Goin' Gaa Gaa for Goo Goo

I listened to every Goo Goo Dolls record to find out if they are any good

When I started doing “Discography Complete & Accurate” projects a few years ago (something I’ve actually been doing on and off for like 15 years), the point was originally to take bands or acts I assumed I hated and force myself to fall into their mostly complete recorded works. I started this back in like 2010 with Rush - a band I HATED growing up but grew to love (and still do). I didn’t intend to do it as a way of “ranking” an act’s albums against the rest of their discography, but it morphed that way for the most part due to how my brain naturally orders things. I come and go with this, some of them with really big discographies (Jimmy Buffett, The Bee Gees, Pet Shop Boys), while some are quite small. Over time, I morphed away from choosing just major acts that I thought I hated (I love all 4 of the above acts now) to just whoever I felt like and oftentimes would alternate a more complex, lesser known band with a major act. I’d been talking to my wife and friends for the better part of a year (jokingly) about doing a Goo Goo Dolls deep dive and after completing the King Gizzard listen-through, a discography that is quite varied and complex, I figured this was the perfect time to do a band that is anything but.

I did this sort of as a joke but with a secret desire to find out if the Goo Goo Dolls, a band with some of the biggest radio rock singles of the last 30 years was actually pretty good beyond said singles (and there are lot more that you know than you realize).

And well, it’s inconclusive.

Here’s the thing - they have (I guess) 3 very good albums. They have a few that have good songs. They have a couple of live records that focus on hits (good!) and…they have a handful of the worst records I’ve ever heard, no joke. I’d never heard a full Goo Goo Dolls album before, despite discovering that SO MUCH of their discography was familiar to me. So are they good? I don’t know. Not really. But at one particular point in their career - they were. If you average out how I rated their 14 studio albums, they get a C-. Overall, this project didn’t really reveal anything, but I’m happy I did it. If you are curious - here’s what I think:

The Good Studio Albums:

Hold Me Up (1990)
Superstar Car Wash (1993)
A Boy Named Goo (1995)

Let’s be real - with The Goo Goo Dolls, you can listen to one of their Greatest Hits compilations or whatever type of “This Is…” playlist on your streamer of choice and probably be good. As I said above, they ARE a singles band and have a high hit rate with them (even their singles from albums that are BAD are often the right choices). BUT if you’re an album person (like I am, most of the time), they do have 3 records that are pretty great.

We will get to them, but the Goo Goo Dolls’ first two albums Goo Goo Dolls and Jed are punk records. It’s hard to believe the band behind “Iris” started that way (though it is common knowledge), but those records are straight up Replacements / Hüsker Dü ripoffs with worse production. With Hold Me Up, you get a record that is still pretty punk sonically and thematically but definitely wears the pop sound a bit more on it’s sleeve with Johnny (the Goo you know) and Robbie (the original vocalist) trading vocal duties back and forth. It’s very much in vein of bands like The Plimsouls (who they cover on here) or early Blink 182 (with harsher vocals). Tracks like “Just the Way You Are” and “Two Days in February” are probably the clearest example of where the band will go over their next few releases, there are plenty of tracks that are mid-to-good tier 80s punk. It’s a sunny record, fun to drive to.

Superstar Car Wash is probably their best record, an actual awesome record to listen to and (maybe this is sacrilegious) would be like the third best Replacements record. It starts off with “Fallin’ Down” which is a single that I grew to really adore over the course of this project when it would show up on live releases and comps. It sounds VERY 1993, not that it sounds like a Grunge copy-cat, but that basically any of these songs could score a scene from a 90s movie. It’s poppy but has the punk / alt. rock edge. It’s really a blueprint record for them, establishing Johnny as the real face of the group and even has a track WITH Paul Westerberg on “We Are the Normal”. You can sense the direction they will continue to move toward with their next record, but there is still enough “edge” to make this a pretty great Power Pop record. I genuinely love listening to this one.

A Boy Named Goo, which just celebrated it’s 30th Anniversary on Mach 14th (with a special extended edition release) is also very good. This is the album I most associate with the band, despite Dizzy Up The Girl being the bigger seller. It’s their breakout and has “Name”, “Naked” and “Long Way Down”, three pretty massive songs in their catalogue. It also is CLEARLY more poppy, with choruses that genuinely stay in your head for hours and production that is much improved. Listening to the record in full for the first time, I was surprised it still had a bit of an edge to it - expecting more songs like “Name”. While there are some more instances of acoustic work, it’s still got these very distinct early 90s guitar leads and a mix of alternative radio and whiney punk vocals. Another super good album.

Now, you could stop here if you wanted to only do studio albums. You’d miss a bunch of their biggest songs, but you’d avoid a bunch of bad records. Alas - we continue:

The Live Records

Live in Buffalo July 4th 2004 (2004)
The Audience Is This Way (2018)
The Audience Is That Way (The Rest of the Show), Vol. 2 (2018)
Live at The Academy, New York City, 1995 (2023)

None of these are necessary, but as someone who values live albums as good documents of a band, all of these are pretty good and from different times in the band’s career. Live in Buffalo came out while the band was still a pretty major deal (6 years after “Iris” but still on the radio and VH1) and is an interesting document in that it was accompanied by a DVD (never watched) and played to this massive outdoor crowd who is RED HOT for the band. Midway through the show, a massive, near record-breaking storm hits (in July!) forcing the show to take a break, but the band comes back and finishes strong. Sound is good, tracklist is good (it’s before most of their worst bullshit) and it’s cool to hear rabid fans. The two Audience releases from 2018 are inessential, but inoffensive too. The first one has more hits and is better than the second (which you can honestly ignore). There are some of the really bad latter songs included, but MOSTLY they focus on their better stuff from the era and then all their biggest hits. Live at The Academy is sweet because it’s during the tour for A Boy Named Goo so it doesn’t have all the slop that would come later. They play a mixture of stuff from that record, their covers of Plimsouls and INXS and some of their more punk stuff. The release includes a long sound check segment and a long encore section (which makes it pretty long) but it’s cool to hear the band on stage during this era.

Decent Radio Rock

Dizzy Up the Girl (1998)
Gutterflower (2002)
It’s Christmas All Over (2020)
Chaos In Bloom (2022)

Dizzy Up the Girl really needs no introduction. It’s the band’s biggest album and features two of the biggest hits of the 90s with “Iris” and “Slide” but also semi-successful hits “Dizzy”, “Broadway” and “Black Balloon” these are all good songs, with “Slide” and “Black Balloon” probably both vying for top 5 songs in their entire catalogue for me. The rest of the album is decent but mostly hollow (though I do like “Acoustic #3” as well). It’s an essential record in that it’s the best snapshot of the band and where it all uh…changed, but its not a truly good album or anything. In fact, I find Gutterflower from 2002 to be ever so slightly better on the whole. It sounds basically the same, though has drifted a bit further from the punk roots (which Dizzy still has some moments of) towards the Johnny-led mid-to-fast tempo rockers and anthems. It does have “Here Is Gone” which is SUCH a cheesy 2002 hit that I just absolutely adore for whatever reason (probably because the chorus is like the best thing Train ever wishes they wrote). You also have “Sympathy” which you probably don’t know by title but you DEFINITELY have heard (I remember the video for this one being especially corny). You have some punky Robbie songs that don’t quite fit - they do however make the album more listenable than the follow-up records, so it’s good. Doesn’t have the HITS but it’s sort of a peak of 2000s pop/rock (which is a low peak to be clear).

It’s Christmas All Over is obviously inessential, but it’s actually quite good for a modern Christmas album. I love classic Christmas music and reject a lot of modern stuff (especially from big-time pop bands) but this is a good collection and done in a way that still has a Christmas feel. The child-sung “Better Days” is a super funny misstep though. Chaos in Bloom from 2022 is the bands best album since Gutterflower (a 20-year gap) and perhaps the only one in that time period that is even listenable. It’s not GOOD but it’s listenable and that means something for a band almost 40 years into their career and super low-lows.

If You REALLY Need To…

Goo Goo Dolls (1987)
Jed (1989)
Let Love In (2006)

I’m going to be quick on this one. Their Self-Titled debut from 1987 is curious. It’s a punk record that is an interesting document to see what the band started as, ONLY has Robbie on vocals and is just like…not good. There were like a billion other bands in the late 80s with the same sound and listening to this, you would have had ZERO idea that this band would become one of the biggest bands of the 90s.

Jed on the other hand - I like quite a bit, but it’s still not particularly good. It DOES have Johnny on vocals AND it’s still a punk record, but there are actual songs here and actual structures and hooks and it’s catchy. It’s still like…just pretty good at best, but for MY tastes, I like it (and it precedes their 3 best records).

Let Love In is where it all went wrong, but at least it has some major songs. This is pop pop pop and really tepid stuff. It’s genuinely one of their most boring records and has the least amount of variety, really just sitting in that mid-tempo malaise. HOWEVER, it’s BORING more than BAD like the 4 records that come after it. It had singles I remember seeing on TV and hearing on the radio in “Stay With You”, “Let Love In”, “Better Days” and the very cringey Supertramp cover of “Give a Little Bit”. All of these are catchy songs but amongst their worst “big” singles and really feel like a band just chasing the money. “Better Days” in particular feels like it was written for a Hospital TV drama or even worse - a commercial for a Children’s Hospital. You know this song, you hate this song (and also sort of love it). The whole record is basically sappy bullshit made for disaster relief and the Bush presidency.

Avoid at all Costs

Something For the Rest of Us (2010)
Magnetic (2013)
Boxes (2016)
Miracle Pill (2019)

This is genuinely one of the worst stretches of consecutive records I can think of any decent band ever having. There is a hierarchy here (Something… is best and Magnetic is truly one of the worst things I’ve ever heard). These records are bad and unless you are perverse and want to subject yourself to the most tepid, lame, embarrassing rock music possible, you should not listen to these (that’s to say it sounds like most mainstream rock music of the 2010s). I honestly hardly remember anything about Something for the Rest of Us and Miracle Pill but I know that Magnetic attempts to do “HEY HO” music mixed with the Killers and the worst of Train (see how that flipped?) and Boxes (if the absurdly stupid album cover wasn’t clear enough) sounds like 45 minutes of the most generic, bird-brained Christian praise music to exist.

These are bad records. You shouldn’t listen to them.

But there you have it! The Goo Goo Dolls, some real high points and some real strong songs. 2 great albums, 1 really good, a couple pretty good and then some real bottom of the barrel stuff. All in all, I’m happy to have given them a shot, despite how hard some of the records were to get through - now I know!

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