Goo Goo Dolls |
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Tue. July 18.2000 12:00 AM EDT |
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INTERVIEW WITH GOO GOO DOLLS' ROBBY TAKAC |
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The Goo Goo Dolls logged on to www.googoodolls.com and thought they could do better. So now the guys behind the hits "Iris" and "Slide" are Web masters.
VH1.com: How did you get interested in computers? Robby Takac: From traveling all the time. I bought a laptop. I didn't really have an address really, so I would be able to stay in contact with my friends. They never know what phone number I was going to be at. So I would always be able to stay in touch with my friends through email. We were never really involved too much with the site. I keep up with the fan sites a lot. As a matter of fact they have more information than I do most of the time, because they are being alerted by people and been around for a really long time. I think they're both a million-plus hits - World of Goo and FabFay. They're really good sites.  When you visited your own Web site, what did you think?It went up halfway through our last tour, right after that summer tour we did with Sugar Ray. It was sort of a vanity site, I guess they call them, which means that it was just pictures for kids to look at and stuff. There was really no interest in doing a daily maintenance on it or anything like that. But from visiting fan sites so much, I started to see that there is a demand for daily information. So the new Goo Goo Dolls-supervised version of the Web site is two weeks old, with the band providing daily updates. How's it going? We're fairly computer illiterate most of us, so we've put it together so we can run it without actually knowing how to run it. It's a system of little prompts to make things easy. But when you've got to stay on something every day, even after 11 days it's gotten to a point where keeping things straight is getting a little crazy. It's something brand new to us, so we're learning how to handle it. You've put a lot of weird pictures up on the site. There's one of you and Johnny hanging out with the Cookie monster... I have photographs of plane crashes and I have photographs of us hanging out in ancient civilizations and standing in the middle of Sinjuku and in a bunker in Bosnia. This is going to sound so f*cking cliched - it just feels like we're giving back in a way. It's like we're on this huge whirlwind, with all the support from all these awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome fans, just coming to show after show after show. And now I sort of feel like going, 'Wow, you guys won't believe what we've done over the past two years." What's next? We've got the coolest stuff to give away, totally inside sh*t. There's all this stuff on eBay. And I got better stuff than that. People are paying an awful lot of money for this stuff, and a lot of people are making a lot of money really unjustly. I would rather people come to our site and get some cool stuff for free. Who exactly is administering the Web site? It switches around. My girlfriend's involved. And we get stuff from everyone. It all drops through my bedroom. [Laughs] My girlfriend uploads what happens at 7 AM L.A. time everyday. So whatever happens in that 24 hours she knows. We do a lot of stuff from email - back and forth. [Drummer] Mike's out of town, so he keeps me up on stuff. We just make sure we stay in touch. Have you had any problems administering site? No, not yet. We're learning about databases and stuff, so that's kind of pretty intense. But I think in general we know what we're doing. We know what we set out to do. What other fan sites have you been to where you thought, 'That's great?' The Foo Fighters have a great site. Their site is very interactive with people. Our site is interactive on our level. We decide what's interactive with it. We don't have message boards full of 'Johnny's cute' 'No he isn't.' 'Korn sucks.' We don't have all of that going on. That's the difference with most of the sites I've seen.  Now, MP3.com sponsored one of your tours, but Johnny's said that he felt whoever invented Napster should get his ass kicked.The idea behind MP3 when we talked with them is that we have this format here and we're looking for a way to make it work. And we're like, 'Wow that's amazing. You can get music online in a click.' Alanis [Morissette] had been involved with it. It seemed like an interesting avenue. But when Napster came along all of a sudden it was like people weren't buying records any more. It was so easy and it was so big. And the library is endless, man. If I was 12 and I had - I don't know what allowances are these days, I haven't got one in an awfully long time - if I had a choice of spending $14 on a single or getting it for free at that moment, I think I would probably be with them. I point people to sites that have cool, weird MP3s. I'm all for the funky weird stuff, man. I mean, God bless 'em. But the thing I'm not for is somebody trying to get a copy of "Slide'" off of our album that we make to sell. Because that's what I do for a living. Do you ever envision a time when you're selling albums exclusively through your Web site? You know what? I bet you see that happening maybe with our next record. It might happen that soon. Boom! It could happen that fast. Starting tomorrow, you put your credit card in, just like you would for anything else and we will give you all the graphics, some great interactive stuff and a record that you can burn onto your CD. That might happen in eight months. That might happen in a year. Who knows? When MP3s take over the world, don't you think people will miss the ritual of opening a gatefold sleeve and soaking up the whole album experience? You're not going to get that thrill of holding the record, smelling the vinyl as you pull it out of the cardboard ... how amazing was that? Checking to see what's inside, getting your KISS army sticker, you know, the whole thing. You can do all that stuff now. It's just you have to come at it from a different angle, I guess. And it's the creative people that are going to find those avenues. I think that the thrill is all relative. Because for me, one of the biggest thrills of listening to a record was that little break you got between end of side one - which you knew was going to kick ass - and the beginning of side two - which always kicked ass. But no one seems to miss it! [Laughs] |
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