John Rzeznik is the frontman of the Goo Goo Dolls. Their latest album, Miracle Pill, was released September 2019 via Warner Records.
I’m at home in New Jersey, and it’s really weird. We’re on the fringe of the epicenter — New Jersey got hit pretty hard with it. It’s just strange. I’ve been hanging out with my daughter, she’s 3. We try to do some school work, and we mess around and build stuff and draw and paint. We live in this small little town, so we’ll go for a walk, walk the dog, kick a ball around in the backyard or whatever. She doesn’t really understand what’s going on. She’ll ask if she can come with me someplace and I have to say, “No, there’s a lot sick people out there, so you’ve gotta stay home.” She gets frustrated and grumbles and walks away. [Laughs.]
I’m also obsessively cleaning. Every time I’m bored, I feel like I should clean! I’m particularly proud of cleaning out my hoarder’s nightmare of a basement. I’ve been able to cook a little bit, too, which is fun. I’m so out of practice because I’ve just been touring for four years, non-stop. It’s kind of nice to be home! It definitely was kind of a shock when the brakes got slammed on. It was like, “OK, now what?” But we’re getting by. Everybody seems to be getting along pretty well.
I’ve been doing a lot of these live streams and things like that, trying to just entertain people and raise a little bit of money for something called We Love Local, which is all the mom and pop business. Trying to support them around here — we live in this little town, it has a little downtown, it’s really cool, and most of it’s owned by locals. So we’re trying to raise some money for that, and also to try and get the word out about this Live Nation initiative, Crew Nation. It’s all the guys that work behind the scenes, they’re all out of work now. It’s important that we try to help them over a rough patch. Without those guys, nothing happens. Those are the guys that are up at six or seven in the morning and they get out of there at midnight or one in the morning when we’re doing gigs. They need some help right now. We’re just doing everything we can to keep everybody together and not have to worry about what’s going to happen after. This has been an enormous shock to the system.
During the summer, when we’re doing amphitheaters and that kind of thing we probably have 30 crew. It’s relatively small compared to a lot of tours where you have 600 people or whatever — what do they all do? But it’s anywhere between 20 and 30 for us. That’s a lot of dudes, a lot of people that do great jobs, and we don’t want to lose them. So we’re trying to do what we can.
