In an emotive interview, the 62-year-old rocker talks about the battle to save his voice and his fear of never singing again in public.
Elton John underwent voice-altering throat surgery in 1987. Rod Stewart was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2000 and could not sing for nine months. Luciano Pavarotti developed vocal nodules due to over-singing at the start of his career before becoming one of the greatest tenors. Many of the world’s great singers have suffered career-threatening vocal trauma, but rare is the star who can never sing in public again. That is the fate hanging over Jon Bon Jovi.
“It’s the parallel storyline, right?” Bon Jovi says. The leader of one of the most successful rock bands, with 120 million album sales and counting, is talking about Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, a four-part documentary that charts the journey of four teenage friends who went from the clubs of New Jersey to the world’s biggest stages. The series also follows the band’s singer as he goes through throat surgery for an atrophied vocal cord, vocal rehabilitation and the dawning realisation of the cost of it all.
“This is the first time I’m saying this,” says Bon Jovi, a wire-haired 62-year-old who, with his famously wide smile and gym-toned body visible beneath a black T-shirt, looks the picture of health. “If the singing is not great, if I can’t be the guy I once was … then I’m done.”
He thinks on this a while.
“And I’m good with that.”
Jon Bon Jovi has flown into Austin, Texas, for the premiere of Thank You, Goodnight at South By Southwest, the vast convergence of tech, film and music that takes over the city each March. Four decades on from becoming the ultimate all-American pin-up, with such 1980s rock hits as You Give Love a Bad Name, Bon Jovi is enjoying a second wave of popularity, with 30.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify. He is so instantly recognisable that conducting any kind of interview in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel proves impossible. So we’ve found a quiet spot in the basement, where Bon Jovi has helped it to roll along by opening a bottle of Hampton Water, his 29-year-old son Jesse’s brand of rosé from Languedoc in France. Two glasses in, I find myself asking: is he saying he will never sing again?
“There is a big difference between being in a studio and going out on the road,” he clarifies in slow, unwavering tones; his speaking voice, it must be said, sounds unaltered. “We have just recorded a new album. I sing in vocal therapy every day. But I want to perform for two and a half hours a night, four nights a week — and I know how good I can be, so if I can’t be that guy … put it this way, I don’t ever need to be the fat Elvis.”
The documentary offers a compelling portrait of how Bon Jovi was driven by some unstoppable force to leave New Jersey, New York’s less glamorous neighbour, and make his mark on the world. Where did that drive come from?
“Some of it is upbringing, because my mother was the one who said, you can do it,” he replies. “The drinking age also had a lot to do with it. Back then it was 18 in New Jersey, which meant you could sneak into a bar at 16, so you could chase the dream of being in a band without any overarching responsibilities. The third reason was simple: I’ll show you. I wasn’t the greatest singer, guitarist, songwriter. For that reason I worked harder than I had to, to be better than I was.”
Born to a father in the US Marines and a mother who was a florist, Bon Jovi started playing in his mid-teens in clubs along the Jersey Shore, where Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes were the local heroes. In 1979 Bon Jovi was performing Springsteen’s The Promised Land with his first band, Atlantic City Expressway, at a biker hangout called the Stone Pony, when the man himself jumped on stage with him. From that moment, his fate was sealed.
“It also has something to do with the time we were born into,” Bon Jovi says of his success. “Bon Jovi were second-generation immigrant kids [his father was of Italian and Slovak descent, his mother German and Russian]. I was born when JFK was still president, we were going to the moon and the feeling our folks had that we could achieve anything was instilled into us. I had no plan B because the moment I played in that bar aged 16, I thought I’d already made it.”
He really did start making it after a local radio station played Bon Jovi’s 1983 debut single, Runaway; a slice of luck after a long dry spell? “I wouldn’t call it luck. I would call it being smart. I realised DJs are the loneliest guys in the world because they’re on their own, but also they’re influential because they can take an unknown band everywhere. So I went in there with my record and hung out.”
Bon Jovi were a pop phenomenon dressed up as hair metal: a 1980s explosion of big hair, tight denims, squealing guitars, catchy hooks and lyrics about good times that teenagers could understand, leading to anthems like Livin’ on a Prayer and Bad Medicine. Their first manager, Doc McGhee, got them to tour with Judas Priest and the Scorpions, giving them an awareness of how to hone their craft and put on a massive rock show. Combined with their lead singer’s all-American appeal, it proved a winning combination. Bon Jovi’s 1986 album Slippery When Wet went on to sell 28 million copies worldwide.
“I loved great pop songs,” Bon Jovi says. “I wanted to tour with Bryan Adams and the Cars, but going on tour with the Scorpions taught you how to win over a crowd, how to perform. At the same time, I had a poster of Led Zeppelin in front of their Boeing 720 on my wall, but it was too big to fathom. Southside Johnny, however, playing down the street and making records? I got that.”
For a while, it looked like nothing could stop Bon Jovi, but as with so many hugely successful bands, eventually, the lifestyle took its toll and the cracks began to show. The crash came in 2013 when their guitarist, Richie Sambora, failed to turn up to a gig in Calgary, Canada, before baling on the remainder of a worldwide tour. Sambora said he needed to spend time with his daughter; Bon Jovi says substance abuse issues were part of the reason for Sambora’s no-show too.
“We had 80 more shows and there was the band, the road crew, the fans all over the world who bought tickets and travelled there … We have the number one grossing tour in the world that year and you don’t show up?”
Bon Jovi still sounds incredulous. “OK, you’re not going to make it tonight, see you tomorrow. Oh, you won’t make that either? No one loves Richie more than we do, and it breaks my heart, but don’t think for a minute that the show can’t happen without you.”
Phil X, a Canadian guitarist who had filled in for Sambora in 2011 while Sambora underwent a stint in rehab, stepped in the next day. “The cliché is that rock’n’roll bands are celebrated for excess,” Bon Jovi says. “But it’s the same if you’re on a sports team or in a family: you fulfil your responsibilities. There is no animosity [with Sambora] — we saw each other last August but we had to sort it out among ourselves.”
There is no question about who the leader of Bon Jovi is: the band is named after him, after all. In 1991 McGhee, who had narrowly avoided a jail sentence a decade earlier after being involved in smuggling 20 tonnes of marijuana into North Carolina on a shrimp boat, got the boot and the singer took over management himself.
“We toured Slippery, then we were on the road with [their 1988 album] New Jersey, which had another five Top Ten singles, and we were exhausted,” Bon Jovi says of McGhee’s departure. “Our attitude was: get us out of here. Richie did a solo record, I did [the soundtrack to] Young Guns II, and I was in a unique position in that I started auditioning for acting roles, yet I was one of the biggest rock stars in the world.
“It was cool, I loved starting from scratch, but when I told Doc about it he said, ‘This is bullshit. You need to be out on the road, wearing a black T-shirt, playing stadiums.’ And that was that. Doc was great for the first chapter, a larger-than-life character like Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant, but he wasn’t right for the second chapter and he definitely wouldn’t be right for today.”There have been other challenges: following up the life-altering success of Slippery When Wet, facing down grunge in the early 1990s. Jon Bon Jovi never fell prey to the drugs and heavy drinking that so often goes with rock’n’roll, but he did suffer burnout after performing in front of thousands of people, trying to come down from that high and get some sleep, then doing it all over again.
“It wasn’t like people on the road had personal trainers or were eating well back then,” he says. “It was about whatever got you through the night.”
Nor did he take advantage of groupies, instead staying with his high school sweetheart, Dorothea Hurley. Four children later, they are still together. Successful marriages are extremely rare in rock’n’roll, so you wonder what made it work.
“She sat next to me in history class,” Bon Jovi explains. “We’re from the same place, we’re the same age, and she was with me when I had less than zero, so we went on the journey together. I know I get to be the poster boy for happy marriages in music, but Bono’s been married to Ali [Hewson] as long, Bruce has been married to Patti [Scialfa] almost as long. I’m not the only one.”
The family now has Millie Bobby Brown, the 20-year-old actress who starred in Stranger Things, in its midst — she got engaged to Bon Jovi’s son Jake, 21, in 2023. “I’ve gotten to know her in the last year, she works really hard, and she and Jake will grow together in their own way. It is an accelerated version of what I went through 40 years ago and I think, with the support of family around them, they’re gonna be great together.”
Bon Jovi also credits Dorothea with developing his social conscience. “My parents were not politically motivated; all they did was keep their nose to the grindstone. Then I met my wife and her family were more vocal, but back then I had absolute focus on one thing only: to be successful in a rock’n’roll band.”
The real change came, he says, in 2004, after buying Philadelphia Soul, an arena (indoor American) football team. Finding himself thrust into community affairs in the city, two years later Bon Jovi created the JBJ Soul Foundation, to “break the cycle of hunger, poverty and homelessness”.
The foundation opened the Soul Kitchen in 2011, a non-profit restaurant operating on the pay-it-forward model, where those who can afford to pay for meals cover the cost of those who can’t. There are now four Soul Kitchens, including one in New Jersey. “It has nothing to do with singing, it doesn’t help sell records, but the foundation stuff is legit,” Bon Jovi says. “This sounds like a crusade, but the high I’ve found washing dishes in the Soul Kitchen is similar to the one I get going out on stage. It’s cool.”
Bon Jovi has been supporting Democrat politicians since supporting John Kerry in 2004, which makes you wonder how he is feeling about the forthcoming US election and the possibility of another presidential term for Donald Trump. “I’m scared to death,” he says. “I don’t want to be alarmist but I’m worried about what will happen eight months from now. I don’t want another authoritarian government, or to see history repeating itself.”
In the meantime, he has his own life to think about. “I can tell you that 60 is different from 50 and my current concern is that I’m going to forget how to sing,” he says. “I’ll be crushed if I can’t sing live again, but what does a quarterback do when faced with the last ball he’ll ever throw? That’s the situation I’m in. I want to look back on 40 years of Bon Jovi, look forward to the new album and appreciate everything. That’s my hope: to find joy in it all.”
- Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story is on Disney+ from April 26. Forever by Bon Jovi (EMI) is out on June 7
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Times of London