Bon voyage: The return of Bon Jovi
It's almost 25 years since Bon Jovi shot to fame with their big ballads and even
bigger hair. On the eve of their latest sell-out tour, Jon Bon Jovi tells David
Usborne why it hasn't all been plain sailing
If by chance you have tickets for the veteran American rock'n'roll band Bon Jovi,
opening the revamped O2 Arena in London's Docklands tomorrow night, you will
want to be sure the concert's not cancelled at the last moment. For here is
something not entirely reassuring: the lead singer has his doubts. " I have told
the promoter that I'll believe it when I see it," Jon Bon Jovi says.
It was 1983 when the boys with tight leather trousers and massive hair first
burst on to the pop scene in America and started a blinding streak of success
that has lasted longer than some of its younger fans have been out of nappies.
But not everyone can be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, so is Jon Bon Jovi,
himself now 45 years old and a father of four, finally admitting that he might
be running out of steam?
That's not it. Bon Jovi has no plans to retire, even if the madness that used to
possess him to perform and record nearly non-stop – in his time, he has done
240-show tours – has eased these days. Sitting in a studio atop the Viacom
building in New York's Times Square with a view westwards so vast it seems to
encompass all of his native and beloved New Jersey, he voices scepticism about
O2, not because of fatigue, but because of what always seems to happen when they
refurbish big venues in London. "Is it going to be ready?"
He hasn't forgotten about June last year, and the two concerts they were booked
to do at the new Wembley Stadium. Both had sold out. (The band always fills
every seat in the UK, famously drawing 91,000 fans to Hyde Park four summers
ago.) But then construction fell behind and Bon Jovi were forced to scratch.
Tomorrow is his consolation prize. The O2 Arena may not be as big as Wembley –
22,000 seats instead of more than 70,000 – and for Bon Jovi the bigger the venue
the better he likes it. But still, it should be a great night.
Bon Jovi is a nice guy, and smart too. This is what everyone tells you when you
are getting ready to meet this icon of American rock, even if he is not quite
Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, the man he coyly calls the "other guy from Jersey".
And the advertising seems to be true. He is a pal of Al Gore, he can act – you
may remember his brief stint on The West Wing – he gives a lot of his money to
building homes for the poor and he speaks passionately about the American
political scene as well as about what has gone wrong with the music industry.
So it is kind of sad that as we speak, we are both aware of an irony behind our
O2 conversation. That he has the energy to honour his London commitment is not
in doubt. With a new album, Lost Highway, just out, Bon Jovi is at the top of
his game. But he can only be as good as his band and, most importantly, as the
lead guitarist who has been with him virtually since the start, Richie Sambora.
On the afternoon of our meeting, some disturbing rumours about Sambora began
appearing on celebrity internet sites. I hardly needed to have read them,
however, because I had seen him perform two nights before. Sambora is only two
years older than Bon Jovi, but you wouldn't guess it. It wasn't just the
old-rocker hair-do that wouldn't have looked amiss on a Seventies tea-lady, or
even the waxwork complexion. Sambora seemed to have trouble staying vertical and
playing his guitar too.
The occasion was an important one. After a hiatus, MTV (owned by Viacom) is
reviving its hugely popular series of UnPlugged concerts. The Police will
reunite for one of them, but the first of the new batch will be devoted to Bon
Jovi. Scholars of rock will know why this is appropriate. According to legend it
was an impromptu performance by Bon Jovi and Sambora with only acoustic guitars
at the 1989 MTV awards show that inspired UnPlugged in the first place. They
played perhaps the most popular of all their ballads, "Wanted Dead or Alive".
So, of course, it should be them who introduce the reborn UnPlugged.
The taping of the new show took place earlier this month on a specially built
stage inside the Steiner movie studios that recently opened in the defunct
Brooklyn Navy Yard across the East River from Manhattan. It was never going to
be an easy night for Bon Jovi. MTV was unusually dim-witted with the audience it
invited – no screaming girl fans, instead mostly journalists and friends of
label executives still in their office clothes. They were not going to give him
much energy. Plus, it is hard to keep pumped up when the director repeatedly
declares himself unsatisfied and asks that songs be performed again. (One had to
be done three times.) After nearly four hours it became an endurance test for
everyone. And part of the problem was Richie. "We are going to stand for this
one," Bon Jovi decreed before one of the songs. Richie obliged, but then it was
too much and he subsided back on to his stool. Sambora's vocals during "Dead or
Alive" were a rasping disgrace and he apologised to Bon Jovi and to us. "I don't
know what happened," he croaked.
Talking about friend and bandmate is the only time Bon Jovi really measures his
words. "He has gone through a lot this year," he says. In a few months, he has
broken up with his wife, the actress Heather Locklear, and lost his father to
complications from cancer. "My job is to be his shoulder right now to get him
through the grieving." On the internet, they were saying he was drunk at the MTV
taping.
"I don't know that he didn't have a drink, but honest to God, as I sit here
telling you the truth, looking you in the eye, there was a total of four bottles
of wine in the dressing room and none of them was opened prior to going on to
the stage. I didn't have a drink that night and if he did, he kept it somewhere
that I don't know about." Bon Jovi wants to stay loyal. "He's had a hard, hard
time. He is an only child, everybody grieves differently and we will be there
for him in whatever manifests." I had wondered about what was said between them
when we had all gone. Nothing at all, Bon Jovi insists. "I can tell you there
were no angry words that night. He'll be all right, we will get him through
this." It is while we are talking, in fact, that the news wires light up with
word that Sambora has checked into a rehab facility in LA.
The first single from Lost Highway has already been released when we meet. It's
called "Make a Memory" and it's doing so-so in the US, hovering at No 20. "That
is probably where it is meant to be," Bon Jovi admits. The album was partially
recorded in Nashville, which won't surprise anyone who has heard the band
gradually adopt a more country and western sound. It's also the only town where
Bon Jovi can find artistic refreshment. "I have friends who would let me truly
get back to basics. I do the sleeping-in-the-spare-room thing and go
bar-hopping, doing maybe three, four or five in a row and sucking up the sounds
of the city. It's inspiring when you can just go from one to the next and hear
real songwriters. I drink, write and go see artists." He laments that the same
sort of scene used to exist in New Jersey, but no more; he blames the raising of
the drinking age to 21 in the early Eighties.
Performing still turns Bon Jovi on – particularly the one, brief "magic moment"
on a concert night. "The 60 seconds between when the house lights go out and you
hit the stage are the most important moment of the day. If something were to go
wrong in that minute and blow your psyche, that could ruin your whole show. But
if the cylinders fire, you think you can leap whole buildings, you get that look
in your eye. You don't see anybody. I wouldn't see you in front of me now." Once
the concert gets going, he can achieve a different level of being. "Truthfully,
if it's going so right and I am in an out-of-body experience and – this is not
some rock-star exaggeration – I am not thinking about where I am going out for a
drink afterward or what's on TV. I am gone, not even there. If one of the guys
asks after, 'How did I do tonight?' I'm gonna say, 'I don't fucking know, I
didn't even know you were there.'"
Is it the ovations of the fans that keep him doing it? "I'm not an applause
junkie. I know many an artist who can't go home, they just can't be out of the
spotlight. They play continually on the road and when they are not playing they
are in the bar doing it again. When I am not on the road it's the furthest thing
from my head. Just walk the fuck away from it." That means walking home to his
wife of 18 years, a high-school sweetheart, and his four children, the youngest
of whom, Romeo Jon, is only three years old.
What fires him up, he says, is getting it right on stage, in the recording
studio and in writing the songs. And the performing isn't the most rewarding
part. Nor, he insists, are the millions of dollars he has earned along the way.
"Sure, I've got more money than I had ever dreamed in a thousand lifetimes. But
that was never the motivating factor to begin with. It's the search for that
perfect song. It's writing that song. More than recording it and certainly more
than touring it. That's the tree for me: writing, recording, seeing if the song
comes to fruition. And then you want to share it with people." Happily, he can
say that he has found that perfect song a few times. If not "Dead or Alive",
then perhaps "Livin' on a Prayer". It is why his UnPlugged concert will be shown
in the US later this month, not just on MTV, but also on VH1 and Country Music
Television. It's also why on one episode of the last American Idol series,
contestants sung only his songs. "The biggest TV show in America playing nothing
but Jovi songs, that's pretty cool. I guess some of those songs really did touch
a lot of people."
Bon Jovi, who was John Bongiovi before his music career, has never hidden his
interest in politics. His 2002 album Bounce was a celebration of America's
resilience after the attacks of 9/11, while the hit 2006 song, "Who Says You
can't Go Home", which took him to the top of the US country charts and won him a
Grammy, spoke to his philanthropy in building houses, both in Philadelphia,
where he also owns an indoor American Football franchise, and further away in
post-Katrina New Orleans. He once surprised Oprah Winfrey mid-show by giving her
a record $1m for reconstructions in the city. Last year he was also named an
official ambassador for the charity Habitat for Humanity.
Right now, however, he betrays disenchantment with his country. Its political
system is broken and "I don't know anyone out there who can fix it," he admits.
"It's the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire if we don't straighten up."
While Bon Jovi may have gleefully joined Gore on the election trail in 2000, he
made similar appearances beside John Kerry in 2004, "because Gore told me to".
As for 2008, he will only be available publicly to support the Democrat
candidate if he actually believes in them. "I have to do my homework this time,
because I am not just showing up." He says he knows and likes Hillary Clinton ("Mrs
C") and is looking forward to meeting Barack Obama. "I am ready to be swept off
my feet." He wishes Gore would get off the fence and run for President again,
but he is not hopeful. "I think the needle is closer to an absolute 'No' than it
is to a 'Yes'. That is the way to phrase it the best, and I talk to him a lot."
But the new album is not about politics or America. It's about the band and its
members hitting rough waters in their lives. That means Sambora as well as
keyboard player David Bryan, who also recently lost his father. "People may find
it revealing because it became an internal record rather than an observational
one," Bon Jovi explains. "I was the narrator. It's easier to write about someone
else's pain rather than yourself. But it became cathartic for Richie,
especially, to express them through me." If it turns out be a hard sell, so be
it. "We weren't writing to sell tickets or even to go on the road." Nor, indeed,
for radio stations who increasingly don't know whether Bon Jovi is rock or
country. "We were writing music from a different place and that's when the magic
could happen. I am not saying it will, but it could."
It's hardly a secret that the music industry has changed and that Bon Jovi is
now a bit of a throwback. "The way it used to be is long-gone, when you would
break out of a little regional area, have a DJ who was your champion and have
record company guys that got it." That was a time, he elaborates, when people
cared as much about "track seven" on an album as they did about the title song.
In other words, the art still mattered. "I have been screaming this from the
mountain top for years. It's about track seven. I always worked hard on track
seven and I still do," Bon Jovi says, adding that he never gave in to label
executives who wanted him to duet with a rapper just to boost radio play and
sales, to go to Seattle to do the grunge thing, to have a scratcher in his
studio or even – heaven forefend – collaborate with a boy band. "They were the
hot things to do. But I never did. Stay true to what you do."
He may be verging on old-fashioned. It is possible, even, that his label
indulges him a little, but Bon Jovi seems still to be doing something right. As
for tomorrow night's gig, best we can tell, the O2 arena will be ready for him.
At the time of going to print, moreover, the band's publicists are insisting
that Richie will be relieved of rehab, too, and fit to play with his old friend.
So hang on to those tickets if you have them. Because Bon Jovi is a class act.