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“I’m not going to sit and complain. Our lives are not necessarily roses and champagne every day, but we made no money for so long, and we’re making a living doing what we always dreamed.”

“This bus is going pretty fast. If someone slams on the brakes, we’re going through the front window.”
on success

“With the last album, we were less like a band and maybe more of what other people thought we should sound like. We think we got it back with this record. Besides, if you don't allow yourself to try new things, you get bored with the situation.”
on gutterflower

“I love the reviews that say the records don't grow. I'd like to play them album one and then album eight and have them say there's no growth. That's ridiculous.”

“It's a valuable talent to be able to finish something, look at it and go ‘OK, this isn't it. Throw it away.’ But just as valuable is to not be able to do that. I think we've been lucky because we've been working with the same people pretty consistently for a few years now and we've got a place to start. And then you kind of go as far as you can go, with still feeling comfortable.”
on gutterflower

“[being #1 on the college stations] basically meant that you got laid and drank a lot of free beer.”

“Our heroes only sold 30,000 albums. We used to be so mad and angry because we never had a hook to hang our hat on. It was disheartening in a way. We just wanted to fit in somewhere and never really did. But I think ultimately, that's how we managed to stay together.”

“We’ve been on the fringe of being cool forever and there’s something endearing about that.”

“When we started, what we used to do was just take pieces of paper and write chords on them in the dressing room. We’d go out, and I’d just scream over them. That was enough to get some beer and a ride home from a chick.”

“We’d just get in the van and throw a mattress in there, because we couldn’t afford a hotel, and we’d leave for a couple of months, and go out and try to collect our $50 to get home again.”

“When did I feel successful? When I was standing in California, where I had never been in my life, on the beach, going ‘Oh man, I better get back to the club—I’ve got a gig tonight!’ I can just remember looking out and seeing kids who lived 4000 miles away from me singing songs we wrote. And I was like, ‘Okay man, this is great!’”

“You hope your fans are going to stick with you, [but] you’re always going to piss somebody off. When we put out our second record, there were kids stomping around Buffalo, pissed off at us because we ‘sold-out’…If you’re at all brave about what you do, you’re unfortunately going to lose people along the way.”

“We’ve got to make sure first and foremost that we made the right record, we have the right songs, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re making a move. But the thing that we try really hard to do is to not jolt people too hard when we’re making those moves. I have 16 years worth of reviews saying that we just made the last record again. As you can hear, that’s not true.”

“We have much more experience and have put in more time being an unpopular band than we have being a popular band. I don’t think I’d like to go back to being an unpopular band again – it’s not as much fun.”

“For us, the right thing is to ignore what’s going on – don’t listen to the trends. In the past 16 years, we’ve seen 50 sub-genres of music come and go, and luckily we didn’t fit into them. We kept our heads down. We like to make a good record, and that’s selfish. We don’t do that for anyone else.”

“[Constantly talking to the press] is not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s not the shittiest thing in the world to do either. I’ve carried roofing tiles up ladders all day. That is a bad job – this is not so bad. No matter what else you have to do, you still get to be onstage for an hour a day, doing what you love.”

“We had the pay phones beside us to phone each other and check out details for our next gig. We could run the band from downtown when we were working. Life is much different at 20 than at 37.”

“All the behind-the-music and horror stories of guys in bands who make a little money and everything’s gone – I want to make sure I’m not one of those guys.”

“When you meet huge rock stars, they’re usually really nice. But when you meet medium rock stars, they’re usually dicks. It’s true. The big rock stars don’t have too much to prove. They’ve already proved it.”
so clearly the goos are huge rock stars!

“We’ve discussed breaking up about 300 times, but there always seems to be a reason to hang on.”

“Most of the people that are in that situation are really the same people we’re playing to right now. They just decided to take a different route. And shit, man, it’s Christmas. They should be having a good time, so we’re going to go have a good time with ‘em.”
on the christmas tour for american troops

“I actually think I’m proud of the fact that we’re still together.”
in answer to "what are you most proud of in becoming successful?"

“I don’t feel too much a part of the pop/rock scene. We’ve just been allowed to stroll around the neighborhood. Musically we’ve been able to stay our course and grow as we’re supposed to, and we’ve still managed to make things work.”

“I couldn’t wait to get off the road at that point. We had been out for a really long time. I was happy to sit around and do nothing for a year, which is exactly what I did.”
on the abng tour

“On the cover of the CD she looks like she’s having fun, doesn’t she? There’s nobody violating her, she just had a good time and now it’s time for bed!”
on accusations that “dizzy up the girl” has negative connotations

“It's just what happens between the age of 21 and 34. We found power in different things now. Before, there was power in the ability of playing so fast and the ability of making so much noise with just three guys. You know, all the cheap ways of driving power - playing loud, hard and fast. I think, along the way, we’ve discovered that there are other ways to drive power, like through certain chord structures, through different instrumentation, or through not playing as loud and then playing loud. Things just sort of grow into what they do. If you let them go into the direction that they seem to be going, you can end up with some interesting stuff. I think that’s sort of just how this whole thing has progressed.”

“We just play rock music. If people want to come and they can dig it, cool. The fact that a lot of yuppies bought the City of Angels soundtrack, God bless them. If they want to buy our records, that's totally cool. I don't care who wants to buy them; it doesn't matter to me. All I know is that we just keep making them. You should just do what you do, and whoever likes what you do, well, that's up to them.”

“When you see this new show, you’ll just freak out. It’s so cool.... It’s all going together really well.”
on the gutterflower show

“That idea would not suck! We got no problem with that at all.”
in response to predictions that dutg would put the goos in the "superstar league"

“I think I got my confidence back quicker than John. Once we got into the studios working on demos, we knew something was working there. Plus having Mike injected a whole new thing. He’s not a bad guy... for a drummer.”
on writing dutg

“Once you bring the fun back into what you do, the problems disappear.”

“Making this record was like looking at a bunch of photo albums from high school -- so wild, all of these bizarre memories came rushing back. Such a long time had passed since we'd even gone back and listened to the early records. This was a great opportunity for us to introduce to the rest of the world some of the things we did in the United States in the '80s and early '90s. All those records lead us to our current situation and we had a blast putting this one together.”
on eoac

“I don’t hang onto CDs anymore. They’re a pain in the ass, they’re made to break in 30 days. That format trivialized the (music) product. ”

“If you live in Missoula (Montana), you’ll have the same selection as someone living in Manhattan. It’s a very valuable thing.”
on the merits of mp3s

“It’s funny, you want to bring people along with you but you can’t. And the people who do stick with you become really, really, really big fans.”

“Some people come to our shows and they only know four songs and they’re like ‘what the fuck is going on?’ Which I think is kind of a victory for me because it changes people’s perspective on pop music. Which is why I liked the Ego record. It’s a backwards retrospective. There might be some guy vacuuming or some lady feeding the baby, listening to I'm Addicted…. And how bizarre is that?”

“If we stayed there (punk) it would’ve been kinda creepy. You got to keep spinning your wheels.”

“No breaks for the dudes from Buffalo.”

“Goo Goo Dolls is pretty easy to remember, and that’s not so bad.”
the one saving grace of the band's name

“John would [urge that we give up] weekly, and I would say, ‘no, c’mon, let’s stay together.’ Fourteen years later, it’s still that way every day. We’ve been at this a long time, so we have a pretty good hang of how to make things work out in the end.”

“There was a learning process going on there. We were learning how to handle that mentality that comes with an arena show. It’s so much different [than a club show], and we had to embrace that and make it our own.”
on the abng tour

“[Popularity] has allowed us to play to a lot more people, which is great. It allows us that little comfort in the fact that for the next two or three years your life is going to be filled with making records. And who knows what’s going to happen after that? We said the same thing in 1989.”

“The things you get noticed for aren’t always the things you did. There’s been singers who are great poets, but no one knew they were poets because they’re singers. What we’re doing now is getting popular.”

“I don’t know much about what I am as a musician. I don’t practice; I’ve just been doing it my whole life. For me to sit around and think of myself as an accomplished musician because we’re successful, I don’t think that’s the case. I think music, as with life, it’s just more taking what’s new and the things you’ve learned and expressing it.”

“There’s a difference between us then and us now. What we’re doing drives what we sing about, which [back then] was drink tons and tons of beer, and hang out with tons and tons of chicks, get drunk and come away with this knowledge. After 30, that life gets a lot more shaky. You begin to deal on a lot of new emotional levels, relationships begin to take on a new level of meaning.”

“[We foster good camaraderie] as much as possible. Or, we give each other space. We have our hotels. I have my suitcase where I keep all of my clothes, and I have another one where I keep computer stuff, stereo, and my hundreds of records. I bring my ‘world’ to places on days off.”

“They shut the building down 'cause obviously, aside from blowing up the Hollywood sign, that's really the only recognizable landmark.”
on being in capitol records on September 11th, 2001

“I was actually really angry about that. These guys probably remember me stomping around the studio when they started calling that a war because they hadn't declared a war on anyone. So now we've declared war on a concept? You can't win a war against terrorism. Terror is a human emotion that you are not going to erase and people are always going to take advantage of. It's just the way it is. So that whole concept freaks me out.”

“We decided to surround ourselves with people who could help us. We listened to people, like our producer Rob Cavallo. To me, it was a luxury to have their input.”
on recording dutg

“There's probably some 35-year-old in a Black Flag shirt really pissed off at us somewhere right now.”

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