I included the first sentence for context. The second is the one that made me and, I'm glad, not only me jump in the chair.

If this is implying what I think it is implying, then I've thought this for quite awhile now. The "WWWB' documentary gives a window into Richie's mindset about Jon, and that also could possibly extend into the way he deals with his life overall. The 'make Jon happy' comment, to me, suggests someone who is a people-pleaser and passive, wanting to make everyone happy. This can often be at the expense of their own self-actualization.

I took it as an assumption that Jon is/was part of Richie's drinking problem which is a pretty strong thing to imply. Maybe it wasn't intentional but that's the way I took it (and yeah it was early morning foggy brain for me, too.) :)

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that alcoholism can be fueled by any number of factors and affects every facet of your life. While I don't think Jon is necessarily /responsible/ for Richie's descent into alcoholism, I do think it's possible that, if they had a contentious or troubled relationship, that their conflicts, along with other factors Richie himself has mentioned (his dad dying, his divorce) --may have all contributed to Richie turning to the bottle to cope.

And Jon's daughter turned to drugs. It's all Jon's fault.

I'm just being flippant by the way. There is possibly some truth in that but, to me, that doesn't make any of this Jon's fault (which isn't what you were saying but is probably what Rolo or someone will take from it).

Richie is proud to Aftermath. There is no more to discuss. He did not want to sacrifice Aftermath for WAN.

Richie thinks he can do both, but Jon wants to protect WAN. It's beyond me, Aftermath is not a threat to the BWC tour, or for sales of album WAN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_BkT9Vsb-k#t=0m11s
VS


Both have to reach a truce.

I'm a big Richie fan; I actually fell in love with his solo music first after hearing it on YouTube by chance, and then turned to Bon Jovi and got more familiar with their songs beyond the hits. So, despite my perception that his current behavior is frustrating and perplexing, I'm still rooting for him.

That said, I think I'd tremble in my boots working for Jon. I had a boss once who was an exacting, perfectionist task-master. I was a shy, passive person who hated yelling and conflict. His "tough love" terrified me, and instead of "thriving", I quit the job and now work in a position more suited to my personality. While I don't know if Jon's work ethic or style is in any way the same as that of my former boss, his 'moment' with Phil X onstage in front of thousands of people is pretty telling imo. Whether it's the right or wrong way to handle the situation is neither here nor there; it's how Jon handles it. If it was me in Phil's place, I'd be hugely embarrassed, wishing that he would have taken me aside for a moment rather than blowing up publicly.

Overall, dominant personalities like Jon seem to need to run the whole show and he's said as much in interviews over the years. It's not either good or bad, it just is. Maybe Richie just got tired of deferring so completely to Jon's vision. I wonder if doing 'Aftermath' woke Richie up a bit, so-to-speak. Maybe Jon didn't appreciate it if Richie suddenly grew more assertive regarding his place in the band, and so a war of egos ensued.

Funny you say that because, I've said to my friends more than one, I would never work for Jon Bon Jovi, because there's no doubt at some point his need for perfection would probably bring me to tears! And I'm a person who has no problem having heated discussions with my boss. :) Also agree about his "public" display of being pissed off. Just as easy to walk to the person you're hacked at and let him know, no need to include the first few rows of the audience. But, he's always done that and always will and I suppose the band is used to it.

Another question, for the next single, Bon Jovi need Sambora for the video? or include Phil X and Bobby?? ... or just will come Jon, David and Tico???

If it be "Amen", just need the presence of Jon. But if it is "I'm with you"?

There probably won't be a next single.

Why not? the album has been a success, Number 1 on billboard. BWC tour is Number 1 now.

They are touring until the end of the year, so of course there will be new singles to support it......

You must get you passive aggressiveness from your idol.

Richie Sambora ‏@TheRealSambora 1m

Music is a relationship. I've tried my heart out to give you all that is inside me. All I can say is Aftermath is the path to know who I am.

What a twat.

"Seven Years Gone" may become the most factual song of Richies.

That tweet is 7 mins old and its already on here. Are people sitting by twitter waiting for Richies tweets???

Anyway I read that as he didn't like WAN but loved his flop, I mean solo effort.

Hey, you don't mess with Sugar Daddy!

We should send to Richie one tweet with the direction of this site. He would like to participate on his own thread.

Or maybe people are in Twitter and suddently he tweets? It's not like if you are on Twitter you can't do anything else, we can have in our phones, tablets, web browser; I have it pinned in the right side of my screen while I'm doing stuff, for example: http://i.imgur.com/pz3V1GK.jpg

But then you'd open the floodgates to all his Twitter "Jon is Satan and Richie can do no wrong" fans coming and posting and.....oh wait.....I see what you're up to, you sly dog. :)

And let the games begin... People will now start the bitchin' again about how clueless he is and how his tweets don't make sense. They make perfect sense if critics would let go of their pissed-off-ness long enough to even try to understand. But that takes too much effort, I guess. It's probably easier to just read it on the surface and let it reconfirm their own preconceived notions. Notions, I might add, that reflect more about their motivations than Richie's.

3, 2, 1...

To me he is sounding really weird and slightly desperate with these recent Tweets.

I get everything, but this is ridiculous. In life, everything is a consequence of something else. If a vase falls from a balcony onto my head and I die, who's at fault? The owner of the vase, who didn't secure it properly. But hey, come to think of it, if I hadn't met that neighbor and he hadn't engaged into a conversation with me 5 minutes prior to it, I would have just kept on walking and the vase would have fallen onto someone else's head. See where this game leads? Nowhere, but it gets to VERY heavy and dangerous assumptions. And I'm done on this issue.

As for Richie's tweet. Same as before. I don't know anymore. Confused as ****.

Even if it was a decent offering, those tweets still make me cringe. If a record is that good, it will stand up for itself. No Richie, I don't need to listen to sugar daddy to get your "artistic vision and soul"

What a load of cheesy claptrap and that's nothing to do with his no show this summer.

Every time this guy tweets I respect him even less and less. He can really go **** himself, simple as that. Fans are worried about the band and all he do is tweet about his solo stuff, the one that he also doesn't care because he didn't choose the winner for the ERLHTY Contest!

He's just a really old man behaving in a more immature way than a 5 years old.

People started laying into him less than 2 hours after the news hit on April 2nd and haven't let up since. And that's on this thread alone. Does anybody REALLY think he hasn't been aware of the attitude of his "fans" since Day One?

My post was pretty easy to figure out, RE: Richie is an idiot, but this board's been fun because of it. I'm sure if anyone else posted it you might have comprehended it immediately. But since you have some sort of strange, misguided vendetta against me, you decided to use your limited intellect to try to... intimidate me? Something? I'm not sure. Anyways, **** off. Also, your profile picture is really, really, really LAME.

And how can you think his recent bizarre tweets are anything other than some desperate attempt to defend his dishonorable withdrawal from the tour and his subsequent grade-school spat with JBJ? Come on bo. We're just calling it how it is.

Richie isn't some poor defenseless 'artistic soul' who got bullied by that big bad Jonny boy. Just like JBJ isn't just a 'perfectionist' (how could anyone who sings like that and be so lazy with his voice be a perfectionist???). He's just a big asshole. Enough with the euphemisms. Everyone's coming across like a schmuck in this situation. But lately, especially Richie.

I still think his absence is somehow related to his feelings about 'Aftermath' versus 'WAN'.

I remember seeing a YouTube video of some Bon Jovi fans/radio DJs --(it may have been posted here, as well) --where they talked about 'WAN' and Richie's disappearance from the tour. They said they had seen a few shows on the first leg, when Richie was still there, and that they had been standing near the front of stage, where they had a full view of Richie. They had said that when a 'WAN' song came up, that Richie had been rolling his eyes and looking bored. By contrast, they said when he played one of the classic songs with more guitar solos, he just "lit up".

Aside from that issue, there's the matter that, unlike previous tours, in this tour, Richie only once got to sing during a solo spot (and perhaps not coincidentally, it was the last show he did (Lubbock, Texas). and the song was not one of his solo songs, but the old Bon Jovi standby, "IBTFY". I can't help but wonder if the fact he quit after that 'swan song' --is telling.

When Richie was promoting "Aftermath", he kept saying, "I was a front man in all of the bands I was in before Bon Jovi, and I missed it." Whether you love or hate 'Aftermath', Richie apparently feels proud of it and that it most clearly expresses where he is personally and as an artist.

These latest Tweets about 'Aftermath', if read in a defensive way, suggests to me that he is hurt that perhaps a lot of Bon Jovi fans only want to acknowledge him in that role and not as an artist in his own right. They want him back in the band regardless of his reasons for being out of it at the moment.

The vibe I got from 'Aftermath' as a whole was that it was a confessional album, but also a hopeful album. It was personal.

By contrast, 'WAN' seems to me to be an impersonal album, filled with observational songs and platitudes.

Maybe Richie's heart is so attuned to what he wrote in 'Aftermath' that he thinks it should have had a place on this tour. When it didn't (and not only that, but he didn't get /any/ solo time except for the Lubbock show) --maybe that was the last straw for him.

I don't buy it. Richie did try to promote his album last year with shows, right? And it was pretty much a total disaster. So now the WAN tour is somehow responsible for resuscitating his album's relevance? Lame. Not that I could blame him for resenting Jon shoving his own solo album down everyones throats and pretending it was a full band album. But still, it's not a reasonable excuse and Richie still comes off like a huge schmuck.

And I think your opinions of the albums are entirely subjective. Aftermath, for instance, sounds just as trite and uninspired to me as WAN.

This makes a lot of sense. I bet nobody is crying out for more solo Richie on Twitter.

There's a whole group that are doing just that.

But from what I've seen, they're in the minority.

Well, yes, my opinions are subjective, but so are everyone else's.

If Richie is so proud of his solo album and it explains who he really is then why was his solo tour last year such a disaster. If he wants to be the front man it shouldn't care how many people bought tickets to his shows and not have cancelled them. As far as him being upset for not getting to do his solo songs during a Bon Jovi concert - time to grow up. Sorry when I pay outrageous amounts of money to see a Bon Jovi concert I don't want to listen to his solo stuff (even if its one song). Unfortunately for all the concerts I've been to, when Richie sang a solo song that was when people started leaving for the concessions/bathrooms and there was more noise from the audience than was listening to him sing. Still of the opinion that if this was his reason for leaving he should have never signed on to do the tour in the first place. I also don't think that Jon is all too blame, Richie has been with him for 30 years so its no new revelation as to his personality and the way he runs the business - that is what made Richie very wealthy.
His tweets just sound stupid and really make me wonder about his frame of mind at the moment. If he is starting to feel that fans are against him, suck it up and get back on tour!!! I have two concerts coming up and am really looking forward to them - from the videos out there Phil X looks like he is enjoying every moment and I look forward to seeing him. Saw him last tour so its nothing new to me.

*Sniff*. Couldn't give a rat's ass what you think - but its laughable that you think I have some sort of vendetta against you?! Stop smokin' the weed, maaan. Its making you paranoid. Or you really think that highly of yourself. Probably the latter. Pathetic.

It's clear that we have come to the crux of what Richie's problem is - but people forget too easily that Jon allowed Every Road onto the new Bon Jovi album - so I dont believe Richie is pissed about Jon's lack of support.

No. That's non-sense.
Richie was in a 30-year induced sleep phase and only happened to wake up on April 2nd. When that happened, he realized two things:
1) Jon is an asshole, 2) Jon is the root cause of his alcoholism.
That's when his true self came out and we gotta be glad that finally happened.

Other Stupid girl sodo***** by Phil X.

Come on, thats extreme. Without Jon's leadership they still wouldn't be going 30 years later. The band have a lot of gratitude to give to Jon. Since firing Doc, Jon's pretty much set the guys up and the next 2 generations of family for life.

You've just proved my point. Some people here are such nutjobs they would totally post something like that without being sarcastic, as I obviously was. No wonder you thought I was serious, more often than not I'm in doubt myself when I read certain stuff.