John Rzeznik

John at age 10

Born: December 5, 1965

At age 7, John`s mother turned him on to music. He started with accordian lessons, and by age 10 he began playing the acoustic guitar. A few years later he started playing the electric guitar. He met Robby at age 19, and they formed what was later to be called the Goo Goo Dolls, along with Robby`s friend George Tutuska, replaced by Mike in 1995.

Want more on John? Read the Teen People interview--

Or the Guitar One interview.

Or the Guitar World Acoustic Interview

John on his childhood, "Did you ever see the movie The Deer Hunter? Well watch that movie and put on a John Prine record, and that`s my life. I was brought up in a part of east Buffalo that I refer to as 'Polonia.' It was a very ethnic, Polish working class neighborhood, with a bar and a church on every corner. Every family had five or six kids, and an alcoholic in every house. And everyone would go get drunk on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday morning."

"My parents died when I was 15, so I left that neighborhood and moved uptown to the college area. That got me away from the enviroment that killed my father. He could never rise above it, see beyond it."
Taken from Guitar World Acoustic.

John on the song Flat Top, "it`s about how we live in a society where it`s harder and harder to get an education, to get a job, to be human, and we constantly have the idiot box in front of us with what we`re supposed to be, what we`re supposed to have. And that means that the things that we`re supposed to be and have are continuously put out of our reach."

"It seems as though there`s a process going on in this country of de- educating people," he continues, "That there`s war being waged on
one class of our society, and the thing that pisses me off the most is the things that empower the common man are the things that are always taken away when there`s a budget gap to fill. Where the fuck are our priorities? It seems like the value of destoying human life is far more important than enhancing it, enriching it."
*Taken from Addicted to Noise 1995*

All information taken from interviews and articles, including GW Acoustic, and Guitar One.