JON BON JOVI: UNEASY RIDER

From the Pinnacle, Finding Faith

Bon Jovi is back in the news.

Hollywood handsome, leading the band that bore his name, Jon Bon Jovi was the face of American rock rising on MTV in the mid-to-late 1980s.  

On April 26, Hulu debuts a four-part documentary series Thank You Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story. The film debuted at South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin last month. If the critics raved, it would be a surprise, because the critics never liked the band Bon Jovi's music. "Pop-metal; hair band" many sneered in collective derision, even as Bon Jovi's albums sold tens of millions of albums and packed arenas and stadiums around the world in a never-ending tour that made them richer than rich but nearly broke their spirit.  

During the Grammy award weekend, on Feb. 2, 2024, Jon Bon Jovi was honored at a gala as the MusicCares Person of the Year. This award acknowledges those who maintain the goals of the music industry's primary charitable organization, which provides medical and mental health services, addiction and recovery, disaster relief and other emergency aid to musicians in need. Attending and performing at the gala at the Los Angeles Convention Center were a dozen artists from every style of music, including Brandy Clark and Melissa Etheridge, Goo Goo Dolls, Sammy Hagar, Jason Isbell, Larkin Poe, Shania Twain, and Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen and Bon Jovi performed "Who Says You Can't Go Home," a lesser known Bon Jovi song, and "Promised Land."

Springsteen, like the proud uncle in a large (mostly) Italian-American family, is seen in the Hulu film trailer, talking about "Livin' on a Prayer." It was one of two No. 1 singles (the other: "You Give Love a Bad Name,") from Slippery When Wet, the third Bon Jovi album (1986) that has sold 28 million copies around the world. Bon Jovi didn't like the song at first. Springsteen, whose Asbury Park is 32 miles south of young Jon Bongiovi's Sayreville, N.J., says: "Jon's choruses demanded to be sung by 20,000 people in an arena."

And they were. And then, instead of enjoying their success, the band spent a month home and went on the road again in support of the 1988 New Jersey album, which ended up selling around 19 million worldwide. They couldn't get off the carousel. Marriages floundered, but not Jon's. In fact, he married his high school sweetheart in Las Vegas while on tour in 1989, and they are still together 35 years later. They have four children.

We spoke on Feb. 26, 1993, as he was promoting the band's late-1992 album Keep the Faith. I didn't realize it at the time, and maybe Jon Bon Jovi didn't either, but he was on a new path. When I began to teach at St. John's University in 2013, I voluntarily attended daylong seminars before each fall semester, in Catholic Social Thought, aka Catholic Social Teaching. One essential concept: the Common Good, which one CST website defines as: "the rights of the individual to personal possessions and community resources must be balanced with the needs of the disadvantaged and dispossessed." In retrospect, it is evident to me that Jon Bon Jovi began embracing this idea in Keep the Faith. He and his wife, Dorothy (nee Hurley) Bongiovi, high school sweethearts, have walked the walk with their charities for the last 30 years.

The JBJ Soul Foundation began tackling hunger and housing insecurity first in Philadelphia, where he was a co-owner of the city's arena football franchise, the Philadelphia Soul. Expanding closer to his native New Jersey region, they opened restaurants in Red Bank and Tom's River. The JBJ Soul Kitchens have no set prices on the menu, embracing a "pay it forward" philosophy.

According to the

Greil Marcus

2022 book Folk Songs: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, Jon Bon Jovi sang Sam Cooke's Civil Rights anthem "A Change is Gonna Come" with soul singer and idiosyncratic Dylan interpreter Bettye Lavette, at Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration

A rest stop on the Garden State Parkway near the merge with the New Jersey Turnpike formerly known as Cheesequake, in South Amboy near Sayreville, has been renamed the Jon Bon Jovi Service Area. It is closed for renovations until mid-2024.

Rest stop on Garden State Parkway/NJ Tpke, formerly Cheesequake.

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YOU'RE A WEEK INTO THIS TOUR. HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM THE LAST ONE?

JBJ: It was quite a while ago, three years to the day between tours. It's different for a number of reasonsw. One, unlike every other album, we waited three monts before we started the tour. ["Keep the Faith" was released in Nov. 1992].
With Slippery When Wet, were were out before the record was out, in Europe. With this one, we said, you know what, it's November, we're gonna stay home for the holidays, do the videos here, get ready in order to go out. The pacing is a lot better.

WR: YOU WERE OUT ON THE ROAD AS SORT OF A LESSER KNOWN COMMODITY, AND THEN THE POPULARITY EXPLODED WHILE YOU WERE TOURING, ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING?

JBJ: With the first album, you're playing clubs, and with the second, youre opening for people, so on days off you're hustling for a date in a club to have enough money to stay in a Holiday Inn. The third album was Slippery When Wet. Nothing and no one can prepare you for an albnum like Slippery. And with the burnout that tour really started, instead of enjoying the ride and walking away from it for even six months, Richie (Sambora) and I started writing the songs for the New Jersey album. And a year after the Slippery tour ended, we were on the road with New Jersey. 237 shows later, we were zombies.

So those two albums back to back were too much for any man to really live through. Then, instead of going cold turkey, which I set out to do, I [co-]produced the Billy Falcon record [Pretty Blue World, by Long Island/New Jersey singer-songwriter now living in Nashville] and doing the "Young Guns" thing. [Young Guns II was the movie; Jon Bon Jovi did the soundtrack and songs inspired by the movie, his first solo album, and another unexpected worldwide multiplatinum album, called Blaze of Glory/Young Guns II in 1990.]

IS THE SANER TOURING PACE THE RESULT OF TAKING OVER MORE OF THE DAY TO DAY BUSINESS? DIDN'T YOU GUYS CUT MANAGER, AGENTS LOOSE AFTER THE LAST TOUR?

Yup. We cleaned house. Nothing against any of the people involved, but it was well, you're home today, I don't get to go home for 16 months. I know it's my job, I like my job, but it wears on you. Now that we're doing it, rather than being part of a machine, we can say, leave us alone. We're tired, we're going home for two weeks. I don't care that so and so wants us to come to their part of the world. We've got to postpone it, we need a break.

WAS THERE A FEAR THAT YOUR HARDCORE FANS MIGHT SLIP AWAY?

I didn't consider it in this whole thing. The one luxury I had that I could admit to, was that I didn't have to compete with my past, because I wasn't chasing success anymore. Maybe the reason we went back in so fast with New Jersey was we enjoyed the [adrenaline] high of Slippery so much.

And "Young Guns," when I went out to experiment, nobody thought it would sell five million records, and I'd be sitting at the Academy Awards [with an Oscar nomination for best soundtrack]. It was supposed to be just for fun. [The story goes that YGII co-star Emilio Estevez coveted "Wanted: Dead or Alive" for the movie, but that Bon Jovi hit, Jon thought, was too specifically about the dysfunction of the band's touring. So he wrote "Blaze of Glory" and some other tunes. Elton John and Little Richard each appeared on the soundtrack, among many other stars.]

I needed to walk away. But when I did this album Keep the Faith] it gave me the opportunity to say, "how many more number ones do you have to have before you're satisfied?" All I needed to do was to say something artistically, and I achieved that.

KEEP THE FAITH DOES SEEM TO BE MORE ANALYTICAL. IT'S HARD TO MISS SPIRITUAL IMAGERY. DID YOU HAVE SOME EXPERIENCES THAT ENHANCED YOUR SPIRITUAL BELIEFS?

JBJ: I didn't see God. (laughs). He didn't come to a show. But I think my beliefs are evident in my life as well as my songwriting. It's a sort of that guilty Catholic upbringing. It's a part of me, so it is gonna come up in my lyrics occasionally.

I still do believe. I've always been an optimist; I've always been silly enough to see the glass as half full. I don't understand when people can't see that; I'm disappointed that they can't.

ANDE YET KEEP THE FAITH ASKS QUESTIONS, SHOWS SKEPTICISM AND DISAPPOINTMENT. BON JOVI'S RIDE WAS ALMOST A METAPHOR FOR THE COUNTRY'S, IN THE REAGAN AND BUSH YEARS, OF BOOM ECONOMY AND WORRY ABOUT THE DEFICIT LATER, OF GREED IS GOOD.

JBJ: Definitely. The world was believing all that stuff Grandpa Ron [Ronald Reagan] told us. And it wasn't until the end of the Bush years that I even woke up from the idea, like wait a minute, I'm not really happy with this right now, I'm kind of disillusioned. What do you mean there are people in America sleeping on the streets, and there are more of them today than there were yesterday, and why can't everyone have a job, and why can't they have health care and why can't the kids have fuckin' shoes on their feet?

And I started questioning these things, because I was fortunate. I was that one in a billion people, who had achieved all their life's dreams to the nth power, I didn't understand why someone else couldn't. When I looked around and saw this world wasn't as pretty as I wanted it to be, or thought it could be, or would be, I had to write that down. I had to question even what I did, if it was worth the sacfifiece, giving up anything to do with having a normal life in order to achieve those things, if it was worth not having relationships, or anything other than the band, or the organization...if it was worth not spending time with your loved ones, whether it was your parents or your brothers or sisters, whatever. I was really questioning that. Because I had a lot of number one everythings, I had made all the money, way more than I ever imagined I would make, and I stil wasn't happy. What was it all for? So I had to walk away from it, and take a different perspective.

DID YOU FIND SOME ANWERS WITHIN YOURSELF?

JBJ (softly) I think so. I got back to basics, to the five of us. [Richie Samboa, guitar and co-songwriter; Alex John Such, bass; Tico Torres, drums, Dave Bryan, keyboards.] These are the guys that sold their souls to be with me. Alec got a divorce, gave up everything he had, in 1983, to be with me. Tico did the same thing, it was a pretty big sacrifice, when you look back on it. Richie was always on the verge [of his own success], it was gonna be [his] band that makes it kind of thing, but he quit that completely to become a guitar player in my band. Dave had a nice Jewish upbringing in Edison, NJ, was going to school, and be a doctor kind of thing. And he said, see ya, mom, I'm running away to join the circus because I believe in this guy. That was a pretty big commitment 10 years ago. If we got back to that, it was worth attempting this album. So I cleaned house otherwise [business], other than the people in the band who sacrificed all this in order to achieve their dream, because their dream was my dream.

WAS IT HARD, CONSIDERING AT THE END OF THE LAST TOUR, YOU GUYS DIDN'T WANT TO LOOK AT EACH OTHER ANYMORE?

But it wasn't in a personal way: It wasn't 'I hate you, you're fired, no I quit.' It was that we didn't know how we had gotten to that point. There's  a scene in Animal House where the marching band comes to the end of an alley and they're still marching? That's where we were. When it was the third tour of Europe, and the places kept getting bigger on the New Jersey album, and the promoter said there are all these stadiums in South America, come headline those big festivals. Okay. They tell me, I tell the band, they say yes, I say yes, we go. [a sort of headshake that says maybe he should have said no]. Same deal deal in Mexico. Man, we were so gone in Mexico, and I can't overemphasize the stupidity to you. There were some riots because the promoter was accused of selling too mny tickets and disappearing with the money...

YOU AND YOUR WIFE WENT ON A MOTORCYCLE TRIP TO STURGIS, S.D. WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?

JBJ: I used to be so quick to say, there's no tradition, no culture in America, until I went and did my little Kerouac trip across the country and saw what was going on, and why people were bitching about their economy, and why they weren't working, and why this or that wasn't working out. When you're on a bike, as opposed to a car, you are by yourself, regardless of the fact that my wife was on the back. You've got your helmet on, nothing to do or see other than you and your mind on that road.

DO YOU KNOW NEIL DIAMOND HAS DONE THAT TOO, BIKING FROM L.A. TO STURGIS?

JBJ: Me and Neil. (laughs) I did hear he's a big bike fan. America's a cool place if you can go out and find it. Even if you go on vacation somewhere, you'd be in a fine resort in a nice part of the world. These were fuck motels. Anything over $25 a night was outside the rules.

DID YOUR WIFE LIKE IT AS MUCH AS YOU DID?

It was her idea. She's a loony tune.