Goo Goo Dolls say they like small venues

Every time Goo Goo Dolls plans to come to this province, the band brings bad weather forecasts.

 Last Labour Day weekend the band was slated to perform at the Rockin’ the Upper East Side music festival in Mount Pearl, but the outdoor show was cancelled when hurricane Earl was predicted to hit (it ended up passing us by).

 This time around, the band was extra late arriving, thanks to the 20 centimetres of snow it brought with it.

 “I’m from Buffalo, N.Y. — I know what winter is like,” lead Goo Goo Doll John Rzeznik told The Telegram last fall, when he said he was planning to include St. John’s among the first of the band’s Canadian tour dates, which started last month.

 Goo Goo Dolls will perform tonight and Tuesday night at the Delta hotel in St. John’s and Wednesday at Joe Byrne Memorial Stadium in Grand Falls-Windsor.

 The gigs are part of the Canadian leg of a tour in support of the band’s latest CD, “Something for the Rest of Us,” released last August, and are among a number of smaller-market stops, which also include Charlottetown, P.E.I. and St. John, New Brunswick.

 “I want to play every place in Canada that we can,” Rzeznik told The Telegram in a recent phone interview from California. “We haven’t done a really big tour of Canada, and it hit us: why are we not doing it? Canada is a really good market for us.”

 While the Dolls are also playing the big-crowd venues like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, it’s the tinier places that the members — Rzeznik, bassist Robby Takac and drummer Mike Malinin — are particularly looking forward to.

 “The smaller venues are more intimate,” Rzeznik explained, adding they often draw an especially enthusiastic crowd. “It tends to make the show feel like we’re all at the same party.”

 Recorded during the summer of 2009, “Something for the Rest of Us” is the Dolls’ ninth studio album. On it, Rzeznik, who wrote or co-wrote all the songs, took a personal and sometimes a political view in his writing, saying he wanted to speak to the “emotional uncertainty and anger of the hard times we live in, whether related to war, the economy or something else.

Love songs reminiscent of 1998’s No. 1 hit “Iris” abound on the CD, and arrangements include strings. 

Rzeznik’s personal favourite song, “Notbroken,” has become the second-most downloaded Goo Goo Dolls song on iTunes ever, after “Iris.” The song is based on the story of a woman Rzeznik met during a meet-and-greet with fans, who told him of her soldier husband, injured in Iraq and too embarrassed to come home.

The Dolls have been performing in the States since the CD was released, and have had a run in the U.K.

 “We’re happy with how everything’s been going,” Rzeznik said. “There have been good reviews and bad reviews, but the feedback from our fans has been great, and they’re the ones that matter the most.”

 Goo Goo Dolls are headed back to the States once their Canadian tour ends in early March, and will do a short college tour before hitting the European festival circuit in the spring and summer.

 While tickets for Tuesday’s show in St. John’s are sold out, tickets for tonight’s show as well as the Grand Falls-Windsor concert are still available online at www.davidcarvermusic.com.

 tbradbury@thetelegram.com

 Twitter: tara_bradbury