Goo Goo Dolls and Dashboard Confessional bring Summer Anthem Tour to Walmart AMP

By Novena Littlejohn | Photos by Troy Littledeer @kituwahpunk

Dashboard Confessional opened. The Goo Goo Dolls closed. What happened in between was two bands reminding a full house at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion that some songs do not age — they just find you again

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Chris Carrabba took the stage first and did not ease into it. The opening chord landed and something in the room shifted — not backward into memory, but directly into the feeling itself. “Best Deceptions” hit the way it always has, which is to say it hit somewhere specific, the place those songs have always known how to find. It does not matter that 20 years have passed. The song does not know that. Neither did the crowd.

Dashboard Confessional closed with three. “Screaming Infidelities” into “Vindicated” into “Hands Down” — a sequence that did not feel like a greatest hits package so much as a logical conclusion. By the time “Hands Down” finished, the night had already become the thing it was always going to be.

Then the Goo Goo Dolls walked out and kept the pace exactly where Dashboard left it.

They opened with “Naked” and moved through “Slide,” “Here Is Gone,” “Black Balloon,” and “Name” with the clean economy of a band that has been playing together long enough to know exactly how much room each song needs. “Miracle Pill” proved the catalog has not stopped growing. A cover of Tom Petty’s “You Wreck Me” hit with the kind of directness Petty always demanded. “Broadway” set up the close. “Iris” finished it — the whole crowd carrying the chorus across the lawn, out past the pavilion roof, into the Arkansas summer night.

The Goo Goo Dolls move next to Nashville, then Boston, Los Angeles and Oklahoma City.

Coming to the Walmart AMP: Little Big Town on July 24, Kansas and 38 Special on July 26, Volbeat on July 31, and Weird Al Yankovic on Aug. 3.