Goo Goo Dolls Reveal Their Secret of 40 Years Together ArticlePure

The Goo Goo Dolls’ founding members, Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac, still share tough love after performing together for nearly 40 years.

The two, who have been the mainstays in the group since 1986, credited their long history to their ability to express their tension in unexpected ways. 

“John and I will actually slap each other and punch each other and get the aggression out,” Takac, 60, told Billboard.

“In retrospect, it’s funny…. But, you know, it’s just silly. It turns into slap fights,” Takac, 60, said, before reassuring fans that they “don’t want to hurt each other.” 

“We love each other,” Takac continued. “John and I shared a bedroom for years, platonically of course, but that’s where we come from. People act like a——s sometimes — I do, he does. Ultimately we go have a cup of coffee and we figure it out and make it happen.”

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Rzeznik and Takac are now on their Summer Anthem Tour to promote their upcoming EP Summer Anthem, which drops on Friday, Aug. 22.

The two founded the band in 1986 with drummer George Tutuska, who left in 1995. The full lineup now includes Rzeznik, Takac, guitarist Brad Fernquist, drummer Craig Macintyre and multi-instrumentalist Jim McGorman.

This year, the band also marked the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough album A Boy Named Goo, and its hit single, “Name.”

The album was their fifth, and it showed them what it was like to suddenly be in the mainstream spotlight.

“We got to see what it was really like to be a priority at a big record label. And we worked — hard, like 20 hours a day of promoting Goo Goo Dolls and being out there, going to six, eight radio stations in a day, sometimes,” Takac told Billboard.  

“I don’t know if I could do that amount of work. It doesn’t feel like 30 years ago; it feels like another lifetime, if that makes any sense.”

The band is no longer putting in that amount of work, but they’ve still managed to attract new audiences in recent years thanks to their 1998 hit “Iris” being featured in Deadpool & Wolverine and 2025 Stagecoach performance. 

During their conversation with Billboard, Takac confessed that they “haven’t seen numbers like this probably ever in [their] career.”

“We’ve got young kids coming out to our shows; that didn’t happen 10 years ago, I will tell you that much. There’s so many kids at these shows now,” he said, before joking, “Oddly, a Goo Goo Dolls show has become more family-friendly than, like, a Sabrina Carpenter show.”

“I hope we have the luxury of having people be this interested in years to come,” he added.