There's no sex, no drugs and - cynics say - precious little rock'n'roll. But Jon Bon Jovi wouldn't swap places with Pete Doherty, he tells Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Friday 26 May 2006
Jon Bon Jovi 'A United Nations of thinking' ... Jon Bon Jovi. Photograph: Stephen Chernin/AP
Jon Bon Jovi has a bad reputation, but it's not the kind of bad reputation rock stars crave. There's little to report when it comes to sex (he's been married to the same woman for 17 years) or drugs (he prefers fine wines) or even, for that matter, rock'n'roll. The critical consensus on this latter point is that Bon Jovi is a sort of unthinking person's Bruce Springsteen: a spokesman for the working man, born in New Jersey like the Boss, but without the poetry, and with a mane of blond highlights where his blue collar ought to be.
Interviewers describe him as a weapons-grade bore; celebrity magazines ignore him. His band, also called Bon Jovi, has sold more records in America than Jimi Hendrix or the Beach Boys or Frank Sinatra, and yet the correct protocol for listening to a Bon Jovi song - even among those who love them - still seems to involve inserting one's tongue into one's cheek. He does little to redress any of this by: a) holding our interview at his desperately beige, totally unrockular uptown Manhattan apartment, and b) spending the whole time with the top three buttons of his shirt undone, exposing his greying chest hair.
So it's disconcerting to find him immediately likeable, exuding the serenity of a man who will be playing to several hundred thousand people at stadiums across Europe this summer whether you happen to rate his music or not. The UK leg of the tour begins next week, and was due to have culminated with the first gig at the new Wembley. But what with livin' on a prayer being the modus operandi of all major British construction projects, the stadium isn't finished, so the band will play the Milton Keynes Bowl instead. "Sucks," Bon Jovi observes. "I offered to play in the parking lot with a long extension cord, but they didn't seem to find that very humorous."
He is 43 now ("old enough to be Lindsay Lohan's dad") and a Bon Jovi concert these days is a carefully calibrated affair, pressing the right buttons - You Give Love a Bad Name, Bad Medicine, Livin' on a Prayer - while trying not to descend into the pure nostalgia of, say, a Rolling Stones show. But middle age is treating him well, roughening his striking good looks just enough to remove the semi-comical boy-band sheen. It is also helping him address the central existential problem of being Bon Jovi, which is this: when you start your career as part of a phenomenon so manifestly stupid and image-based as 1980s hair metal, when can you ever tell if people really like you for your music?
"At 25, your thought process is, 'I want credibility! I want the critics to like this!'" he says. "I hated [the focus on looks]. Hated it. We'd written a record, Slippery When Wet, and we were sitting there going, 'Right on! We got three No 1 singles, this is the biggest-selling record in America, and we're on the cover of Rolling Stone!' And then the first thing a girl talks about is, 'Your hair looks nice. Will you take your shirt off for me? Got any tattoos?'"
But time moves on. "You get older, and you can joke about it and say, well, I've still got my hair. And so now even somebody who might despise everything we did has to admit that there's a body of work that people listen to. It's the body of work that matters."
We are sitting in Bon Jovi's lounge at a heavy wooden table, which is empty except for a glass bowl containing 15 identical green apples. Every piece of non-wooden furniture, plus the carpet, is some shade of beige or cream. There is a photograph on the wall of Bon Jovi meeting Bill Clinton, an Elton John CD, and a coffee-table book of aerial photography, but few other signs that anyone lives here. Which, it turns out, they don't: Bon Jovi lives with his wife Dorothea and their four children across the river in an upmarket corner of New Jersey. (The children's surname is Bongiovi, the one their father was born with.) The New York apartment is a calculated pretence, designed to make you think you are in the presence of authenticity.
This is what the critics say about Bon Jovi's music, too. The charge is that the band output is corporate pap, laden with cliches, incapable of eliciting any emotional tug. By way of example, their latest album, Have a Nice Day, contains a song with the following lines: "Like a blind dog without a bone/ I was a gypsy lost in the twilight zone/ I hijacked a rainbow and crashed into a pot of gold/ I been there, done that, I ain't looking back/ On the seeds I've sown." (Although if you think that's embarrassing you should see the video, which features a man in a dog costume, and of which Bon Jovi concedes: "It's fucking out there, man ... I don't get it, one iota." )
But calling music corporate isn't an unanswerable put-down: some such bands endure and some don't. What distinguishes all of Bon Jovi - co-songwriter Richie Sambora, Tico Torres, David Bryan and Hugh McDonald - is their unremitting energy and their level of belief in what they're doing. "We didn't pretend to be from Seattle when that got popular," Bon Jovi says. "We didn't hang out with rappers when that got popular. I didn't do a boy band dance routine. I'm not in the tabloids, I'm not in the gossip magazines, but there's a lot of other guys who can do that."
The self-belief is in the band's DNA, but the nonchalance about media attention is new: until fairly recently, the feud over press coverage between Bon Jovi and Axl Rose, of Guns N' Roses, was one of the most entertaining in rock. Bon Jovi complained that Rose was in the spotlight too much, considering that the band hadn't recorded anything decent in a while. Rose, among various responses, suggested in public that Bon Jovi might like to suck his dick. But while Rose struggles perpetually to orchestrate a comeback, Bon Jovi never really went away, and so it falls to the victor to declare an end to hostilities.
"Taken out of context," Bon Jovi says today about his attack on Rose. "Let me clarify that. They've written some great songs. But people [attending concerts] also wanted to know, 'Is this the show where he ends it all?'" There is little danger of Jon Bon Jovi collapsing on stage in a drug-addled heap. "I'm not a drug guy," he has said. "I have a nice wine habit, but I was never into drugs ... Why do I need something that's going to grind my teeth all night and won't let me get it on with a woman?" He knows that adopting a less suburban lifestyle might make some people think he was cooler. "Those people get a lot more press. Like, I know who that guy is - Pete Dyer, Pete Doherty? I hear he's great. But I've never heard a Babyshambles song in my life ... I'd rather be doing what I'm doing."
In the midst of all this Happy Days talk about clean living and doing what you do best, Bon Jovi's politics come as a bit of a surprise. But he is serious about his leftwing commitments. He performed at rallies for John Kerry in 2004 and, by all accounts, spends serious time and money tackling homelessness in Philadelphia, near where he grew up, in association with the charity Habitat for Humanity. He also owns an unprofitable minor-league football team, the Philadelphia Soul, which "has made helping the local community a cornerstone of its identity", according to the national volunteering umbrella group Points of Light. "I'm Bono's biggest fan, I love what he's doing for the world, but where he's acting globally, I act locally," Bon Jovi says. The comparison comes off as a little awkward, but who's to say Bon Jovi's philanthropy isn't just as effective on its own terms? It is certainly a lot less annoying.
The problem is that the politics don't find a voice in the music. The title track of Have a Nice Day is a bitter screw-you to George Bush, written in the aftermath of the 2004 election, but we know this only because Bon Jovi has said so. "The Japanese came over and said" - he adopts a bad Japanese accent - "'Oh, Have a Nice Day, very nice song!' And you go, 'No, no, no, you don't get the irony in it. You're missing it. It's have a nice fuckin' day.'"
In part, the vagueness of the lyrics is to avoid internecine disputes: the rest of the band, Bon Jovi says, aren't nearly so liberal as he is. But there is another calculation involved. "I could have started that song with 'Dear Mr President'," he says. "But I had to say, now, wait a minute, I have to sing this in Africa, and Asia, and Australia, and Europe. So I need to make the theme universal. Because, maybe you have a prime minister instead of a president. Maybe you have a boss. Or maybe you don't care about social issues. I tend to find if I make a universal theme people can relate to, they'll get their own message ... It's a United Nations of thinking." Your response to this statement - is it cynicism, or just populism? - will probably serve as a good barometer for your views of Bon Jovi in general.
Does he ever envisage retiring? "I won't be like the Stones. I don't anticipate being sixtysomething and doing a lot of shows. You probably heard Keith fell out of a tree a few days ago. I don't envision myself being like that." Bon Jovi will pack up their guitars, he swears, "the minute that this is all nostalgia, that it's the fat guys out there pulling up their tight jeans. Then I'm out. I'm out. Until then, I can't stop."
Nothing gives him more pride than the fact that there are two generations of fans at the average Bon Jovi show: couples in their late 30s, who might have just met each other when Slippery When Wet came out, and a new wave of people in their late teens and early 20s. Sure, they might have their tongues in their cheeks. "But you go to a Springsteen show, and they're 50 or 60 years old!" Bon Jovi says, which sounds a little bitter, but is also, by and large, true.
Bon Jovi's publicist has warned the Guardian that he may storm out of the interview if asked about his love life, so I leave it till last, and tell him what she said.
He laughs. "Nobody cares. Richie's the one getting all the media for that." (Sambora has been dating the actress Denise Richards and has previously dated Cher and Ally Sheedy, as well as having been married to Heather Locklear.) "Me? Nobody cares. I'm the poster boy for marriage. How I became the poster boy, I don't know, because I'm not the only one. Up until about two minutes ago, Steven Tyler [of Aerosmith] had been married for as long. Bono's been married as long. Springsteen's been married, this time, for as long. But that's OK. People say, you know, 'How come you're not sleeping with Angelina Jolie?' Well ..."
He leans back in his chair and makes a characteristic Bon Jovi expression, somewhere between a shrug and a smirk. "I can't. Whatcha gonna do? That's the trade-off. That's OK. I can live with that. I got a good deal."
· Bon Jovi play Hampden Park, Glasgow on June 3, then tour.
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