When the Sky Opened Up and “Iris” Became Immortal — Goo Goo Dolls Live in Buffalo, July 4th, 2004

There are concerts, and then there are moments that burn themselves into the permanent memory of everyone who was standing in the rain when they happened. On July 4th, 2004, in the center of downtown Buffalo, New York, the Goo Goo Dolls stood on a stage in front of their hometown City Hall on Niagara Square and played a nineteen-song set for over sixty thousand people who had gathered to celebrate both Independence Day and the homecoming of the city’s most famous rock band. The weather had been threatening all day — torrential downpours soaked the crowd in the hours before the show — and when the rain cleared just long enough for the band to begin, there was a shared, almost defiant sense of relief in the air. Nobody left. Nobody was going to leave. This was Buffalo, after all, and the Goo Goo Dolls were Buffalo’s band, and when the skies opened up again midway through the set, harder than before, what could have been a disaster turned into one of the most visually stunning and emotionally overwhelming live performances in modern rock history.

The concert was deliberately organized to be filmed and recorded for a live album and DVD release, which would eventually come out in November 2004 under the title Live in Buffalo: July 4th, 2004. Members of the production crew later compared the energy and visual intensity of the performance to Talking Heads’ legendary Stop Making Sense concert film — a comparison that sounds hyperbolic until you actually watch the footage. The stage was set up directly in front of the art deco facade of Buffalo City Hall, giving the whole event a cinematic grandeur that most outdoor rock shows simply do not possess. When the rain returned during the performance of “January Friend,” it did not trickle or drizzle. It came down in sheets, transforming the stage into a waterfall and turning every member of the audience into a soaking, cheering, arm-waving silhouette under the stage lights. And the band did not stop. As frontman Johnny Rzeznik later recalled, stopping was never an option — not in Buffalo, not in front of his own people. He joked in an interview that if he had walked off stage because of rain, he would never have been able to show his face in his hometown again, because that is simply not how people in Buffalo operate.

To understand why this particular performance of “Iris” mattered so much — why it continues to circulate on the internet two decades later with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Hendrix at Woodstock or Freddie Mercury at Wembley — you have to understand what “Iris” meant to the Goo Goo Dolls and what it meant to the city that raised them. The band formed in Buffalo in 1986, originally as a scrappy cover act playing dive bars and punk venues. Johnny Rzeznik on guitar and vocals, Robby Takac on bass and vocals, and drummer George Tutuska started out idolizing bands like The Replacements and cranking out raw, three-chord punk rock that was miles away from the soaring, orchestrated power ballads that would eventually make them famous. Their early albums — the self-titled debut recorded on a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar budget, Jed, Hold Me Up, Superstar Car Wash — built them a loyal underground following, particularly in the college radio and punk scenes of the American Northeast. But mainstream success remained frustratingly out of reach.

Everything changed with “Name,” the breakout single from their 1995 album A Boy Named Goo, which cracked the top ten and introduced the Goo Goo Dolls to an audience that had no idea about their punk roots. The success was bittersweet: the band found themselves in a nasty legal battle with their label, Metal Blade Records, over a contract they had signed as inexperienced twenty-somethings that left them earning virtually nothing from their album sales despite going double platinum. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and the band moved to Warner Bros. Records, but the experience left deep scars. Rzeznik, whose marriage was falling apart at the same time, found himself living alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles in 1997, creatively blocked and questioning whether he had anything left to say as a songwriter. He later described the period as feeling schizophrenic — a man caught between identities, between cities, between the person he had been and whoever he was becoming.

And then the phone rang. A music supervisor named Danny Bramson called Rzeznik’s management and suggested that the guitarist might be able to write something for an upcoming film called City of Angels, a romantic fantasy starring Nicolas Cage as an angel who falls in love with a mortal played by Meg Ryan. Rzeznik was initially lukewarm on the idea but agreed to attend an early screening because the soundtrack already featured artists like U2, Peter Gabriel, and Alanis Morissette, and he figured the company was worth keeping. That same night, sitting in his hotel room with a guitar that had two broken strings, Rzeznik started winding the remaining strings into unusual configurations — up and down, searching for something that sounded interesting. The tuning he landed on was BDDDDD, an unconventional open tuning that gave the guitar a shimmering, almost otherworldly resonance. The song that poured out of that tuning came together in roughly an hour. It was, by Rzeznik’s own admission, one of the easiest songs he had ever written — a rare gift after months of creative paralysis. He needed a title and found one while flipping through the LA Weekly newspaper, where he noticed that a folk singer-songwriter named Iris DeMent was playing a show in town. The name struck him as beautiful, and he took it.

“Iris” was released in April 1998 and proceeded to demolish every commercial expectation anyone had for the Goo Goo Dolls. The song spent a record-breaking eighteen consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart, topped the charts in Australia, Canada, and Italy, reached number three in the United Kingdom, and earned Grammy nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group. It anchored the City of Angels soundtrack, which went to number one on the Billboard 200. It was later included on the Goo Goo Dolls’ album Dizzy Up the Girl, which sold over four million copies in the United States alone. In 2012, Billboard ranked “Iris” as the number one pop song of the previous twenty years. The single has since been certified diamond by the RIAA and has accumulated billions of streams across platforms. It is, by virtually every available metric, one of the most successful rock songs ever recorded.

But commercial statistics cannot capture what “Iris” does to a room — or, in the case of the Buffalo performance, what it does to an open square filled with sixty thousand rain-soaked people. The song’s power lies in its emotional architecture: it opens with that distinctive, ringing guitar figure built on Rzeznik’s strange open tuning, immediately creating a sense of vast, aching space. The verses are quiet and intimate, almost conversational, with Rzeznik’s voice hovering just above a whisper as he describes a longing so deep it borders on the metaphysical. And then the chorus arrives like a wave breaking, the full band surging underneath Rzeznik’s voice as it lifts into its upper register, and for a few suspended seconds, everything in the song is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking. The lyrics, inspired by the Cage character’s willingness to surrender immortality for the chance to feel human love, tap into something universal — the desire to be truly known by another person, the fear that the world will never quite understand who you really are, the impossible bargain of giving up everything for a single moment of genuine connection.

On the night of July 4th, 2004, with the rain hammering down on the stage and the crowd and the cameras and the cables and every exposed surface of Niagara Square, “Iris” was the eighteenth song of the nineteen-song set — the climactic moment the entire evening had been building toward. By this point in the show, the band and the audience had been through an extraordinary shared physical experience. They had started the evening dry, watched the sky darken, felt the first drops during “January Friend,” and then been absolutely pummeled by a downpour that would have sent most festival crowds running for cover. But nobody ran. The crowd stayed, and the band stayed, and together they pushed through song after song — “Slide,” “Name,” “Black Balloon,” “Broadway” — with the rain turning the stage lights into blurred halos and the musicians into drenched, grinning figures who looked like they were having the time of their lives precisely because everything was going wrong.

And then came “Iris.” What the footage from that night captures is something that transcends a typical live performance and enters the territory of a communal event, the kind of thing that people who were there will tell their children about. Rzeznik, soaking wet, his hair plastered to his face, picks up the opening riff, and the crowd — equally drenched, equally exhilarated — erupts. The rain is still falling. The stage is practically a swimming pool. The camera catches individual faces in the crowd, and what you see is not mere enjoyment but something closer to rapture — people singing every word at the top of their lungs, eyes closed, arms raised, completely unconcerned about the weather or the mud or the fact that they will be shivering in wet clothes for hours afterward. There is a particular quality to the way Rzeznik delivers the vocal in this performance that separates it from any studio recording: there is an urgency in his voice, an edge of rawness that comes from singing through physical discomfort, from pushing against the elements, from standing in his own hometown and knowing that this is the single most important song he will ever play and that the universe has decided to make it as cinematically dramatic as possible.

The production quality of the footage is remarkable, considering the conditions. Multiple cameras capture the performance from various angles — wide shots that show the full scale of the crowd and the rain, close-ups that reveal the water streaming down Rzeznik’s face and guitar, and sweeping crane shots that frame the stage against the illuminated facade of City Hall. The lighting, which under normal circumstances would have been merely competent, becomes extraordinary when filtered through curtains of falling rain, creating a diffused, almost dreamlike glow that makes the entire scene look like something out of a music video that no director could have planned. Rzeznik himself acknowledged this afterward, noting with a kind of bemused gratitude that the rain, which had nearly ruined the evening, ended up giving them footage that was more visually powerful than anything they could have staged deliberately. The universe, he suggested, had handed them a gift.

Part of what gives this particular live version of “Iris” its enduring viral power is the total absence of cell phones in the crowd footage. This was 2004 — smartphones did not yet exist, and while some audience members may have had early camera phones, the overwhelming majority of the sixty thousand people present that night were simply present. They were not filming the experience through a four-inch screen. They were not checking messages or posting updates. They were standing in the rain, watching a rock band play a song about longing and surrender, and they were fully, completely there. In the age of social media saturation, that footage has become a kind of time capsule — a document of what it looked like when tens of thousands of people experienced a moment together without the mediation of technology. It is, for many younger viewers who discovered the clip years after the fact, almost unbearably poignant.

The performance has also become a touchstone in conversations about what separates a good live band from a great one. Plenty of artists can reproduce their studio recordings accurately in a concert setting. Far fewer can take a well-known song and elevate it into something that feels genuinely new, that makes you hear familiar chords and lyrics as though for the first time. The Buffalo performance of “Iris” accomplishes this through sheer atmospheric force — the rain becomes a co-performer, the crowd becomes a choir, and Rzeznik’s vocal, raw and unprotected by studio processing, reveals imperfections that somehow make the song more beautiful. There is a crack in his voice during the bridge that would have been smoothed away in a recording studio but that, in this context, sounds like the most emotionally honest moment in the entire performance. It is the sound of a man giving everything he has, holding nothing in reserve, and trusting that the song is strong enough to carry him through.

Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac have spoken about the Buffalo show many times over the years, and their recollections are characteristically self-deprecating and funny. Rzeznik’s most-told anecdote involves the logistical nightmare of the day before the concert, when city officials informed the band that they did not have enough portable toilets for a crowd of that size. The band had to scramble, literally begging local businesses and sponsors for additional funding, offering rolling credits at the end of the DVD in exchange for cash to rent more facilities. It is the kind of absurd, unglamorous detail that tends to get left out of rock mythology but that perfectly captures the reality of what it takes to stage a free outdoor concert for sixty thousand people in a mid-sized American city. The fact that Rzeznik’s two biggest memories from the night are the toilet crisis and the rain tells you something about the man — he is not given to self-aggrandizement, and his relationship with his own legend is more bemused than reverent.

The Live in Buffalo album and DVD were released in November 2004 and have since become a fan favorite, valued not just for the “Iris” performance but for the full arc of the setlist, which showcased the band’s evolution from their punk roots to their polished, emotionally resonant later work. Songs like “Two Days in February” and “Broadway” — the latter a deeply personal track about Rzeznik’s childhood in a tough Buffalo neighborhood, watching men drink themselves into oblivion at the same bar where their fathers had done the same — took on additional weight in the live setting, their lyrical heaviness offset by the sheer physical joy of playing to a hometown crowd. The concert was re-released on limited-edition crystal-clear vinyl in June 2024, introducing the performance to a new generation of listeners and sparking a fresh wave of social media appreciation for the rain-soaked “Iris” clip.

What the Buffalo performance ultimately represents is the intersection of preparation and chaos, of a band that set out to make a professional live recording and instead captured something wild and unpredictable and infinitely more powerful than anything they had planned. You cannot manufacture a moment like the one that happened on Niagara Square that night. You cannot schedule rain. You cannot script sixty thousand people deciding, collectively and without discussion, that they are going to stay and sing and get drenched and turn a rock concert into something resembling a religious experience. You can only show up, plug in, and hope that the universe cooperates — or, in this case, that it refuses to cooperate in the most spectacular way possible. The Goo Goo Dolls showed up. The rain showed up. The crowd showed up. And together, they turned a song about yearning for connection into the most visceral demonstration of connection that anyone in attendance had ever witnessed. Twenty years later, the footage still gives people chills, and it probably always will.

“Iris” has now surpassed two billion streams on Spotify alone, making it one of the hundred most-played tracks in the history of the platform. It has been covered, sampled, and referenced by countless artists across genres. It was performed at the Concert for New York City in 2001, days after the September 11th attacks, and it has soundtracked weddings, funerals, proms, and late-night drives on empty highways for more than a quarter century. But for millions of people, the definitive version of the song is not the polished studio recording with its carefully layered strings and pristine production. It is the one where Johnny Rzeznik stands in the rain in front of Buffalo City Hall, water pouring off his guitar, his voice cracking with effort and emotion, sixty thousand people singing every word back to him through the storm. That is the version that lives in the blood. That is the one that refuses to fade.