By Vivian Lassiter
BUFFALO — Forty years into the Goo Goo Dolls, John Rzeznik still walks on stage looking like the coolest guy at the Broadway-Fillmore block party: tousled, sun-streaked hair falling into his eyes, a black tank top or a worn T-shirt, a beaded chain at his neck and an acoustic guitar slung low. It is a look that hasn’t chased a trend in decades, and it hasn’t needed to.
This month he brings it home. The Goo Goo Dolls play their second annual hometown benefit shows at the Town Ballroom on Nov. 20 and 21, with every dollar going to FeedMore WNY, the food bank announced. Last year’s shows raised $150,000.
The kid from Broadway-Fillmore
The Buffalo History Museum’s new exhibit sums up his beginnings in one line: Rzeznik is “the youngest of five children raised in the working-class Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood,” a graduate of McKinley High School who lost both of his parents young and moved in with one of his sisters, the Am-Pol Eagle reported from the museum’s biography panel.
When an Am-Pol Eagle reporter introduced herself at the exhibit’s opening, the paper that served Polish Buffalo when he was a boy, his face lit up. “Oh my God! It’s still there?!” he said, according to the paper.
He has been unusually open about those years lately. In a long October interview series with Graham Bensinger, filmed partly on a drive through his old neighborhood, Rzeznik talked about growing up the only boy among five children, losing his parents by 16, being bullied, and his long road to sobriety, according to Bensinger’s episode notes. He also walked back into his old high school for the first time since graduating, and showed off the skills from his fry-cook days by teaching Bensinger how to make a proper Buffalo wing.
A relic, by his own account
In September the museum opened “Long Way Home: 40 Years of the Goo Goo Dolls,” a yearlong exhibit on its lower level that runs through September 2027. It holds scrapbooks kept by bandmate Robby Takac’s mother and the original guitar and notes Rzeznik used to work out the unusual tuning for “Name,” Buffalo Toronto Public Media reported.
Rzeznik, ever the wiseguy, was not about to get sentimental in front of a room full of VIPs. “I don’t think Robbie and I in 1986 would ever have imagined that there would be like a retrospective thing about us because we were going to implode any second, at any time,” he said, according to BTPM.
Asked by WGRZ’s Pete Gallivan how it felt to be in a history museum while still touring, he had a one-word answer, then a few more. “Old. I feel like a relic they dug up, you know,” Rzeznik said, in the station’s report. “For us to be part of this is pretty cool, and I think it’s kind of a little bit of a departure for the museum as well.”
He also wanted visitors to know that the overnight success took a while. “Nobody sees nine years in a van, stinking and like smelling so bad when you come home from tour that your girlfriend’s like, ‘Nuh-uh. You ain’t getting in this house until you hose yourself down — and hit the soap,’” he said.
The look, and the discipline behind it
The band he started with Takac in 1986 has sold 15 million records worldwide, earned four Grammy nominations and set a record with 15 No. 1 and Top 10 hits, according to FeedMore. Their summer run included the iHeartRadio Festival and the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park, where he played in that familiar uniform of black tank, chain and acoustic guitar.
Staying stage-ready at 60 is something he works at. Bensinger’s series drops in on one of his workouts, where Rzeznik walks through his health routine and explains that he is committed to staying healthy after watching his parents’ lives cut short by their habits, according to the episode notes. He is just as particular about the songs. In one clip, he says some of them, like “Broadway,” sit for years before they’re right, and that art by consensus is “garbage.”
City of Good Neighbors
The FeedMore shows started last year, after people in Western New York lost their SNAP benefits, Rzeznik told KISS 98.5’s Nicholas Picholas, WBEN reported. “People are dealing with all sorts of economic pressures right now. There’s a lot of people who get up and go to work every day, and they have two jobs, and because everything is so expensive, they still need a little bit of help. Whatever we can do so that a kid doesn’t go to sleep hungry,” he said.
He was quick to hand the credit back to the crowd. “I’m just showing up and playing a bunch of songs. You guys are the ones that are driving this,” Rzeznik said. Fans who buy tickets, he added, are “proving again that Buffalo is the ‘City of Good Neighbors.’”
“This is not a political thing. This is not left. This is not right. This is about being a good human, and doing what you’re supposed to do — doing the right thing,” he said. “When I grew up in Buffalo, you learned what the right thing was, and you did it most of the time. I don’t know one person in Buffalo that hasn’t helped push someone out of a snowbank. Those are the kind of people that we are.”
FeedMore says the attention matters as much as the money. “It means the world to FeedMore WNY and the community members we serve, to have the support of a band like the Goo Goo Dolls,” Catherine Shick, the organization’s chief communications officer, said, WKBW reported. “When the Goo Goo Dolls are talking about the need, about how prevalent food insecurity is, that can help people take a moment and realize that hunger is in their own backyard.”
If you go
The Goo Goo Dolls play the Town Ballroom, 681 Main St., on Friday, Nov. 20, and Saturday, Nov. 21. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are sold through googoodolls.com/tour, and all proceeds go to FeedMore WNY. The “Long Way Home” exhibit is open at the Buffalo History Museum through September 2027.
Rzeznik’s advice to anyone struggling this winter was simple, and very Buffalo. “Keep going one day at a time, one minute at a time. And if you need help, reach out for it, because people do care. Especially now,” he said.
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