Heyheyhey INROCKERS and Welcome to The Lobby !

This is a pretty cool post this month, I'll get right to the story. . . . .About 2 months ago we got a Google Alert for a You Tube video talking about a young man performing the Goo Goo Dolls song ''Iris'' at a local music festival event near Richmond, Virginia here in the states. We get a lot of these notifications and it's always a lot of fun to watch people covering the songs we have recorded over the years. But this one was a little different, the caption read Armless Man Plays Iris by my band, The Goo Goo Dolls, and that's exactly what it was. Unbelievable. A young armless man named Geoerge Denehy was singing and playing the acoustic guitar with his toes on a small stage at a high school scholarship presentation.

As you could imagine this was incredible for us to see, Mike, our drummer was so moved by the performance that he wrote to George through a twitter account posted to the video which had at this point about 50,000 hits (by the way, George's twitter name is @thatarmlessguy, I'm not kidding), that very same video has nearly 600,000 hits as I write this column. Our drummer Mike chatted with George a bit by email, it turns out he was born in Romania with no arms and was adopted by the Denehy family here in the US, oh, and he also plays Cello and piano. A few days later John suggested having him come to perform the song with us at a gig we had scheduled in Bethlehem Pennsylvania later that month!

He accepted and in a couple of weeks we were performing with George at Musikfest 2012. He did a couple of songs on solo acoustic guitar before we played and got a standing ovation from the nearly 6000 people in attendance that night! It really was inspiring to see someone who was dealt and undeniably difficult situation and was so moved by music he was able to figure out ways to overcome those obstacles to be able to express himself through song. Oh, and he plays pretty well too. Then George came out and performed Iris with us at the end of our set in front of a mesmerized audience, it was a great, great night.

There were about 8 news crews from around the country covering the show and within hours of the concert we were seeing posts from camera phones and news channels popping up on the internet and television. From what we've been reading he has booked some recording time with a producer In Nashville and has been offered a trip to his homeland in Romania to appear on television. I think George's life has taken an interesting turn, and we truly wish him luck in all he does, and maybe we can make this happen again some day. Goo Goo Dolls are now between New York City and Los Angeles working on our 10th studio album to be out in early 2013!

Next month is also the annual ''Music is Art Festival'' in my hometown of Buffalo here in Western New York, over 100 bands DJs, about a hundred visual artists, hundreds of dancers and all sorts of artistic / festival style craziness that myself and a great staff help coordinate for the city to enjoy. This is our tenth year, I'll fill you in on all of the fun next month here in In Rock. Also, I'll be in the recording studio here in Buffalo with a great new band from Tokyo, Japan called Pinky Doodle Poodle for a release on the Good Charamel Record label here in the states in late 2012/ early 2013! PDP is also performing here at the MiA Festival while they are here doing their record, we'll have pictures of the event posted here for you next month!

Now that my Olympic Fever has calmed down a bit, I'd like to ''congratulate'' all of the Olympic medalists and athletes from Japan for an amazing games, we saw the Medalists parade in Ginza for the athletes here in the US on TV Japan and they estimated 500,000 people gathered to celebrate with the athletes. It was an amazing Olympic games and a tense but exciting finals in the US/Japan Women's Soccer Gold medal match, we had a great time following the Jaanese team from here in the States. !

Thanks for stopping in, check out RobbysLobby.com for links to all sorts of Social Networking sites and I'll see you next month!

Peace
Robby