Rick Mitarotonda Revisits Goose’s ‘Thrown To The Wolves’ Tour & Defends Dave Matthews Band

The latest episode of The Ryen Russillo Podcast features an interview with Goose guitarist Rick Mitarotonda. Mitarotonda shared memories of his early days in music and pointed out both a key tour and influence in his evolution.

While Goose’s fanbase grew exponentially from 2019 through the present, the Connecticut-based band spent their formative years playing small venues in their home state and the surrounding area. “When Goose first started I was going back to school, so it was probably the first three years of Goose being a band on paper, we were just playing bars in Connecticut once a month or something like that,” Mitarotonda recalled. “Every once in a while we’d go up to Burlington and play the first of three or four at Radio Bean.”

After those first years, the band decided to go for it. “2017 is when I finished school the year prior [and we said] let’s start pushing here and try to figure out how to get this thing moving,” Rick explained. “We got a booking agent finally, which — at least in our case was the only hope — booking shows outside of our local bar scene was pretty much impossible with no traction of any kind.

“We started working with his guy Matt Kolinski, who’s a great guy, and we were in the trenches with him for a couple of years. Peter [Anspach] joined the band 2018 — throughout 2017 we were going through lineup changes and stuff like that,” Mitarotonda added. Rick then spoke about a infamous trek for the band:

“Summer of 2017, there’s this notorious tour we call the ‘Thrown To The Wolves’ tour because we were all fired up. We finally had a booking agent we were like, ‘yeah, let’s get out there. Just book a million shows. We’ll just play ’em and it will be great. He was like, ‘You really shouldn’t do that.’ And we’re like, ‘no, no, no dude do it!’ So we got out there and within a couple of weeks we were like ‘yeah, cool, that’s why he said we shouldn’t do this.’ After that, I think we had to get out there and get our asses kicked a little bit to figure out what we wanted to be and what we didn’t want to be. How to refine it, how to do it more intelligently and how to not burn ourselves out wasting energy.”

Rick Mitarotonda went on to discuss his experience attending the Berklee School of Music, the huge increase in attention Goose began receiving in 2019 and several other topics. The conversation started with Rick detailing his earliest exposure to music. He noted the influence of Dave Matthews Band and his recent Dave Matthews resurgence.

“I was at a party a few weeks ago and they were playing [DMB’s] Central Park concert and I was like, ‘I forgot just how good this stuff is,” Rick recalled. “I’ve been digging more into his discography and have just a different lens now,” the guitarist added. Mitarotonda and Russillo shared their mutual appreciation for Matthews and their feelings he gets an unfair rap.

“Whether you like it or not that music is so creative,” Rick said. “What you like, that’s one thing in and of itself, but it’s good. This stuff is good, his music is sick. I dig it.”

Hear the latest episode of The Ryen Russillo Podcast below with the interview beginning around the 52-minute mark:

Goose kicks off their biggest headlining tour yet on Sunday in Holmdel, New Jersey. Free livestreams of all September Goose concerts are available for nugs.net subscribers.