Music - http://maxpages.com/tysgoopage/RS_1999

"Dude, we fight sometimes like you would never believe," Takac says. "We've chased each other down the block. I threw him down a staircase when his arm was broken." Once, in 1995, they argued for fourteen hours in a Pario stairwell, drinking cheap red wine. When Takac adjourned to buy a new bottle, he drank it, immediately threw it up, walked back into the shop and bought another bottle.

They are different. Far from home, Rzeznik loves the silence of an empty hotel room. Takac has to have the TV on. Rzeznik bares his insecurities constantly; Takac offers to strange comment, "I'm much like a cockroach - nothing affects me whatsoever." Takac becomes the dominant male only at the barbecue and on the g-cart track. Rzeznik's song-publishing company is named out of childhood nostalgia: Corner of Clark and Kent. Takac's simply alludes to how he felt the day he had to think up a name: Six Aspirin a.m. "But I know he loves me, man, and I love him," says Takac. "He is my brother," says Rzeznik. "I never had a brother. And I'm his brother. He never had one. We always joke about it: 'You're the brother I never wanted.' "

Malinin, meanwhile, exists on the edge of the group. When the door swings shut so that important things may be discussed, he is often on the outside. Takac says Malinin is "the most content person I know - and he talks about it."

"Ad nauseam," and Rzeznik, merrily, who talks about Malinin's fatal combination of a photographic memory and a subscription to Harper's. Mike will often say something like, "Beavis is the most important character in American humor in the last fifteen years," or "Mandarin Chinese has no homonyms, so you can't pun - what do they do for kicks?" And then Takac will say something like, "Mike? What's that noise that comes out of your face sometimes?"

In Milan, the "Door-lin-gering psycho" takes to calling Rzeznik's room and telling him she needs to see him. "Dude, that's scary," he says. On the morning of the Goo Goo Dolls' concert, she can be found gently sobbing in the hotel foyer because she has been encouraged to stop bugging him. Face to face, Rzeznik is a soft touch, and when he appears, he sits down next to her like a friendly older brother and she bursts into tears again. "Are you all right?" he asks. "I made you cry? I did?" She cheers up as he looks through her file of Goo Goo Dolls clippings. "I put your picture in
everywhere," she tells him. She gives him a red and black top she has bought. (She also has clothing for Takac and Malinin.) He agrees to wear her bracelet onstage. Meanwhile, the man from the Italian record company tells me that he has run into this girl before. She did exactly these same things when the punky Irish pop group Ash came to town. "And," he says, "a bit with Sepultura, too."

That night, when Rzeznik and I return to the hotel to talk, she is waiting. He gives her back the bracelet and wishes her a warm farewell. We go inside to talk. "I think there's people that think we're pretty lightweight, and I don't give a fuck anymore," he says. "It's cool. People can take this piss out of you if they want to. At the end of the day, I know I did exactly what I wanted to do. And when I finally got my head together and shut the outside world out, I put together some pretty fucking good songs. I may not be as cool as some people, but I don't give a f*ck, because what I write about is important to me. I'm really defensive about my scene, because it's mine and I'm proud of what I've done and I meant everything I did. A lot of people want to give us sh*t for it. I'm ready to go toe-to-toe with the best of them."

After we have been talking for a while, I look up. The Italian girl is standing about ten yards away, about two feet inside the door. She is simply staring at Rzeznik. For five minutes, she doesn't move. "Weeeird," he says. "Help me." I suggest he wave goodbye once more and then she'll be forced to go. "Bye!" he hollers, waving. "Ciao!" She waves back but does not move. She stand there for another twenty minutes, staring, waiting, before she finally leaves.

As already noted, Rzeznik walks out of the Goo Goo Dolls every week or so - at least he did until recently. It's not particularly that he feels less insecure or more settled. It's that he's been too busy. On his last night in Italy, Rzeznik has a dream. In this dream, he has forgotten to sign an autograph for some girl, and she is all mad at him.

missdizzy@johnnyrzeznik.zzn.com

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Page Updated Mon Dec 13, 1999 9:06pm EST