JON BON JOVI

by Jane Stevenson
Sun Media

NEW YORK — When Jon Bon Jovi was a teenager growing up in the working-class town of Sayreville, N.J., he could have never predicted his current rock star status.




PRETTY-BOY ... Rock star and actor Jon Bon Jovi.

— Mark O’Neill, Sun Media

"I don’t really anticipate being out there doing You Give Love A Bad Name at 65, (but) I’m not going to say I won’t be" — Jon Bon Jovi, 2002


Sure, he had musical ambitions from the age of 13, but the mindblowing success part of the equation — his namesake band has sold a total of 93 million albums worldwide in the past 19 years — was beyond him.

“The wildest thing, I looked forward was, ‘Gee, I wonder in the year 2000, I’ll be 38, who will I be?’ ”

Bon Jovi said in an exclusive Canadian newspaper interview with The Sun leading up to the Oct. 8 release of his band’s new album, Bounce.

“Sitting there thinking to yourself, ‘I’ll be a grownup with kids and maybe a wife and maybe a career or maybe not a career. But when I got there, I still felt like that 18-year-old that was waiting for the answer to that question. I would have never dreamt this. And if it is a dream, don’t wake me up.”

Bon Jovi had time to reflect on his place in the world earlier this year when he turned the big 4-0 in March.

But given that the things that keep him grounded as adult have remained virtually unchanged, the transition wasn’t that hard.

“I thought it was a wonderful milestone,” he says. “I have the same band, the same wife, the same friends, and all the wonderful things I’ve been lucky enough to have accomplished.”

However, the pretty-boy rocker — looking as youthful and handsome as ever on this particular day, in a beige suede top and brown leather pants with his long hair streaked blond — did think about the physical ramifications.

“I thought that it was the last pretty birthday,” he says with a laugh. “It’s all downhill from here.”

He does agree, however, that age is a state of mind.

“Oh, absolutely. Look at ... Jagger and Richards.

Who would’ve thought they would have been 60 doing what they do, the way they do it. It’s fantastic.”

Which doesn’t mean he knows how long he wants to continue to perform rock ’n’ roll.

Bon Jovi, the band, plan to start an arena tour in December and will celebrate their 20th anniversary next year with a box set of B-sides.

“In his day, Sinatra was a rock star,” Bon Jovi says.

“He toured ’til he was 80 and he made 60 movies; that’s a pretty good gauge.

“Once the Stones decide to throw the towel in, then we’ll see how far rock bands go. And then we’ll be able to add the two up, divide by two, and figure out the average median age for the performer. But until that happens, I just don’t know. I don’t really anticipate being out there doing You Give Love A Bad Name at 65, (but) I’m not going to say that I won’t be.”

For now, Bon Jovi, who currently resides in a riverside, 30-room, 18th-century, French-style mansion complete with recording studio in nearby Runsom, N.J. — “10 minutes by chopper, 15 minutes by ferry, and a little over an hour by car,” he explains — is looking forward to the release of Bounce.

It's title does, by the way, does refer to New York’s recovery since 9/11, among other things.

“I think when I came up with the title, which was pre-9/11, it wasn’t so literal that it defined the record to you,” says Bon Jovi, relaxing in a spacious Ritz-Carlton suite at the tip of Manhattan and mere blocks from Ground Zero.

“Post-9/11, the song was rewritten to be a little more pointed. What I liked about it, still, as an album title was, in its most simple terms, a baby can say it was bouncing a ball, a mother can say they’re bouncing a child on their knee. Or, in light of what happened here, it’s the resiliency of the country.”

In other words, Bon Jovi — who was collaborating with guitarist Richie Sambora at the time — didn’t want fans to think the title was only about 9/11.

Just three of the 12 new songs — the title track, the first single Everyday and Undivided — directly deal with the tragedy, which Bon Jovi got to witness first hand.

“I was home. I was in Jersey. I was in the gym that morning, at my house, and the first plane hit. By the time the second one hit, I woke Richie up, and told him something catastrophic was happening and we tried to call his wife and child in California and the phone lines were dead.

The other planes were in the air so there was a sense of urgency of what was going on. Like the rest of the world, we were all glued to our TVs wondering if this was, in fact, Armageddon.”

He takes a deep breath before continuing.

“The proximity of my house to here, the smoke was wafting over my house,” he says. “We went over to the beach and watched the towers burn because they were off in the skyline, they’re close enough that we could see them, it was surreal to say the least but then we had to hurry back to my house to watch more TV, wondering, ‘What’s next?’ The kids were in school. It was a gorgeous day. I’ll never forget what a beautiful day it was, and a traumatic time.”

For his part, Bon Jovi hasn’t even gone to visit Ground Zero.

“I don’t feel the need to go to the site. Even when I was refused to be on the bucket brigade because I didn’t know CPR, I didn’t want to get in the way, so I didn’t go down there.

I’ve flown over it 20 times and gone by it on boat but I didn’t feel the need to go and pose on that platform, or get in the way of the rescue workers, or the construction workers.”

Instead, Bon Jovi and Sambora performed acoustically, a mere 11 days later, on the all-star TV telethon America: A Tribute To Heroes and later with the entire band in October at The Concert For New York City at Madison Square Garden.

“We did anything we possibly could,” he says.

“I made 200 sandwiches and set out buying socks and boots and bags and everything else that the radio was telling me to do.

Because I couldn’t get on the bucket brigade, all I could do was something like make food for the relief workers. You wanted to do anything.

I called the blood bank and there were so many people that they didn’t want or need anymore. You wanted to do anything, you felt helpless.”

Bon Jovi says he and Sambora ran the gamut of emotions during their songwriting sessions for Bounce.

“It was sadness and hurt and anger. It was cathartic. But the ones that made it to the record are the ones that are more about people having to come together or dust themselves off and pick themselves up and move on. But I didn’t want it to be a theme album.”

In fact, Bon Jovi does have something to say about that other New Jersey rocker, Bruce Springsteen, whose first album in nearly two decades years with the E Street Band, The Rising, almost entirely deals with the event.

“That’s his thing,” he says. “It hasn’t found its way back to my record player. I find it’s okay. But that’s just my opinion. It’s a lot (to deal with). Hasn’t anything else happened in the last 18 years since the band made a record?”

As for Bon Jovi, they are entering the 21st century a revitalized act.

Often the butt of critics’ jokes as they emerged as a hair-metal band in the ’80s, and having faded in popularity during the late ’90s, the rock veterans found success again with their previous album, 2000’s Crush.

It sold eight million copies around the world, spawned the biggest single of the group’s career with It’s My Life , and garnered the band their first Grammy nominations.

Bon Jovi, who previously got Grammy nods as a solo artist, says awards have never really been important to him.

“I was always hoping that I’d be able to make another record,” he says. “And it’s nice to be in such an elite club, I mean 93 million albums is way beyond my wildest dreams, so at this point, I’m obviously not motivated by any of that. And I know that because of that success, I’ll be allowed to make records probably as long as I care to make them.”

In the meantime, Bon Jovi doesn’t have any plans to abandon his other career — that of an actor.

After making his debut in 1995’s Moonlight & Valentino, he’s since appeared in Pay It Forward and U-571, and most recently had a recurring role as the handyman/love interest Victor on TV’s Ally McBeal during the show’s final season.

He says one day he’d love to carry a movie and was extremely disappointed with a recent film.

“I did a vampire movie last January, it never came out,” he says. “It was a piece of junk. It was called Los Muertos and I enjoyed going to work every day on it.

And when I saw the cut of it, you wouldn’t have thought it was the same movie. It didn’t turn out very well and it was heartbreaking ’cause it was a starring role in a studio picture.”

In fact, two songs on Bounce were acting-inspired — You Had Me From Hello, a phrase from Cameron Crowe’s Jerry McGuire, and Open All Night, which Bon Jovi has described as Victor’s dialogue with Ally.

“I enjoy it immensely,” Bon Jovi says of acting. “And it teaches me things and it brings me gifts that I can write in song. I like the cinematic scope of a couple of other (new) songs like Joey and Right Side Of Wrong.

I think that a lot of that had had to do with my acting and reading a lot of scripts and classic plays and then collaborating with two different guys on two different screenplays myself.

I was able to be more concise in the storytelling of the songs ... the way that great ’70s songwriters, storytellers, like Billy Joel or Elton (John) would have. I just don’t hear songs like that much anymore.”

Or anything he likes much, for that matter.

“Radio plays the same 15 songs,” he laments of the music industry. “I don’t know if it’s restricted or if it’s big business or if there’s no patience level, I don’t know. I’m certainly waiting for the next Kurt Cobain to come along. Somebody to kick it in the ass. The things I hear on the radio and see on video aren’t all that exciting.”

Even his children — with his wife of 11 years, Dorothea Hurley — appear to have developed decent musical taste despite their young ages.

Their daughter Stephanie Rose is nine while their son Jesse James is seven.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Bon Jovi says. “It’s Harry Chapin and Tom Waits and Elton John and Elvis Costello. There’s no NSYNC or Britney Spears at my house, they never knew what that was.

Their favourite thing has got to be the Beatles. They know the difference between the I Am Sam soundtrack and the Beatles 1 collection. They’ve worn ’em both out.”




2002-10-06