The members of Goose came of age in the same Northeast corridor that has served as a prime jamband incubator for decades. But when asked to pinpoint the crest of the quartet’s current wave of success, the band’s guitarist/ vocalist Rick Mitarotonda cites a gig decidedly south of his current home turf.
“There was this group of friends in Kentucky, one of which checked out our album online and really dug the tunes. He rallied his group of friends, and they came out and had so much energy. They were stoked,” Mitarotonda recalls of that particularly memorable set at Covington, Ky.’s Octave club. “At that time, we were playing these little clubs and having zero expectations, but these 15 kids were just amped up; they even knew the words to some of the songs. We were like, ‘Woah, this is cool!’”
Two weeks later, Goose returned to Octave and were surprised at what they found. “The place was considerably fuller and that was the starting point of a new thing for us—a new ethos or something. We went back that June and did a two-night run at the same club. It was a very legendary moment in the Goose story.”
And, while they are currently at the vanguard of a classic jamband revival, Goose weren’t without their salad days. Before the outfit coalesced around 2014, Mitarotonda was playing around the admittedly “weird” Connecticut bar scene alongside Goose rhythm section Trevor Weekz (bass) and Ben Atkind (drums). That band—dubbed Vasudo—quickly fizzled out, and it wasn’t until Mitarotonda graduated from the Berklee College of Music that they “got the itch” to give the project another shot.
