. I guess I've never even thought of you guys. You know, the Goo Goo Dolls have gotten so big that there's some fun things that you don't get to do.

RT: Yeah, yeah, it's true. You know, it's like, there's things I don't get to do, you know, like, because there's things I know how to do real well, within our organization, you know, and I do those things. And, you know, that's sort of my role. And, and so it's fun. You know, I would probably go nuts with just writing a couple songs every four years and, you know, touring and playing our same songs over and over again for 25, 30, almost 30 years now, like, you know, I would probably go crazy if I didn't have some other outlets that let me go Oh, yeah, you can still like, you know, do these other things too.

HG: Like creative juices? Yeah, when you put those energies Yeah.

RT: And you know, being able to steer creative people like what the music is art festival ends up being like It's just like, it's like painting man. You know, it's like, you know, it's like creating something whose mark is gonna last because of all the good people involved, like, you know, like, that's awesome. You know, and that's amazing. And it's not something that you can just do. Like, you can't put it together, like just on a whim, you know, you got to grow into it. Like it's gotta grow from something that started out real. You know, Music is Art The organization started out as a little party because I was pissed off about the on town art festival. Yeah, sure, yeah. When we started out, I had opened a studio, down the street from where we are now. And we're sitting around one day after we were recording, and someone had mentioned to me that there was a moratorium on people doing any business outside their business on the days that the Allentown art festival running in a certain parameter. And you know, I always love the Allentown art festival, you know, and I thought that that was great, but, you know, the punk rocker and me decided that I thought that that wasn't like, the smartest thing to do. So, I booked like 30 some bands in my parking lot. And you know, it was a reaction 100% it was reaction, you know, I was like, we should do this because there's gonna be 100,000 people down here, you know, we're gonna have bands playing and people are gonna come we get some of our artists, friends who couldn't necessarily afford, you know, to pay the entrance fee to get into an event like that, you know, and let them display their paintings. We would let anybody sell anything. And yeah, we made it happen over two days and they tried to stop us many times by getting injunctions against us and sending the health department. Yeah, it was a was pretty crazy. We were running around with the TV news crews like up to their door and down at City Hall and it was in the newspapers and because they were trying to stop us from doing this show, which happened anyway, and but what we found at the end of this whole thing, because it takes a lot of people to make something like that happen, you know, and we not only had that we had that, you know, we had hot dogs and a beer garden for the bands that were involved in some of the bands recorded in some of the bands played in our building through a big plate glass window with a PA outside, and we recorded that stuff. It was like it was a lot going on, you know, we had DJs and like I said, art installations and some dancers and you know, but it was very small, you know, it was it wasn't like a huge event. And it's grown. Every year. We did it the next year, and it got a little bigger and we did it the next year, and we got a little bigger and there was some personnel change down at City Hall and they we ended up getting thrown out on time. But by that point, there was kind of some steam behind what we were doing. And we found out right at the last minute that we weren't gonna be able to have it. So, everybody was like, Okay, well, let's not do it, you know, and by that point, we needed a pretty big infrastructure. You know, we were having some we're having a lot of artists, so we moved it out to the Erie County Fair instead. And that was like really bad move. I was in Japan, and it was kind of like the last year. But we came back into the city, we moved on to the grounds of the art gallery. And since then it's like, aside from some weather issues, it's been it's been pretty amazing. You know? We're up to like, 13 stages now.

HG: That is incredible.

RT: Yeah, yeah. Thanks, it. Yeah, yeah, thanks to the infringement folks coming on. It's like we're starting to have like a little bit more busking and a little bit more sort of stuff going on in the woods and, and DJs and boats…

HG: Vikings.

RT: Vikings? Yeah, it's my friend David. Yeah, man. There are some characters in this town. And that's what that events kind of come to represent. You know, it's like you know, you can come, you know, you can come be character and we're not going to ask you to pay $150 to come in and set up your scene man. Just set up your scene. And, you know, if you want to be in our tents because we have tents, you know, then you can set up in the tent, if you want to set up in the woods, go set up in the woods, man, it's, you know, feel free, you know, like, like, because there's a lot of room here. There is way more room than we can possibly use. You know, last year a band just came and set up. Right in the middle of the pavilion, they just set up and played for like, four hours. And it was it's like, you know, someone came on say, should we stop them? And I'm like, they don't seem to be bothering anybody, you know, they, they kind of like added there on stage. You know, like, I'm, like, that stuff's like awesome to me, you know? Yeah, you know, um, you know, we have obviously scheduled entertainment, you know, and, and, you know, 98% of it from Buffalo, which is pretty, which is we're from Western New York, which is pretty awesome. You know, I don't think there's another one half day event. You know that kind of represents such a such a wide swath, swatch swap, swath, swath?

HG: I always say swath.

RT: Swath… swath of what's going on, you know, here, but you know, there's so many great people that help put it together. You know, that's how it is able to operate. But like I said, from us seeing how excited people were about helping out, we just we began branching out in different directions. When we first started, we were collecting instruments. It's the very first thing we did, we were collecting instruments and we collected instruments with Channel 2, and we did it with 97 Rock and The Edge and a few other radio stations and we went to run to a few malls, we collected instruments and we collected pretty much an entire Ryder truck or have used instruments. And that's kind of when we started kind of getting into “wow, we can kind of like get some volunteers together, we can make stuff happen!” as we were doing that, we were approached by a school they call this left a message for me and said, “you guys do programming in schools?” And I was like, “sure we do programming in schools.” And then I showed up at our hanky little board meeting and when “so, how do we do programming in schools? Because I tell somebody, we did programming in schools.” So, we brought a few people on and put really hanky board together of some really passionate people, you know, from our festival committee. And when I say hanky, I don't really mean that. We didn't know what it was, you know, we didn't even know. We didn't elect officers. We didn't have bylaws. We didn't have anything, you know, we would do all our work. When we started running more and more programs. We started running programs at the men house Association (~14:50), and we started running programs at a few other organizations along the way. And, and, you know, the more and more we sort of started to do the more and more legitimate we needed to become because, you know, as my father, who started my board because he was afraid I was going to go to jail—not because we're doing anything wrong—because I wasn't keeping track of what we're doing. Came in started a board of directors we hired, you know, a Chair. You know, we hired an Executive Director, we got a chair, you know, that some set of bylaws we went in, you know, we do annual meetings, you know, the whole thing. We're together now, it's like 13…13 member board, you know, working board, you know, some real passionate people, you know, we've run summer camps. We've run winter jazz festivals, Battle of the Bands, high school programs, you know, many, many of them actually over the past 10 years. You know, it's funny, because, you know, you finish them and you'll learn an awful lot about jumping into this stuff the first time it's like, almost like every time it feels like those first festivals, you know, where it's like, you finish you were like, “what was I thinking?” you know, was I thinking like, “why did I do it like that?” but that's only something you learn from experience. And, you know, once again, just like I said about the festival, you know, being real about it and going in and willing to let your passion kind of pull you and guide you through that stuff and you know, then deal with the consequences, learn some stuff and then move on to what comes next is fantastic.

HG: And it's so… I mean, what I've been hearing as I've been listening to you is just it's such a Buffalo thing to happen to get so much grassroots support.

RT: Oh, yeah, you know, the punk rockers that I knew when I was growing up in the continental back in the 80s. You know, like, those were the people that I still need when I came back here and when we were reaching out to people that attitude, don't tell us what to do. Like, I was still young enough. You know, I was, you know, I was I wasn't quite 40 yet, you know, when we were starting this stuff, you know, it's like, you know, you know, I wasn't still in my, you know, mid 30s it's like, you know, I was I was you know, I had a lot of, you know, I just then a lot of, you know, just vim and vigor, I guess back then you know when you told me not to do something I was like, “well, wait a minute, man. You know, what do you mean ‘I can't do this’, you know, I'm a taxpayer, this is my parking lot, you know, and so I'm gonna have some rock bands play and I'm gonna donate the money to Roswell Park and, you know, and and so now tell me to stop.” You know

HG: I mean it's… yeah…  you were both you're both like going against the grain but still working within the constructs of what's supposed to be acceptable. Yeah, you know and so the closer I've become with infringement over the years I’ve seen a similar push. Yeah, infringement exists. Yeah, you know, and in some ways we're infringement is like fiercely egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Yeah. Anti-capitalist. Yeah, there's something about this environment in Buffalo that both needs organizations like Music is Art and infringement and also can support them yeah, like this is an environment that people see the value and not taking people's shit.

RT: Yeah, they do. For sure. They do for sure. And you know, we've gotten much better since those days at actually dealing with stuff. I mean, you know, we're hugely funded by the county. You know, we're hugely funded by some, you know, really great reputable people who see the advantage to what we do, you know, you know, you know, the thing we've wrestled with a lot as Music is Art is, when people hear Music is “Big Day”. And that's when the most people are made aware of what we do. We try that day to kind of spread the word a little bit about some of the other stuff we do, but that's really not what the day is about so much. You know, the day is about showing what's going on and you know, but the more and more people learned kind of about the things that we are trying to do, you know, in the programming that we run over the years, you know, they start to see that we bring kind of that same vibe and that same level of acceptance that we try to have with the festival into our organization itself and that allows us to do really great things.

HG: Do you still do programming with schools?

RT: Yeah, yeah, we're actually doing a guitar workshop right now I'm doing a Buffalo Performing Arts. I'm doing a speaker series with them tomorrow night. And then with Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. We're doing a whole series of speakers, yeah, that we're helping put together and we're doing some programming coming up soon with NCCC [Niagara County Community College]. And we're gonna do some things with recording and songwriting with them. And so yeah, so you know, there's some things you know, that are bubbling up. There's a program called You Rock, which we've been working on right now, it's probably going to launch in a real small way at the NCCC event. And then we're going to run a camp, you know, where, you know, we do it for a bit longer. So we got a lot of stuff going, you know, but it's funny, like I said, you know, we have a lot of programs that have run, and then run their course, you know, because we have 10 years with the programming that we've been running now. So, but yeah, a lot of stuff going on. For

HG: That makes me think I was just at a show at sugar city the other night, which is recently, they are legal and up and running. Awesome. In a very similar vein, they made sure that they “dotted their T's and cross their eyes as I like to say” …

RT: You have to! Because you can end up get in trouble because so many well intended people just because they don't do things the right way end up having to stop doing what they're doing, you know, because just because they don't have their ducks lined up. The big thing with me, when we started Music is Art, at the end of the year, every year, I would write a check, because I was this supporter of it. So, if the festival cost us back then $6,000 to do, I would write a check for $6,000. And we'd be done with it. That was you know, in 2000, like a guy who's in a band, like isn't always going to be making the kind of money that I was making when I can just write a check for $6,000 and that's what I was reminded. Like, when we decided we wanted this thing to be real, you know, and to have the commitment that we needed, it needed to live on its own, you know, it needed to be, you know, like, if I if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you know, we need to figure out how does this thing run by itself. So, it got to a point where it was like mantra, like, like you like, you're not gonna do that anymore, you know, and we're gonna figure out a way to make this happen. And it seemed like an unreachable goal. But we started reaching out to people that we had been helping and saying, “Look, man, you know, we're trying to make this thing real, you know, can you help us out?” And, you know, a lot of really great people have come on, and, you know, a lot of really great people support us each year for some for recognition at the festival, you know, they get in the program, you know, again, you know, they get mentioned on the posters, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, they get to set up at the festival if they want, but some just to support the organization and the idea of what we do. You know, I think we put like $250,000 worth instruments or something in schools already. Yeah, but it's over a long time. You know, like that's the thing, like you stick around, it's like my band, you know, you, like, you stick around for a while, and then you know, just what you turn around and you're like, “woah, I did all that!” You know, like, that's kind of what this is, like, you know, like, just every year we, you know, put out a batch of stuff, and a batch of stuff, and a batch of stuff. And, you know, it's, it's, it's worked out really well. And people in Western New York have been super giving, you know, helping out people, you know, the folks in the music stores, you know, we work out deals with people, we'll give them some instruments, they'll fix some instruments, you know, like that kind of stuff. You know, everybody's really been willing, because they're passionate about music, you know, they're, you know, they're willing to pitch in, you know, to help out because they know, it's gonna get more instruments and more kids hands.

HG: And it's very much I think, also part of some of what I've identified as the “Buffalo Mentality”, which is, in some ways we support around and in some ways it's not we're not going to expect the government—or we're not expecting someone else to make things better for us. Like we're going to figure out a way to…

RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…

HG: And that a certain point you get big enough where you know if the county will give you money…

RT: Well, you might. That's how it worked for us. You know, like I said, “that’s not how it started,” you know, like, like, the idea began first. And then I think when people saw the value of what attaching the minds of music is art to stuff, I think they were willing to support it a little bit more. And that meaning you go to the people, you know, and you say, you know, “what do y'all think, you know, is this part of what we should do?” And their representatives decide that it is and, you know, you grow into that position. And, you know, because, you know, I mean, there's many there were years early on, like, you know, I had friends that used to do these, like, hang from hooks and stuff was kind of this thing that they did, and so we, we had displays of that stuff. And it really caused quite an uproar Downtown. It was while the art gallery was there so the Allentown art festival is going on, and it really caused quite an uproar at the time.

HG: Couple years too early, huh?

RT: I couldn't imagine then growing into what I just explained to you know an organization you know that does the things we do you know, works with kids, but it came from that spirit. It really did, you know, and once again I refer back to my band again, it's the same thing. It's the difference between what my band does, you know, which plays songs that go on Hot AC radio next to a lot of other bands that kind of don't have anything to do with what we do or what we are, you know, we grew up being kids played at the Continental playing at CBGBs and play in Max's Kansas City and you know, you know, doing all that kind of stuff and you know, touring in vans and, you know, doing it for real and you know, growing to this point, you know, where's this many years later, you know, we do the things we do. It's, it's, it's not like we wear it like an uncomfortable suit. We just Go in, we kind of make it happen and then go back and stay in our stay in our little gaggle, you know, and just kind of make our music and make things happen, you know? Yeah.

HG: Just one last thing I want to say about music is art is I think maybe why it's at such resonances. It's not self-serving, you know. I mean, it's both a celebration and it's like a phenomenal party. Yeah, but it's also something that gives back in Israel, it's very tangible.

RT: Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, I don't try to pretend like I know what's going on with a lot of this stuff like guys who I hire to do DJs you know, like they that's what they know, you know, that the folks who we know that hire… that curate the artists, you know, like, they know that you know, the you know, that's the world they know, you know, we bring in people who know the worlds they know and, and once you get everybody kind of working together and having it all happen, you know, it's just I don't know, just fun, man. Everybody has a great time, you know, even when it's raining. Even when, you know, it's, uh, you know, 10 in the morning and there's and there's literally four people sitting there on the hill watching the band play, you know, it's, it's, they're still they're okay with it, you know, I mean, you know, I'm sure they would like to play in front of more people but like, their playin’, and they're happy you know, you know, I'm there. I'm talking, you know, it's like it's going on it's happening, you know, and they're starting the day, you know.

HG: And it’s a good collaboration, too. While, I'm not hoping for it to be September yet, I am looking forward to it.

RT: Yeah, yeah.

HG: I need summer to last a minute.

RT: Yeah, I'm, I'm trying to get Pinky Doodle Poodle, the band that's playing here. I think they're coming back. They played about four years ago. I think they're coming back this year to play. Got a few other kinds of semi-musical surprises coming up. Yeah, yeah. Green Jell-o, maybe coming back again this year again. Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna replay here a couple times between now then.

HG: Get them to sign up for Infringement.

RT: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Have you ever met them before? Bill? They’re a trip, man. Yeah, there. Yeah, he's a trip. Yeah, we're trying to put a tour together right now with Pinky Doodle Poodle and Green Jell-o around the US, so hopefully it'll work. I hope so. ‘Cause I really love that band. So yeah, I should play some of the Pinky Doodle Poodle’s stuff. It's really good. They came here recorded an album about four years ago that we released on my label, and Sheldon (27:35) is going to be there too. And they're playing Music is Art benefit. So yeah, yeah. Pinky Doodle Poodle will be working on their third album, here in September.

HG: So, this has become, I mean, I'm sure it could be a full time job for you if you didn't have everything else as well. And that sort of thing.

RT: Yeah, you know, like I said, Man, you know, Goo Goo Dolls is kind of like the you know, I got a manager I got I have a booking agent. I got three lawyers. I have I have an assistant that works in the office that that handles our day to day stuff, you know, like, you know, I got a four person road crew, that's retainer all the time. So, like, a lot of that stuffs taken care of, especially since we've been doing this for a while everybody kind of knows their jobs like my, my guitar tech, they take care of my stuff has been with me for 14 years. So, like, he takes care of everything, you know, and Justin runs the studio here and, and my wife and I run our record label and Tracy Shattuck runs Music is Art, with our board of directors. So, what I actually have to do isn't as substantial as it feels when I talk about it, you know,

HG: That is a very good place to be.

RT: Yeah, yeah, like, I mean, it's still I'm away a lot, you know, I you know, I travel a lot and you know, I live about a block away from the studio. So, I'm back and forth from my house a lot, you know, I have a three year old daughter, so, I try to see her as much as I can. So, it's nice that I live close, but you know, I just do as much as I feel that I'm comfortable doing. And, you know, try to keep my life in some sort of Zen-like state, you know, so I can get through to the next day!

HG: You're the only member of the Goo Goo Dolls who's living in Buffalo?

Yes. Yeah. Well, the band is pretty much just Johnny. Right? Right.

HG: It's just, again, I know you've had different drummers. Um, I hate the way questions like this come out because I feel like Buffalo has such a victim complex in so many ways…

RT: Yes. Football, football. Yes. It is the football industry.

HG: Yeah, that's it.

RT: Yeah. You know that a lot of it for a long time was brought upon itself. I think, you know, people in Buffalo kind of acted that way. Honestly, you know what, as when things started kind of getting bad people acted that way. And I think I don't think people are acting that way as much. Now, I think that that's great. I think this is the first time in my adult life that I've seen people not be that way in this time. Like when I leave and talk to people, when I used to leave and talk to people, they would always say Buffalo with a smirk on their face. I swear to God, it's true. I don't know why it was just the way it was. And I think it's because that's how this city played itself. And I think slowly that's wearing off right now. I think in it wears off from the inside, it's not gonna wear out from the outside, because it's easy to look down at people. That's easy, you know, and, you know, you let people do that and that's what they'll do and, and you make people believe that that's what you deserve, and then that's what you're gonna get. And, you know, right now, I think that there's people coming in and taking stock and the good things that are here this last winter sure didn't know, you know, my wife's from Tokyo and she's like, she's like, “are you serious, man? Where did you move me?” You know, the first year we moved I moved into the South Towns and we got like six feet of snow or something like that the first year. And then yeah, and then we had a couple of good years there. I came back here because when I was living away from here, I was living in LA. And when you do something in LA, it's different than doing it here. When you do something in LA, you're immediately thinking, “can I sell it to somebody?” you know, “is just gonna work?” you know, is this gonna is this, you know, okay, can can, you know, “what's the publisher gonna think?” you know, you know, can Jeez, you know, it was all about how you were going to fit into the business of what goes on when I came back here to do things. And LA’s got a million, you know, millions of people, millions and millions and millions of people it's like, so it's harder to get things done to begin with. And it's more expensive to get things done to begin with and to live to begin with. So what I found myself doing was living in LA, and coming here to do those things that I was talking about before those things that like you know, produce records and not produce records like because it's Someone's hired me to produce the record producing a record because I heard a band and went, “Wow, I like this band, I want to produce this record, or Wow, I like these people, I want to produce this record,” you know, like that kind of thing. So, I found myself coming back to do that, and the music is art started up and I found myself coming back more to do this stuff. I was doing stuff in LA to I was working with some people in LA, I was doing work in there and doing my thing, but I was finding that my gig, which was Goo Goo Dolls was supporting my life. And this other stuff that I was doing wasn't making me happy, you know, when I was out there, so I would come back here to work on stuff that made me happy, you know, to feel like I was like making like a little bit of difference to feel like I was working with a group of people who’d listen to my idea and go, “Wow, that's a great idea. Let's do that.” Instead of “Hey, you know what, talk to my people and we'll and we'll figure out like how we're gonna make this thing work.” You know, like, that's the thing I fell in love with. Again, you know, after leaving, and after being as fortunate as I could possibly be, I'm not talking about I'm not complaining about, you know, life I, you know, was handed man it was, it's you know, you know, like when it popped and it happened and we moved out there and it's awesome and I was so busy that I didn't even have a chance to think about this stuff, you know, but then I had the time between records where there was a little bit of time off. And, you know, I started coming back here working a little bit doing some things and like I said, you know, that the feeling of, you know, working with a band that's working because, you know, they really want to work, you know, and not just because, you know, they're, they're hiring you to come in and make you one thing or another, you know, it's like something that you feel invested in, you know, and it's not just a like a gig, you know, and that's pretty awesome.

HG: And I found the ability to be, you know, Buffalo is also a very honest city. Yeah, you know, and I think that partially because of how affordable it is, but it's easier to take big risks without it being potentially catastrophic if it doesn't work out.

RT: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of architecture here that's available, you know.

HG: So where did you go to school or what did you go to school for?

RT: I didn't go to school for music. I took music a little bit when I was in school to play trombone, you know, through high school, that kind of thing. And then I went to school for Broadcasting Media Communications at Medaille, I got a four year degree there and ended up working in radio at few radio stations here in town. And that led to me doing an internship here at TrackMaster studios at the time, and here I sit, all these years later…

HG: So, I have my general questions here, but I'd like to ask you some more specific ones. I'd like to ask you about your early days in the punk scene in Buffalo. I'd like to ask you about the Continental, just what that vibe was like?

RT: Yes, you know, punk rock bar, old punk rock bar was kind of a show bar than it was a gay bar, and then they kind of they started to allow the kind of punk rock bands to play there. Yeah, there was a great scene. I entered it, probably a few years after it had started up, and got a chance to see some pretty great bands there. You know, but it was it was a community of, very much so mixed community, of people there. You know, if you like that kind of music, that was pretty much the only place to go for a couple other fleeting places, but Mr. Shabs, The Subway, you know, there were a few other places that you can go play, but for the most part, you're gonna be playing the Continental. Yeah.

HG: I wanted to ask you about Lance Diamond in your relationship with him, especially since we lost him just earlier this year.

RT: Yeah, I was just actually at a meeting about him. Trying to get a statue built, actually. Yeah, we are. We're starting to talk to some people. So hopefully we can make that happen. Yeah, man, great friend, man, great dude. He taught me a super lot, you know, and gone way too quick, way too early, that's for sure. You know, I was forgot he was older than me, you know, never really dawned on me, you know that. You know, when you look at the math, I guess you know, that's the reality of it. But yean, man. So, we're gonna do our best to get a bunch of songs and he never finished that he sang on that we're gonna work on.

HG: How old were you when you met him?

RT: I was probably 20 and then only 21 maybe Yeah, I lived in an apartment, in the apartment below him. And I was being 20, would fight with my girlfriend, she would throw me out. He'd let me go sleep on his couch and we'd sit up all night watching movies and laughing and listening to music and games. Super good friends and did a lot of shows and recording and just hanging out. He had quit drinking. Right when I met him, so and I hadn’t that point, so I spent a lot of years tearing me out of bars four o'clock in the morning, “Come on, you're going home,” “ahghbaha.” Yeah, but you know, he's great friend.

HG: You play very different types of music you know, I mean…

RT: Yeah, but see, we got to be good friends first and you know, I would always tell them, you know, like he was probably my age when I met him, you know, and no, actually he was younger than I now. Wow, it's crazy. I remember thinking to myself, man, “if I'm doing… there’s no way I’m gonna be playing music when I'm 40 years old!” I remember telling him that. He'd be laughing, like “You're going to be playing music. I'm telling ya, you know.” And you know, “It's your it's in your heart, buddy,” you know, and I'd be like, “Yeah, okay,” but, um, you know, he's right. And of course, as he usually was and, you know, so yeah. So, you know, it's, it's really sad, you know, what a life and, you know, so we keep his memory alive here and then make it make it make it the way he wanted it to be.

HG: And I see a lot of what you do with the way you engage in the community to be different ways of how he supported the community too. Like he was you know, in some ways, Lance you just think is like all you know, where else you're gonna go? Yeah, so let's go there.

RT: Yeah, he was just always here, man. He knew that this community supported him. And when he had opportunities, he would always weigh those opportunities against losing his situation here, you know, and sometimes you know, that plan to sometimes 200 sometimes 2 people at the Elmwood Lounge, you know, for him was more important, you know, than doing some other things because he knew that if, you know, you don't want to let that segment, he didn't want to let those people down man be it 2 or 200 he didn't want to let them down. So, I went out did his thing. And, you know, just like all musicians, you know, towards the end, it was getting harder and harder to get gigs, you know, and, you know, not having a particular just in general, you know, it's harder, it gets harder and harder, you know, because a lot of people are using recorded music and DJs and stuff now, you know, so your opportunities become a little less. But, you know, he's still managed, you know, to do it right up until the very, very end, you know, which is once again exactly the way he would have wanted it.

HG: And he was… there's just such charisma there that I don't know if we're ever going to…

RT:  There's no one else. I mean, there's never gonna be that again. You know, I mean, there'll definitely be, you know, other dynamic people that they come out of this city, but there's not gonna be that again, it's, you know, once again, happens for real. It's like, you know, there's no bullshit, man. It's like, you know, he started out, you know, let's face it, man, he started out in a time where the world was a lot different than it is today, man. And, you know, he would tell me sometimes, you know, you know, he'd have to watch his back, like, quite often, you know, because, you know, people weren't accepting of stuff, you know, back in the late 60s, you know, when he started out. And it was in his heart enough to go out there every single night and become part of the creative scene here, you know, and of course, a lot of walls have fallen down since then. But it came from that real place, you know, like, it’s real.

HG: Yeah. We should totally have a statue.

RT: We’re trying. We’re trying, you know, we talked to Larry Griffis today, and we talked to some other folks today. It’s not cheap though, man. It’s not.

HG: No, no.

RT: So, it costs a lot of money, we were talking about some options…

HG: A kickstarter!

RT: Yeah, yeah. We talked about a kickstarter, we talked about some other things as well, so, I don’t know. I don’t know.

HG: Maybe IndieGoGo. So, the last thing I want to ask you is, as one of Buffalo’s favorite “musical sons”, what advice could you give to young, emerging musicians?

RT: Um, I think, do what you’re doing because you love to do it, and because you feel it’s the right thing for you to do. Don’t try to do things because you think you’re going to become successful by doing them. Do what’s true to you; do what feels good. There’s, like, outlets for everything these days. You know, if you live bluegrass music, then play bluegrass music. If you love bluegrass music and death metal, play those things, you know? It’s like, whatever you love, do it! There are outlets for all of that stuff, and you may end up doing it 30 years later, so make sure you love it. And just be true to yourself because, you know, it’s your stuff. It’s your music. If you’re a songwriter, then write your songs, man, and be proud of it. Make sure you deliver them in the way you want them to be heard, and then you won’t regret anything later on.

HG: Here’s the other side of this. Normally, I only ask one or the other, but I’ll ask you both: if you could give yourself any advice at 20 years old, what advice would you give yourself?

RT: See, here’s the Catch 22 here: the advice I would give myself would have probably caused me to not be sitting here talking to you about this right now. Because I wouldn’t have taken chances, I would have directed myself in other ways. And the happy set of circumstances that led to this moment never would have happened. I would have given myself the wrong advice, yeah.

End.