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"I don't sound like Barry White when I talk for nothing. I've played in every smoky nightclub on Earth."

"The way he writes, the way he feels about this band... He kills himself, man. I've never seen anyone put so much emotion into anything. When he's writing a song, veins are popping out of his head. It's really painful."
on John

"We were so heavy that they didn’t want us on their label."
on the Goos' first album

"My dream is to do a duet with that sexy, dirty, little Dixie Chick."

"I don't think we have that thing that a band that gets a deal has... writes a hit and you know the next day they have girls pounding on their limosine windows. I mean, we had cops banging on our van because we were sleeping at a dead end street."

"Our first album was born out of just...being drunk and hanging around."

"We've done a lot of driving around in the back of vans in freezing weather, begging radio stations to let us go on, turning up to find that they hadn't even got a copy of our record."

"Weird things happen to your head when you're in paradise, right?"

"Thanksgiving is the cut off, man. No matter what. I'm going to eat a lot of turkey and hibernate like a bear."
on ending the summer 1996 Boy Named Goo tour

"I don't play my cards like that's going to happen. Do I wish? I get asked that a lot. I don't put that as a priority in my life. I've been doing this in this capacity for an awful long time. I don't even know how comfortable I'd be with that... To be honest with you, I watch John having to deal with a lot of stuff I don't have to. Trust me. And I don't always feel good for him. I don't have to have a thug follow me around while we're on tour. I can weasel in and out of places easy enough."
on the possibility of his songs becoming the Goos' hits

"The nuts got ripped off that record. They were there when we gave them the tapes, but they weren’t when the album came out."
on Dizzy Up The Girl

"We’re growing at our own pace, and so for me, I feel like we’re in the luckiest position in pop music. We’ve actually grown up for real. We make real records. There was never a moment that we said, “Let’s be this now.” We just grew up and got a hell of a lot better on our instruments."

"I think the shock is hearing it sandwiched between some of the things I hear it between now. I used to hear it between Sonic Youth and Husker Du and now it’s between Backstreet Boys and something else."
on hearing his music on the radio

"Videos are pretty important. Especially right now. Your songs are what they are and at some point you have to sell them. Not unlike selling shoes, or snowcones. So we have to be presented in the right way."

"The way things are going right now, most of the world knows the base of this as being John. And before that we never had a face to begin with. Nobody knew who we were. It wasn't like I was this immensely popular lead singer and then I had to step back. So it never felt weird to me. This is a great thing I do. Nothing about it feels odd to me at all."

"Playing new music, in front of people who've never heard it before? You might as well just take a crap onstage. People just look at you like, 'What the hell?'"

"So yes, this band grew from punk."

"You want to take people on a - not to sound pretentious, too pretentious anyway - you want to take people on sort of a trip through your record. A journey through your record so it remains interesting as does a book or a movie."

"Dude, I won't listen to anybody in a cowboy hat, except maybe Willie Nelson."
on George Dubya Bush

"I thought about carving 'Slave' into my face, but it didn't work."
on legal battles with their former label, Metal Blade

"I think that’s the only thing that we could have named it that was like, worse, actually. You know, I mean we did take a step up. Not too much but you know, we jumped up on the curb."
on the merits of the name Goo Goo Dolls, vs. Sex Maggots

"It's like getting up in the morning with an anchor tattooed on your face.''
on the name Goo Goo Dolls

"I carry a suitcase that I only use on days off. It’s just full of the stuff I need to be me. It’s cool. I have all my little toys and all my little things that I like to have around my house and now I’ll take that suitcase and drop it in my new living room and on I go."

"The biggest victory that you have is when you've finished the record and no one's heard it yet and you sit down and you listen to it and go 'Yeah OK, man, we did it.'"

"It’s like when you’re a kid and you want that puppy you saw on the Hallmark card. You get that puppy and you find out it’s not always like the picture on the card. You have to clean up the crap in the backyard. We’re always busy and it’s a lot of hard work. But I’m not complaining. It’s cool that people like our music."

"Our biggest problem with getting songs on the radio right now is we have too many songs on the radio -- which is not a bad position for yourself to be in, really."

"We have this bizarre concept of trying to make good albums."

"All you can do is do what you do, and do it as well as you can."

"Right after that happened, the guy that ran the studio that we recorded at decided that we could do anything we wanted there, he just started givin' us time because he said, 'Holy shit, you mean Elektra Records actually spent the dollar it cost to call you from New York to tell you how bad this was?'"

"I think that's why 90% of young, teenage males play guitar. Chicks dig it."

"You don’t want to go too far ahead with goals. Who knows -- maybe one day we’ll have a ballet company, Rob & Johnny’s Ballet Company. We’ll do interpretive dance."

"Remember those old vibrating football games? My goal in life is to be vibrated around the stage just like those little men."
why he plays barefoot

"I don't see this as just a job. I wouldn't have a job that takes up this much time out of my day!"

"We had to get over people being surprised when guys showed up to do the show. That was a six-year complex in the making. ‘Those are some really manly chicks.’"
on the confusion sometimes caused by the band's name in the early days

"We like to 'take the piss' out of classic songs. We thought it was funny to play Don't Fear the Reaper five times as fast, and cut out everything but the three chord structure. To me, that is hilarious. But it also allowed us to work on cover songs that fit what we did. Then we 'put the piss' back in them, if you will. So instead of making fun of them, we made them our own."

"It's not the Day's Inn Motor Lodge tour anymore."

"The problem with the whole indie world right now is that it's become a status thing. There's a lot of Southern California pop punk bands out there who are selling lots of records and getting millions and millions of dollars from major labels, and they're still trying to tote themselves as some sort of poster children for indie punk rock. I want to tell them, 'For God's sake, take off that $700 shirt if you're gonna do that, and give all your money to start a label and make other little bands marginally successful. But don't sit back in your mansion on the side of the hill and say "Man, we are still so punk." Whatever… just make your records, man, and stop it.'"

"The first time I was in Omaha it was 11 degrees outside, it was freezing. The next time I was there, it was 111 degrees and cows were exploding, they were boiling inside and dying. Land of the exploding cows."

"I remember hearing a Ramones song and thinking, 'I can do that.' And I did."

"Don't give people a chance to boo and throw things."

"For years we've been playing and writing songs that sound happy. And yet if you listen, the words are all like 'My brains are falling out of my ears; would someone please pull me together?'"

"We're still playing the same rooms we've always been playing. It's just that there's people in them now."

"We clear the room with the first few songs. People start filing out like you wouldn't believe."
the reaction of abng concert crowds expecting to hear a set of Names

"We actually lost 163 people after we played the single."
on a 1995 show in Rochester, NY

"He had all our records and knew our songs. We got together and played 20 songs the first day and did a gig nine days later."
on Mike

"We used to scribble chord changes on pieces of paper and throw them at each other. That’s pretty much how we wrote our first record, which we did for only $700."

"Dude, I'll take Days Inn any day over a stuffy hotel. A bed, a TV, a bathroom. What more do you need?"

"I'd love to get to the point where I could own a car, or I wouldn't have to worry about paying rent for a couple of months. Those are still concerns."
from an interview shortly before the Goos made it big

"I'm a cockroach -- indestructable."

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