Very very interesting read, goes into greater detail than the usual ones. I'm sorry if it has been posted, I couldn't find it. I'm pasting it in here for the ones who can't access the article online, would be a 2 part post, it's long
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jo...life-2hmr8ns3d
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Jon Bon Jovi: ‘These three years have been the worst of my life’
Record company woes and a guitarist gone Awol are among the setbacks that inspired a new album
Will Hodgkinson
October 8 2016, 12:01am,
The Times
Occupying two floors of a nondescript block in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, the Power Station is where countless pop and rock stars from the late 1970s onwards laid down their biggest hits. Over the past three decades Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and David Bowie have passed through this legendary recording studio, and today the Power Station’s former tea boy is reminiscing about the two highly formative years he spent working inside its wood-panelled walls.
“I was here when David Bowie made Let’s Dance,” says Jon Bon Jovi, a lean, handsome 54-year-old, those famous teeth, so redolent of American health and vitality, as pronounced as ever. “I had to bring him a Heineken. I was here when Madonna was in the studio upstairs, recording Like a Virgin.”
Jon Bongiovi, as he was then known, worked at the Power Station from 1980, straight out of high school, until launching Bon Jovi in earnest in 1982. The stadium rock band went on to sell 130 million albums and establish its frontman as one of the biggest stars in the world, famous for such fist-in-the-air anthems as Livin’ on a Prayer, You Give Love a Bad Name and Bad Medicine. Before all that, he was just a New Jersey teen playing in cover bands and dreaming of the big time.
“My uncle came to New Jersey to see my band,” says Bon Jovi, as we take a tour of the studio he worked in 36 years ago. “He told my dad, ‘The band sucks but your kid’s got something’ and offered me a job. I soon learnt that the bigger the star, the nicer the person. I remember getting out of a cab on the day John Lennon had been shot. I was counting my change on the street to pay the guy and behind me there were all these flashbulbs going off. It was the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger comes up, puts his arm around me, and says, ‘Here’s my new band.’ Diana Ross yelled at me. I went in to deliver whatever I was told to deliver and she chewed me a new ass. Today I’d like to tell her to go get my coffee.”
He did not, however, pick up tips from watching Bowie record vocals for Let’s Dance. “I wasn’t close enough to witness the inner workings of a record, nor would I allow a kid today to sit in the studio while I’m working out the intimacies of a song. I was only breathing the same air as these people. My job was to get the hamburgers and park the car.”
Bon Jovi is in a mood to look back because, after three years of what he describes as “a living hell, the worst of my life”, he’s back on fighting form with This House Is Not for Sale. As the title suggests, the album is something of a mission statement for Bon Jovi. Three and a half decades on from first strutting out of New Jersey, looking very much like the blue-collar suburbanites who would go on to make up the bulk of their audience, Bon Jovi have reclaimed their role as the go-to guys for straight-up heartland rock — big on passion, low on pretentiousness.
“The bumper sticker for this album would read, ‘Out of great pain comes great songs,’ ” says Bon Jovi, settling into a black leather sofa in a back room of the Power Station. “If everything had been peachy-clean, I wouldn’t have known what to write about.”
What, then, has been so bad about the past three years?
“The big one: at a concert in Calgary in 2013 I look over to my right and there is a blank spot where the guitarist should be,” says Bon Jovi, referring to the sudden disappearance of founder member Richie Sambora. “The album’s in at No 1, the concert is sold out, and he doesn’t show up. And there was no big fight. We haven’t seen him since.”
Sambora has since stated that he wanted to spend more time with his daughter, which seems a strange reason to leave moments before the 21st concert of a 101-date tour. I ask Bon Jovi, who has written a ballad called Living with the Ghost about Sambora’s leaving, why he thinks the guitarist so integral to Bon Jovi’s power-rock sound felt the need to bolt.
“I haven’t done enough interviews to give you an answer to that,” he says. “There has been a history, let’s leave it at that. The last time Richie had been in rehab [replacement guitarist] Phil X learnt all the songs, so I called Phil and thank God he was available. From then on I didn’t have time to breathe or grieve, and only at the end of the tour was I able to come to terms with what had happened. I was blindsided by it.”
Then there was the fall-out with Mercury, the label Bon Jovi had been with for their whole career. In 2013 their deal was up and the label wanted to negotiate a new one, giving it greater ownership over the band’s recordings. Bon Jovi responded by handing them a contract-filler of an album called Burning Bridges, the title song for which goes: “After 30 years of loyalty they let you dig the grave.” The album came with no credits, no lyrics, no photographs and no videos, just the bare minimum of music required to be legitimately called an album. As Bon Jovi admits, “I might as well have handed it to them in a brown paper bag.”
I look over to my right and there’s a blank spot where the guitarist should be
Bizarrely, This House Is Not for Sale is coming out on Mercury. What rebuilt the bridge that the band and the label had just burnt down? “We pouted and stamped our feet until we came to a compromise. For all of 2014 I was doing nothing, coming down from everything and wondering: what’s the motivation, do I have anything left to say? But I never wanted to stop doing this, I never wanted to leave Mercury, and eventually I understood the label’s position. The business has changed and we had to come up with a different deal, one I could live with and they could accept.”
As we go back over Bon Jovi’s story, you realise how hard it must be to give up life in one in one of the world’s biggest rock bands. “When it began, I never dreamt of rock star status because it was unattainable,” he says, leaning ever farther into the sofa and radiating that special confidence only lead singers of successful rock bands have. “I would look at posters of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith on my bedroom wall and think: where do they come from? But I liked the music, I knew what it did to my heartbeat, and learning to play guitar was interesting. From then on, each step — playing in a backyard, a block dance, a high school, a nightclub, a radio show — made you feel like you were the Rolling Stones. Then it was Slippery When Wet [the third album, released in 1986, 12 million copies sold] and we said to each other, ‘Well, we’ve made it.’ In retrospect it was just another step on the journey.”
Being from New Jersey, the place New Yorkers laugh at when they want to feel superior, proved central to Bon Jovi. It gave them both a will to succeed and somewhere from which to position themselves as the band of the people.
“You have New York, the centre of the world. Thirty-five minutes away is where we grew up. Coming to the city was intimidating to say the least. You could rarely get a gig. I showed up at [the legendary punk club] CBGB’s on the wrong night. Growing up in the shadows was a good thing for us.”
Bon Jovi has always, as the name suggests, been Jon Bon Jovi’s band. There’s no question about who is in charge, but I’m interested to know how much the keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres and, until 2013, guitarist Richie Sambora have contributed.
“They came into the organisation knowing the situation,” he says, sounding for a moment less like a stadium rocker and more like a chief executive assessing his company’s human resources policy. “They were not sidemen and everyone got paid handsomely, but it was always my vision. Thankfully they stayed with me over the speed bumps, and my gratitude to Dave and Richie and Tico is for ever . . . but not so much that it couldn’t go on without any one of them.”
Success took its toll. When Bon Jovi’s 232-date world tour for their album New Jersey ended in early 1990, each band member flew home on his own private jet. When Jon Bon Jovi cut his famous tresses in 1992, it made CNN headlines. How can you prepare for that level of fame?
“You can’t. Here comes a manager with a contract and you don’t know what you’re signing. Here’s someone saying, ‘Oh and write another hit by next year. Good luck, kid.’ It’s the old adage. You get enormous success, you burn out, you break up, and then you’re Guns N’ Roses and it takes you 25 years to do a reunion tour. When we started we were in a rock band for the right reasons, it was us against the world. And then it becomes this thing, and it goes to your head. I went to see Jersey Boys recently and it’s all there. This guy’s doing drugs, this guy’s not, this guy’s in with the wrong crowd . . . boom, it falls apart. If you’re lucky, you get back together. If not, at least you’ve got a great play to write.”
10-10-2016, 12:45 PM
