Goo Goo Dolls' memories of eastern Pennsylvania

InterviewNovember 4, 2011The Morning Call

When Goo Goo Dolls pull into Reading on Nov. 8 for a show at Sovereign Performing Arts Center, it won't be the first time in the city for bassist/sometimes singer Robby Takac.

In a recent telephone call from Los Angeles to promote the show, Takac, who's originally from Buffalo, N.Y., says he's familiar from family trips there when he was a child to shop at the city's outlet malls.

"When I was a kid, we would vacation occasionally to Reading because there was an outlet mall there," he says. "A big outlet mall that was within reach of Buffalo. So we would go there when I was a kid.

"I mean, vacation was basically the pool at a motel somewhere that you were staying at," he says with a laugh. "But that's pretty bad-ass when you're a kid, you know?"

Takac's band had the 1998 triple-platinum album "Dizzy Up The Girl," which produced the hits "Iris," "Slide,' "Broadway" and "Black Balloon."

More recently, the band released the album "Something for the Rest of Us" in 2010, and this year had two songs on soundtracks: "All That You Are," a Top 15 hit from the summer movie "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," and "Best of Me" on the "Hawaii Five-0" TV soundtrack released Oct. 4.

A more recent Pennsylvania memory for Takac was Goo Goo Dolls' July 4, 2010, show headlining Philadelphia's Fourth of July celebration.

"That was crazy, man," he says. "Number one, it was pretty amazing playing with The Roots in their hometown. It was pretty nuts, man. Like the tons of people – more than I ever knew. I walked out on the stage and it was sort of like a general area. All you could see on the other side of that was drive-in screens, like everywhere.

"I was like, 'Wow, I think there's a lot of people here. I can't see that far, but if there are people in front of all these screens, there are a lot of people," he says with a laugh.

"And I remember this little kid jumped up on the stage with us and he was dancing around to a lot of the songs. It was kind of fun. And then that ended up on – oh, I forget what it was; it was some incredibly popular sports page for some reason and that YouTube thing ended up getting like a quarter-million hits or something like that in a week, it was funny. But yeah, that was a great experience."

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