Day 1 of Nanowrimo month. I’ll be posting about songs that inspired me to write.
Like many a Gen-Xer, I first heard of Goo Goo Dolls due to Name’s ubiquitous presence on college radio. A strange guitar tuning, one that easily breaks apart any strings you’ve got. It’s a sweet song, bitter in its aftertaste, and extremely catchy. This and Long Way Down made me an instant fan, but through the years, I just never bothered buying their music.
Iris is a great song, but it got overplayed to heck and, to be honest, City of Angels is not a good movie. Great soundtrack, excellent score by Gabriel Yared, but it simply doesn’t work and its narrative falls apart. Never try to cover Wim Wenders, y’all.
Summer of 99 and I have to do summer school to catch up with a couple of classes. We visit my brother in Arkansas and I get a copy of Dizzy up the girl, which I quite liked, even if it felt overproduced. Then a quick trip to Vintage Stock in Rogers introduced me to a world of possibilities: used CDs. Everything they had was in great shape, and I bought a shitload of albums.
Okay, my dad paid for them.
A boy named Goo was my summer of ’99. I would be locked in the electronics lab, testing a design for an infrarred remote control that was supposed to help disabled people work stuff like blinds, door locks, and the like. It was a good project.
Around that same time, I’d reacquaint a friendship with a friend who now lived in Monterrey. We once went on a “not-date” to a Burger King after going to a Coca Cola bottling factory for a project for some quality assurance class or whatever. It was a good day out and we did talk a lot that day. Nothing happened though.
A few years later, I would start a novel -still editing it!- and it involves her and that particular “not-date” at Burger King. I swear we heard Name by Goo Goo Dolls that day while talking, but it might a case of “the memory cheats.” I no longer feel that happened, but it fits my memory and the novel’s narrative.
Through the years, I always come back to A boy named Goo. Name, Long Way Down, Only one, the very Replacements-esque Ain’t that unusual and two great covers (Disconnected, Slave Girl) round up an album that was an inflection point for the band.
-Sam J. Valdés López
