In late June, when the sun lingered deep into the evening and the Goo Goo Dolls had a few days off before tour rehearsals, Robby Takac was back home in Buffalo. And he was sweating.
Not just perspiring, which he does nightly with the Goos when he zips around the stage, bass guitar strapped over his shoulder. It’s part of his rock star gig, and some 40 years after he started, he still does it with ease.
No, on this evening, as a crowd gathered and musical notes throbbed in the hot June air, Takac was sweating. He was running up and down stairs, plugging in wires, checking speaker connections. It was very un-rock-star-like, which was apropos, because this wasn’t a Goo Goo gig. Takac was overseeing a fundraiser for his nonprofit, Music is Art, at his recently opened recording studio, GCR Studio D, which is inside a former mid-1800s carriage house on the outskirts of downtown. A crowd of a few dozen people was gathering outside to listen to the bands who were recording inside, and Takac and Marc Hunt, a recording engineer at GCR, were struggling to make the sound work.
Takac thought to himself at one point, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?”
This feeling of handling a tangle of wires and speakers to make the music play right is familiar to any musician. It’s a stress, but for Takac, it’s a sweet stress, because it’s one he doesn’t get in his day job with the Goo Goo Dolls. Handling how the music plays sends him back to his early days, when the constant challenge of getting better was invigorating.
It’s still invigorating.
At one point as they were running gear, Hunt looked at Takac and said, “Dude, this is awesome!”
Takac, in the gravelly voice that hints at his punk-rock roots, said, “I know!”
This is part of the reason why Takac runs a recording outfit – Studio D is an expansion of his larger nearby studio, GCR Audio. It hints at why he runs a nonprofit organization that stages a flagship event, the…
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