We’re a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade kind of family. Which is to say that, every Thanksgiving, my wife and I turn on the TV, go about our holiday preparations, and occasionally look back at the screen to comment “Oh look it’s Dolly Parton!” or “Hey, it’s The Muppets!” while our children display zero interest. This has been our tradition for as long as I can remember — with one minor exception. Sometime during the morning of Thursday, November 26, 2020, while Hota, Savannah and Al gutted out another year of canned pleasantries, my daughter and I, suddenly engrossed by the broadcast, simultaneously guffawed “Goo Goo Dolls?!” Both questions. Both exclamations. Her guffaw implied, “Who are these old men with this ridiculous band name?” My reaction suggested, “Is that the Goo Goo Dolls and why are they lip synching and air guitaring on top of a float?”

My daughter’s question was one of understandable ignorance — she was just nine at the time, born more a decade after Goo Goo Dolls conquered the charts. But mine was caused by the shock of displacement. Why were those guys, who were once the biggest Rock band in America and who must have been well into their fifties, performing alongside Picachu, Tom & Jerry and Pentatonix? Moreover, were those guys, the tall, lithe blonde with perfect skin and loose ponytail, dressed all in black, and the shorter, salt and pepper Heavy Metal guy, also dressed in black, really John Rzeznik and Robby Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls?

A quick Googling confirmed that — yes — in addition to supporting their new Christmas album, the Goo Goo Dolls were also promoting their lead singers physical fitness and cosmetic maintenance. Rzeznik looked fetching in a way that betrayed both the ridiculousness of the setting (rolling down Fifth Avenue on a balloon) and the reality of his age (fifty-five). As surprising as his look was, though, additional searches revealed a much greater surprise: many people on the internet believed that the Goo Goo Dolls were awesome. Well, maybe not awesome, but definitely important and absolutely better than they were given credit for. Years after their gargantuan hits had faded from the radio and the backlash had subsided, critics appeared to have softened. The groupthink was that, of those Nineties, adult alternative rockers (Matchbox Twenty, Better Than Ezra, Gin Blossoms, etc.), the Goo Goo Dolls were not simply they lone survivors — they were also the best. At some point unbeknownst to me, a Goo Goo Dolls reclamation project had begun.

Article after article, the themes were consistent: The Goo Goo Dolls — underrated and still (gently) rocking out. It was a version of the historical beige-washing that I’d seen before. In the last decade, reconsiderations of late, mid-period Bob Dylan had become dime a dozen. The takes posited that (for example) “Down in the Groove” was actually a great, misunderstood work of art. Same for Van Morrison. A corner of the internet was working hard to convince me that I’d prematurely dismissed “A Sense of Wonder” and “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart” — that these records possessed grace and wisdom that I did not detect the first time around. I almost had time for those zags. But the Goo Goo Dolls? The band who’d represented the spaying of Alternative Rock? The band who was mouthing a holiday song on The Macy’s Day Parade? They were awesome?

The Goo Goo Dolls were born in Buffalo, New York, during the mid-Eighties. Buffalo’s population was in sharp decline at the time. And worse than that, their football team was coming off of back to back two win, fourteen loss seasons. The rapidly shrinking city was cold and depressed, existing in the shadow of three famous waterfalls and hundreds of awful motels. Buffalo was a place to endure. And yet, in recent years, amazing efforts have been made to reclaim the city. There’s the AKG museum, the Teddy Roosevelt Historic Site and The Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House — not to mention the Super Bowl contending Buffalo Bills. Nowadays, Buffalo exudes a vibe between elevated Rust Belt and Canadian New York. It’s a city back on the rise. And, honestly, it’s a comeback that I can get behind. Which made me wonder whether I was being a little too hard on John Rzeznik and Robby Takac, Buffalo’s prodigal sons. Perhaps there was something to be said for grit and endurance. Perhaps a fresh coat of paint really could change perspectives.

The first incarnation of the Goo Goo Dolls had very little in common with the version that broke through ten years later — and, aside from Rzeznik and Takac, virtually nothing in common with the band floating down Fifth Avenue in 2020. They started out sloppy and messy, ostensibly a Punk band, curious about Heavy Metal. They wore muscle shirts. They were loud and drunk. They were signed to Metal Blade! Their heroes were Motörhead, Bad Religion and, most of all, The Replacements.

For two albums, Robby Takac was the band’s primary lead singer, excelling in a shrill holler that befit their sound. But between 1990 and 1993, almost everything about the group changed. Takac’s squeal was eclipsed by Rzeznik’s rasp and, soon after that switch, their career exploded. They went from alpha to beta. From aggro to sensitive. From Metal Blade to Warner Brothers. From journeymen openers to rising star headliners. “We Are the Normal,” from 1993, got things started. But “Name,” from 1995, kicked the doors open. And “Iris,” from 1998, blew the roof off entirely. Twelve years into their career, the Goo Goo Dolls barely resembled the band that spent The Eighties opening for Dag Nasty and Gang Green in Buffalo.

Many bands have survived and thrived after radical shifts. Journey were a mostly forgettable, mostly instrumental Fusion Rock band before they added Steve Perry. REO Speedwagon were a second rate, secondary market, arena Rock band before they mastered the Power Ballad. Chicago of 1971 barely resembles the Cetera plus Toto version that defined the sound of Eighties' caressing. However, most groups that shift dramatically do so desperately. And unsuccessfully. But in the case of the Goo Goo Dolls, and despite the frontman swap, the changes felt more like gradual adjustments than whiplash. Before 1995, they were almost completely unknown, and so, for most of us, there was only, always the soapy jangle, earnest rasp, golden highlights and far off stares of John Rzeznik. We assumed that Takac was Rzeznik’s wingman, but also, just the bassist. For those of us (most of us) who entered the picture in the mid-Nineties, Rzeznik was the guy. And much gentler, kinder Replacements fare was his trade.

In 1998, that fare was unfathomably popular and almost equally despised. “Iris,” from the multi-platinum selling “Dizzy Up the Girl,” spent an astounding eighteen weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. It was the rare song that dominated every radio format (with the exceptions of R&B and Hip Hop) and that played constantly on MTV and VH1. “Iris” was the culmination of both the Goo Goo Dolls’ transformation and the amiability that had come to define Modern Rock in the late Nineties. Its supremacy came after years of Spin Doctors, Matchbox Twenty, Gin Blossoms and countless other, less interesting strains of Eighties “College Rock.” But the Goo Goo Dolls were simply better at it than their peers. Their jangle was softer and frothier. Their singer warmer and more earnest. Their songs grander and more aching. The Goo Goo Dolls may have forsaken the legacy of R.E.M. and The Replacements, but they also predicted Coldplay and Mumford and Sons. “Iris” finished the job that Matchbox Twenty had started. It was the end of Alt Rock and the thing to which Nu Metal responded to.

But it wasn’t just Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis who reacted, it was most of us. The post-Iris antipathy was swift and severe, but also not particularly surprising. To my mind, there are three plausible explanations for the post-Iris revulsion. The first is the obvious one: oversaturation. When people are exposed to too much of one thing, they become acclimated until they tire of that thing and want none of it. There are countless examples of bands whose careers faltered from oversaturation. The second explanation is also plain to see, though far less generous: Rzeznik’s hair. The Goo Goo Dolls’ frontman was a pretty boy with striking, pale blue eyes and lots of body art. But what stood out most was the inexplicability of his hairdo. It was a feathered mop-top, full of blonde highlights and reliant on mouse to make it look both tousled and — I think — spiked in parts. It was, in fact, at least three haircuts in one — which had the effect of calling too much attention to itself and looking complicated and very expensive. It was not necessarily a bad look so much as it was a dislikable one.

Had Rzeznik’s hair been brown and less manicured, it would have resembled Paul Westerberg’s classic look — which brings me to the third source of animosity: the Goo Goo Dolls buried their heroes. No band took The Replacements component parts, processed, sanded, softened, lacquered and reconfigured them more expertly than they did. And while The Replacements might have only had a couple hundred thousand fans in 1998, every single one of them was onto the Goo Goo Dolls ploy and despised them for it. I would have been in this third, smaller cohort back then. I resented Rzeznik and his band immediately and intuitively. I considered “Iris” to be craven and probably bad for music. And yet, I never really stopped to consider what separated that song (or “Slide” or “Name”) from Paul Westerberg’s beloved, stripped down un-hits. A quarter century after the fact, I began to wonder whether those Goo Goo Dolls singles were really so different from “Unsatisfied,” “Here Comes a Regular” and “Achin to Be.”

It took me about twelve minutes to confirm that — yes, absolutely, what was I thinking — they were affronts to the Replacements’ songs that had inspired them. Whereas Westerberg’s have rage and pain and pathos and empathy and defects, the Rzeznik songs have none. The Goo Goo Dolls toil in acoustic ballads that signify “Replacements-esque,” but which are actually devoid of the qualities that their heroes held most dearly.

By 2000, however, our rancor had faded. There were new enemies to sneer at — Limp Bizkit and Crazy Town and Dick Cheney. And so, given their freedom, the Goo Goo Dolls were able to persevere and sustain a living as expert makers of pumpkin spiced Rock. They never had another platinum seller. Never had another top ten hit. But they had a career, trusted by Adult Alternative radio programmers, good bets to sell a couple hundred thousand copies of each album in America and a whole bunch more in Canada. They worked and worked and, most of all, they showed up. Eighty to one hundred shows most years. Late night TV performances. And, of course, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where they appeared three times during a seven year stretch.

In time, that consistency started to endear some parts of Generation X. Forty-somethings began to look back with greater kindness. They’d tweet nice things. Post pictures of old CDs. Write about how we didn’t appreciate how great they were — or minimally, how not bad they were. My curiosity, meanwhile, was piqued less by those think pieces and more by what I saw and heard on that November day in 2020. John Rzeznik looked almost exactly the same — younger and better, even. And the track he lip-synched to sounded just like the same as the band I first heard in 1995. Which made me wonder not whether they were kind of great but whether, after all these years, they had changed at all.

My sense was that Rzeznik’s highlighted pony, youthful glow, and acoustic air guitar strumming were signs of either arrested development or supernatural consistency. To confirm my hypothesis, though, I’d be forced to do the one thing I’d been avoiding for decades — I’d have to listen to the Goo Goo Dolls. And so, one by one, starting with “A Boy Named Goo,” from 1995 — the album where Rzeznik took the reins — I bathed in the pumpkin spice latte. Warm and earnest. Full of glittering generalities. Acoustic guitars on top of acoustic guitars. Song after song, album after album, and with the exception of Takac’s contributions, there was not a whole lot of variation. Johnny Rzeznik excels at one particular thing and — to their credit or detriment — the Goo Goo Dolls did not deviate from it.

Nine albums into the oeuvre, I assumed I’d heard everything there was to hear. But then I pressed play on album number ten — “Magnetic” — and was more than a little shocked by what I heard. Or, rather, by what I didn’t hear. There was no jangle. The guitars were mixed back. Way back. There were handclaps and big bass drums and choruses that sounded like cheering. The themes were ostensibly the same — love and loneliness. The singer was still the same. But something had shifted. This band sounded a dash more like Mumford and Sons, a drop more like Imagine Dragons and a dollop more like late period Bon Jovi. Obviously, I’ll never know exactly why they decided to try something new at that point. But I had a pretty good guess as to who the agent of change was. Chunks of “Magnetic” were produced and co-written by John Shanks, the multi-instrumentalist turned producer who excels at making Rock songs sound ten percent more contemporary, twice as competent and half as interesting as their source material.

Shanks, along with Warner Brothers house producer, Rob Cavallo, takes the Goo Goo Dolls from the Nineties to the Aughts. The producers offer a little more in the way of rhythm — “Rebel Beat” and “More of You” have more pulse than most Rzeznik singles. They also know how to punch up a chorus — "When the World Breaks Your Heart" sounds like it was written for an “American Idol” finale and “Caught in the Storm” sounds like Sambora-less Bon Jovi. Modernization means occasional compression in the vocals that verges on auto-tuning. But, since Rzeznik’s rasp is so familiar, it’s all still recognizably Goo Goo Dolls.

Shanks and Cavallo are pros — in raising the floor of the material, however, the ceiling feels considerably lower. Everything on the album is mired in B- territory. The worst songs on the album, “Happiest of Days” (one of two that Takac wrote and sang) and “Keep the Car Running” are forgettable, middle of the road fare. In the case of the former, Takac’s voice squeals in ways that can work in Punk or Heavy Metal songs much less so in mid-tempo, bittersweet rockers. The latter, which closes the album, suffers from an existential incongruence. The song is taut and excitable, but Rzeznik is the opposite — he is loose and depressed. So, while the song wants you to stand up, shake your hip and pump your fist, the singer wants you to sit down, take a deep breath and think about things.

“Magnetic” was a choice — less left, less right, more middle. The ballads inched closer to Coldplay. The rockers closer to Mumford & Sons. It was a direction the Goo Goo Dolls would stick with, introducing tasteful whispers of contemporary Rock and Pop into their road tested formula. But it was never more than a whisper. And none of it seemed to matter much because their fate had been sealed years before — frozen in amber along with the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, McGwire and Sosa’s home run chase and Rzeznik’s blonde highlights. For two decades, they have signified “late Nineties Modern Rock which is in no way Alternative Rock.” They are the apotheosis of the form — the very best at it. And yet, they were always going to end up on a float in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day for the most obvious of reasons: November is pumpkin spice season.

by Matty Wishnow