Dizzy Up The Girl - October 23, 1998
Review by: By Thor Christensen / The Dallas Morning News
The Goo Goo Dolls found themselves in a bizarre position Monday
night at Coca-Cola
Starplex - headlining a mammoth concert where 90 percent of the crowd didn't seem to
know who or what they were.
The Buffalo, N.Y., trio was the top-billed act at the "Fall
Cha-Cha," put on by
KDMX-FM (102.9), thanks to incessant airplay given to their two majestic, radio-friendly
pop anthems, "Name" and "Iris."
The only trouble is, the Goo Goo Dolls aren't really a
radio-friendly pop band. They're
a punk band - complete with jackhammer tempos, snarling electric guitars and between-song
cussing.
And when they took the stage and launched into 20 straight minutes of high-decibel
metal-punk, you
could see quizzical looks on the faces of all the Top 40 listeners. Of the 18,000 people
in the audience,
16,000 seemed to be thinking, "THIS is the Goo Goo Dolls?"
That's the inherent danger of these free radio-sponsored
megaconcerts. But it's a credit to the Goo Goos'
talent that they were able to win over the vast majority of the crowd anyway. It didn't
hurt that singer
John Rzeznik has the sort of matinee-idol good looks that keep women's eyes from
wandering. When he pretended
to start taking off his shirt - at the request of a fan in the front row - the place
erupted into a din of
high-pitched squealing unheard since Hanson was in town.
Yet the Goo Goos are far more than just a pretty face and some
dramatic chord changes. Songs such
as "Slide" and "Dizzy" were the perfect marriage of punk with pop, and
Mr. Rzeznik's
scruffy tenor is one of the most effective rock 'n' roll voices since Paul Westerberg
broke up the Replacements - one of
the Goo Goo Dolls' obvious punk role models.
"We were always this garage kind of punk band, and when this
song came out on the radio, I thought,
'Oh . . . [expletive], I'm about to lose my indie-rock credibility . . . this is gonna end
my career,' " Mr.
Rzeznik said, introducing the melancholy "Name."
Then, as he looked out over the sea of fans, he broke into a smile and said, "But as
it turns
out, it just started my career."
North Carolina's Athenaeum was the perfect choice to open. Their
hard-edged power-pop was cut from the
same cloth as bands such as the Goo Goos, the Smithereens and Fastball. And if some of the
band's set
was a bit generic, at least it had enough killer melodies and harmonies kept you humming
along.
Everything, the first opening act, owed an obvious debt to its Virginia homeboys, the Dave
Matthews
Band. But just when you had them pegged as one more pack of funk-blues jammers, they'd
throw you a curveball
such as the irresistible pop hit "Hooch" or some squirrelly sax-and-trombone
riff straight
out of a New Orleans second-line band.