Dizzy Up The Girl Album Cover
Rosalie Checca
The Goo Goo Dolls kicked off a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their biggest-selling album, "Dizzy Up the Girl," at the Van Buren Sunday with a sold-out show that started with them playing that entire album with the cover art projected on the screen behind them.
The Dolls were clearly into the nostalgic possibilities of celebrating the songs that made it possible for them to still play sold-out shows two decades down the road from that quadruple-platinum triumph.
"It is amazing that our relationship has lasted longer than most marriages," Rzeznik said after leading the crowd in a spirited singalong on "Slide," the second song on "Dizzy Up the Girl."
After "Black Balloon," Rzeznik told the crowd, "This is our first night on this tour, so if we (expletive) something up, just please understand. If you come see us in a week, we'll be way better."
"It was sort of the first time that we could make a real record," he said, "with real producers and cocaine if we wanted. It was very exciting. But when I found out how much the cocaine cost, I was like '(Expletive) that. no way. Let's just get a bottle of vodka.'"
Then the other Goo Goo Dolls returned to rock their way through "Fallin' Down," "Lucky Star" and "Stop the World" from 1993's on-the-verge-of-making-it "Superstar Car Wash" album. (It's not too late to come back with a 25th anniversary tour on that one, guys).
Then, after dusting off two relatively recent songs, "Think About Me" and "Notbroken," they went back to the old-school, bringing the set to a raucous conclusion with "Another Second Time Around" and "There You Are" (from 1990's "Hold Me Up").
The encore started with a funky "Big Machine" and they signed off with a great choice, an anthemic "Flat Top" from "A Boy Named Goo" that climaxed with Rzeznik, who by then had cemented his standing as a criminally underrated lead guitarist, tearing it up on lead guitar over a classic garage-rock rave-up ending.
If the goal of this show was to capture the youthful abandon of the Goo Goo Dolls in 1998, when "Dizzy Up the Girl" was just the next step in the evolution they'd been on since "Jed" gave way to "Hold Me Up," it's hard to imagine what they could've done to make it any better.
As a testament to the enduring appeal of their best songs and the connection those songs have allowed them to build with the fans who packed that venue? It was everything it could've been and then some.
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Rising like Aphrodite from the sea, one or two songs from film soundtracks inevitably surface as a particular season's Love Song. Be it sentimental (Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" from Armageddon), bitter and/or vengeful (Mary J. Blige's "I'm Not Gonna Cry" from Waiting to Exhale) or, most common of all, composed by Bryan Adams (Robin Hood Prince of Thieves's "Everything I Do [I Do it For You]," Don Juan DeMarco's "[Have You Ever] Really Loved a Woman?"), these Love Songs dominate radio play-lists and often surpass their related movies in popularity. Indeed, how many of last year's senior proms were perfumed by the sweet mourning of the Goo Dolls' "Iris." featured in City of Angels? "And all I can taste is this moment/And all I can breathe is your life"--lyrics such as these, occasionally punctuated by the sad twang of a mandolin, combined to make "Iris" the Love Song of Summer 1998. Perhaps in an attempt to wring the udders of the cash cow for one last drop, the Goo Dolls included "Iris" in their new album, Dizzy Up the Girl. While other bands might fear that such a conspicuous track might trap buyers into assuming that the other songs on the disc were of the same style (how many of you bought Blind Melon in the hopes that every song would be sound like "No Rain?"), John Rzeznik and company confront the supposedly dangerous supposition with shameless affirmation. Yes, they say, every song on this album is (or at least attempts to be) just like "Iris." We hope you like it.
The formula employed by the Goo Dolls to create this album of Love Songs has been to address almost every song to one person, presumably whatever girl is being "dizzied up," and to permeate each line with the same type of dark, tortured, adolescent, I-love-you-why-won't-you-let-me-in infatuation. "I wanna kick at the machine/That made you piss away your dreams/And tear at your defenses/Till there's nothing there but me," declares Rzeznik in "Dizzy," and so on he bellyaches throughout the other 12 songs on the album. "They press their lips against you/And you love the lies they say/And I tried so hard to reach you/But you're falling anyway," Rzeznik sings in "Acoustic #3." What this girl's problems are, beyond the abstractions of lies and betrayal, Rzeznik doesn't disclose, but his lyrics read like a high-school diary. Currently seen glamming it up in the newest issue of Rolling Stone, Rzeznik himself sheds here as well some of the down-home Buffalo boy that got him and his band where they are today. On certain tracks, such as "January Friend," his normally earnest, raspy voice mutates to a synthetic-sounding and nasal scratchiness, reminiscent of a phlegmy Ed Roland. The Goo Dolls, however, are no Collective Soul; Rzeznik here commits the double wrong of choosing the wrong person to imitate and failing to do it accurately.
Musically, the Goo Dolls are your run-of-the-mill mainstream alternative band. Nothing extraordinary is done here in the way of instrumentation, and most songs are similar in their construction and execution--verse, verse, bridge, verse. "Extra Pale" is a brief flash of distinction in the obscurity created by so many homophonic songs with its abrupt pauses and nicely-incorporated backup vocals. Those who might be tired of "Iris" will welcome its mandolin and violins to break up the thickness of guitar, bass and drums characterizing the rest of this album. The strangest quality of the music of Dizzy Up the Girl, however, is just how darn upbeat it is. Most songs move to quick-paced rhythms and, at the chorus, slide up scales for an almost uplifting effect. The music, in fact, tends to belie the plaintiveness of the lyrics. How the Goo Dolls write something so dolorous as, "See the young man sitting/In the old man's bar/Waiting for his turn to die" into a tune so whistleable as "Broadway" is a marvel and, perhaps, the saving grace of this album. One might criticize the hackneyed phrasing, the pretentious lead vocals, and the uncreative musicianship, but the upshot of Dizzy Up the Girl is that its melodies are so memorable and euphonious as to shift attention from the sorrow of which they sing. Isn't that, after all, an optimism that we of the Prozac 90s could use?
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