Goo Goo Dolls - Eyes Wide Open
From moment one, this song presents to you everything I love about the Goo Goo Dolls circa 1995. That opening guitar lead, playing what will be the vocal melody on the song’s chorus, immediately introduces the yearning minor-chord feel the entire song will take on. This is a sound that Husker Du made at times, that Dinosaur Jr, Buffalo Tom, Soul Asylum, the Replacements, and plenty of other bands who were moving from the world of punk to that of alternative rock in the late 80s all worked with frequently. It’s a sound that I love, one that seems rooted specifically in that time, a time when bands who’d grown up with punk rock were taking the parts of its influence that they could never shake off and carrying them beyond punk’s circumscribed world of acceptable influence. They were discovering just which albums in their dad’s record collection that they’d sneered at as rebellious teenagers were actually now worth another listen. And some of these bands were coming up with new hybrids of punk, rock, folk, and blues, and using them to express eternal emtions in a new way.
The Goo Goo Dolls weren’t at the forefront of any of that; after all, A Boy Named Goo was released several years after Husker Du and the Replacements had broken up, and their members had moved on to new and different sounds. But they had picked up on that new way of mixing punk influence and midwestern heartland spirit into a fresh way of making the kind of simple, straightforward rock music that would touch the hearts of the guys who headed down to the bar on Friday night after a week’s hard work, looking for solace in music. All three of the Goo Goo Dolls were Polish, with unpronounceable, jaw-cracking last names that they originally feared even putting in their liner notes (even A Boy Named Goo credits the members only as “Johnny, Robby, and George”), and they came from generations of working class immigrants and citizens of Buffalo who suffered through the long winters working in factories and under cars. They knew the world that their original audience came from, and they made music that reflected that world—catchy, driving rock tunes with an undeniable undercurrent of emotion.
When Johnny starts singing on “Eyes Wide Open,” it’s that exact world that he’s talking about. “I’m a fortunate son of a fortunate son,” he begins, then gives that first line a dose of irony by following it with “Living large on the wrong side of town.” “Too many friends and the fun never ends,” he continues. “Drinking and hanging around.” So far it sounds like a celebration of a lot in life that many would deride as worthless, second-class. It’s pretty clear that, while Johnny recognizes the limitations and deficiencies of this lifestyle, he’s also proud of it, in that way that a lot of working class people have pride in their lifestyles, precisely because it keeps them from being too proud. They’re close to the dirt, they struggle just to get by, but their lives feel more real to them than any cushy lifestyle of the rich and the famous, where everything’s done for you and you don’t really understand how anything works. When you’re covered in grime at the end of every work day, at least you know that you accomplished something. And when no one can really get all that clean, there’s no reason to try and pretend anyone is better than anyone else. Poverty and hardship are great egalitarian forces within the communities they create, even as they distance those communities from others that are more well-off.
Still, at the end of the day, when you work your ass off and come home tired, when you can still barely get food on the table some weeks, the nobility of poverty can only get you so far. It’s fuckin’ rough, and even if you’d never tell your friends, you get frustrated. In the last two lines of the first verse, Johnny makes a powerful allusion to this fact. “I wanna rule the world, wanna swallow it whole,” he sings. “At least I could kick it all down.” And then, as the music goes through a brief transition into the chorus, he yells, “I wanna kick it all down!” His guitar rings, holding a chord for a few seconds before the whole band goes back into the riff that opened the song. It’s been transformed from an intro to a chorus, and as Robby sings the song’s title in the background, Johnny sings, “I can’t seem to be,” with an emotion in his voice that’s impossible to ignore. Where “Eyes Wide Open“‘s first verse portrays the struggles of the working class as relatively difficult but ultimately noble, the chorus reveals the deeper truth: it’s hard to get by out here, and sometimes that wears you down. Even with eyes wide open, it can be hard to see a way out.
The second verse is a bit more abstract and harder to read, but I’ve come up with a tentative interpretation. I see it as a more direct lament; rather than Johnny placing himself in the shoes of the friends and relatives he grew up with, working hard at the factory all week, now he’s singing more directly as himself, a struggling bandleader with a major label deal who still doesn’t make much more than he needs to survive. “I never took the bus and I never walked too far,” he sings. “The furthest I’ve got is my own backyard.” After five albums, it was bound to be frustrating to still feel like no one knew who the fuck you were, and no one was listening to your songs. He then turns that frustration on himself: “With a fistful of cash that somebody else earned, they’ll send me some more when it all got burned.” It’s hard not to see this as a reference to record company advances that never get recouped. A band can only make it for so long by getting big advances that they are never able to pay back before they get dropped by their record company with six to seven figures of debt hanging over their heads. This kind of thing can quite literally end a band’s career; when your label demands that anyone else deciding to release a record of yours first pay them the $400,000 (or however much) in unrecouped expenses that you contractually owe them, it’s almost impossible to get signed. You can go on with the touring and the playing of your music to steadily dwindling audiences, as many of the glam bands of the late 80s did when their contracts went away, but there’s no real future in such a thing. When the Goos recorded A Boy Named Goo, they were staring down the barrel of just such a fate. If it hadn’t been for the surprising, eleventh-hour success of “Name,” their fifth album may very well have been their last. Johnny must have been thinking about that when the album was recorded, and its possible influence on the lyrics to “Eyes Wide Open” can hardly be seen as a surprise.
After the song’s second chorus, it drifts into a quiet bridge, and this is the only part of the song where we can see a preview of what was to come for the Goo Goo Dolls. As Johnny quietly whispers, “You never ever know,” he plays an undistorted arpeggio on his guitar, plucking out echoing single notes in a fashion guaranteed to catch the fancy of adult contemporary radio programmers. Fortunately, it’s over in mere seconds, as the whole band suddenly stops and he kicks his guitar back into overdrive, blasting out a supercharged version of the verse riff and bringing the rest of the band back in to lay down an uptempo backbeat over which he rips off a blazing overdriven solo. There wasn’t the prohibition on solos in the 80s and early 90s that there often seems to be now, and thank god, because sometimes these post-punk power-pop groups need the blazing solos to really get their point across. This one really works for the Goo Goo Dolls, turning up the emotional temperature of the entire song as it heads into the last verse.
That verse seems like it might provide a song-ending catharsis, giving us a bold declaration to counteract the uncertainty of the first two verses. Johnny tries to give us just that, starting the verse by singing, “I’ll get what I want if I make up my mind,” but the truth hiding underneath that particular declarative sentence is that he hasn’t made up his mind yet. He doesn’t know if he’s going to keep playing this rock music that hasn’t brought him riches and fame yet, or if he’ll give up and settle into the working-class lifestyle of the many who’ve come before him. He doesn’t want to give up, and he’s still swearing that he wants to rule the world, but he’ll settle for the opportunity to kick it all down one last time. It’s hard to know what that even means in this context, but maybe it’s better to take the whole thing as a metaphor, to accept it as a generic catharsis that may involve turning the record industry upside down, or may just end up being a drunken attack against a stack of milk crates out behind the convenience store on the corner. It’s a frustration endemic to the working class, and sure, sometimes kicking it all down doesn’t solve anything. Sometimes it even makes things worse, like when you trash your apartment in a rage and then have to live with the fact that you broke your TV and can’t afford another one for at least two months. But in that moment, even if you can’t see any way to get out of the hole you’re in, it provides a bitter satisfaction. After this album, the Goo Goo Dolls traded their lashing-out punk rock rage for success in an adult contemporary world of syrupy power ballads, but really, who can blame them? In the words of Mark McCoy, “Struggling for a lifetime to break even isn’t an achievement.” Wouldn’t we all take something better if we had the opportunity?
