Ice Cream Man

“I’m in Oregon, man…I’m looking at the mountains out my window. There’s a bunch of hippy shops…” Robby Takac is at his leisure on tour. Tranquil yet loquacious, the Goo Goo Dolls‘ bassist and I talk shop: evading record company deadlines, recruiting the industry’s best, optimism toward the digital revolution, artist growth after twenty years, and their tours’ genuine contribution to the rest of us.

ICM: What is the concept behind your new album, Something For The Rest Of Us, both in title and recording style?

RT: Well, we finished our last tour, we took about a year and built a recording studio in the space where we did all of our first records when we were kids, back in Buffalo. We setup there and wrote a bunch of songs and went back out to Los Angeles and worked with a producer named Tim Palmer. And once we had our record together we went back to the studio in Buffalo and recorded there for about twelve weeks and then went back to Los Angeles, finished it up and to mixed it. And in that time, between when we were a little bit late turning the masters and missed our deadline, and when the record was supposed to be delivered to make our next deadline, we ended up going back into the studio again and re-attacking a lot of the songs – which was sort of on our own with the band – gave a us a little bit of a chance to go in and listen back to some of the things we had done. We never really got that luxury before, it was always sort of like finish the record, drop it off and, you know, put it out – what was recorded was recorded. But we actually had some time to go back and listen to some things.

We ended up working with a couple other producers, old friends of ours, Butch Vig, plays in Garbage, he’s been a friend of ours for a long time – produced countless huge records. And a guy named John Fields who is another producer that we worked with, who actually ended up producing what ended up being the first single from the record called, “Home”. Also went to Rob Cavallo‘s studio, who’s on a bunch of stuff with us over the years, he’s produced two of our records actually. Long and short, I think with this record we got a lot of time to listen to what we were really doing. It was a little bit less of a rush job and a little bit more of a [snickers/chortles] not pre-applicating into the territory of being dangerously over analytical about what we were doing.

So that’s why we’re on this tour right now, before our record’s coming out, and it’s sort of given us a chance to A.) step away from the record that we’ve been working for two years, but B.) it’s just, interestingly enough, in this new climate of music industry we’ve been able to look out in front of people playing songs that aren’t on records yet, which is something brand new for us. The internet has sort of found it’s place in what we do right now. Obviously it makes it more difficult to sell records, but I’m finally seeing, sort of, one of the major benefits of having the social networking situation and the ability for people to trade data so quickly. I see a positive effect on the shows. We have whole theaters full of people singing these songs to us that we haven’t even officially released to the public yet, it’s all due to camera phone footage, people putting stuff on YouTube, actually being interested in what it is we’re doing, which I think is a pretty cool thing. It’s not something that’s been stuffed down their throat on pop radio day in and day out. They actually have to go and seek out, so it’s an exciting thing, it’s an exciting time in general for music.

ICM: I’m glad you’re having such a warm experience with this because a lot of artists don’t have that mindset. Especially since you were able to cheat the system and buy yourselves extra time to really do something that is possibly a reconciliation for your past and your roots, working with people that you personally respect; you achieve a lot of variety. It seems like a very a rich experience with this new album.

RT: Yeah, well it’s a lot different because we’ve always sort of walked into our record making processes not really being the wisest person in the room, we always felt. There was always a producer or someone in the room who we sort of let guide us through the process. Glen Ballard did our last record and Rob Cavallo, of course, we’ve been working with for years, before that Gavin MacKillop, these are all guys who I thought had records we were very, very impressed with and we were still sort of at the point of our career where we were really learning how to do this…”

ICM: …Which is odd to hear from someone who’s been in the industry for almost two decades.

RT: Yeah and when we went in with Tim Palmer it felt more like a group effort sort of thing. It wasn’t like we were looking for someone to guide us through something. He sort of joined us in the record making process and I think that allowed us to keep our hands on it even more. And then after he left, he lives in Texas, we were still sort of tinkering with the record, I think we were sort of able to bring it even closer to ourselves. John tends be a pretty over analytical about an awful lot of things, as I mentioned earlier…I don’t know if it’s over analytical, incredibly analytical about a lot of things. It really gave us to the time to discover the things we didn’t like before we had to start ignoring them, when it was a wallmark or whatever….

ICM: You said you will be taking a break from the album with the tour. Will you be featuring a lot of stuff off the new album?

RT: Yeah, we’ve been out for almost a month already on this tour and we’ve been doing 5-6 songs a night form the new record…like I said, this is really a different thing for us, you know, we’ve been at this for awhile. It was always a little bit terrifying to walk out and play a bunch of songs that people don’t know, but like I said, people seem interested now. It’s funny you said earlier, it’s nice to hear that I’ve found a positive note on this whole thing because most people can’t right now. It’s very difficult. I don’t think it takes an incredibly huge amount of light to light up an incredibly dark room, which is how I can equate this. Seeing any positive steps in an industry that has pretty much been devastated, decimated, use any word you want, over the past 8 years has not been able to catch up with the digital revolution, but people love music and people will always love music. Seeing people singing these songs back to us before they’re even out in the commercial market reaffirms that we’re doing this for the right reason.

ICM: Fans are still passionate about the music you put out, they’re hungry for it. I think it’s a matter of repackaging how your fans access your work and it seems like you’ve found your footing and have become more comfortable in the industry.

RT: It’s a tough business out there these days. I know the record companies are having an incredibly hard time, I own a record company myself. It’s very difficult to sell that particular product. So I think the record industry is having a hard time, but I think the entertainment industry in general or the ability to be in a band and travel around and have people actually put a little bit of money down to have an experience that’s actually human as opposed to the one on the end of the internet they’re used to having. It seems that people are still hungry for that experience, of actual feeling of human beings making music. Which is awesome.

ICM: Is there something you look forward to in the tour?

RT: In general, I love being out there, man. This is what we do this for. It’s going to be a nice long tour. We’ve been in Atlantic City, I think we were there for New Year’s last year…something like that. We come to Atlantic CIty an awful lot. That area of the world tends to be a good place for us, it’s where we came up so we’ve been spending a lot of time coming through there.

Another aspect we look forward to as a band is working with an organization called USA Harvest at all shows that we do. We collect canned goods at our shows through our street team. It’s a good old street team. It’s a good old fashioned canned food drive. The person who brings the most stuff gets to come back stage and say hi to the band and get a picture taken. We have agreements and arrangements with food banks in all the towns that we come into and they disperse food to all of the food pantries and such usually within the next day. Pretty cool thing that we’ve been doing for about 13 years and we’ve raised almost 9 million meals at this point, so we’ve been doing some pretty cool stuff.”

ICM: Such a charitable cause to be involved with it for 13 years. I don’t really see anyone out there doing something of that nature. For how big your band is, I can imagine how many families you’ve helped in your career.

RT: All I do is take the time to mention it, the street team is the one that actually makes it happen. God bless them, man.

ICM: Finally, you previously mentioned that you own a record label?

RT: Yeah, it’s called Good Charamel. Like caramel with a “c-h”. I just signed five Japanese bands, actually. if you want, you can go to my page is RobbysLobby.com, there are links to my social networking sites and everything I do.

Photo courtesy of www.BuffaloRising.com