Bon Jovi: Neither Pin-Ups Nor Wimps!

Bon Jovi: Neither Pin-Ups Nor Wimps!

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

So here they are in England for a tour that sold out in six hours flat. Here’s Alex John Such, doing the U.S. equivalent of the Pope kissing the soil and baring his butt at a gaggle of Northern girls! Here’s a roadie, doling out backstage passes to girls who bare theirs back! Here’s David and Richie and Tico, and here’s Jon, running from some megahormoned harpies who want to rip his clothes off! Still, last time Bon Jovi played England he was running from the pig’s-head (“Pig’s head? Where do you get a pig’s head? And how the hell do you get it into a gig?”) and the piss-bottles that unbelievers threw onstage; Jon, who wasn’t “into” sports at school, is getting jolly good at moving fast. Like to the top of the international rock superstardom league, for instance. Right now everyone wants a bit of Bon Jovi; heck, Jon couldn’t even go to the bathroom at his own party the other day without a journalist hiding in the next cubicle and trying to sneak an interview . . . .!

“We haven’t had a day off in over a year,” Jon leans back in the chair, parking his groovy cowboy boots on the table. “But that’s fine; I’m not complaining. It’s what I wanted all along, wasn’t it? To be a real touring rock band. I’m not into that rock star thing, you know, sitting around in the jacuzzi waiting for the limo to take me to my one gig a year. I love this shit!” Jon beams, and I forgive him at once for ever having had a cardboard guitar called Elton.

When Jon was 14, he was playing in bars he wasn’t old enough to get through the front door of; when he was 18 he was sweeping floors in a recording studio (“I was one hell of a floor sweeper!”) and hobnobbing with the likes of Billy Squier and Southside Johnny. He once saved Mick Jagger from an evil paparazzi person. Which all goes to show this is one of those rare beasts in the business who actually lives this rock ’n’ roll lark: eats Marshalls for breakfast, monitors for lunch, dreams stage-lights—even after having toured with Ratt and 38 Special! And all this touring has turned Bon Jovi into a powerful and raucous bunch of rock ’n’ rollers, a long way from that “Duran Duran of Metal” tag that Jon’s puppydog good-looks landed them with in the beginning. It’s their first time headlining: “At last! After four years of opening for everyone else and working our butts off, we get our chance in the limelight, and I think we’re ready!” As they should be. Slippery When Wet went gold in just nine days.

"I finally got to pull Clint Eastwood out of the closet!"

The album, produced by Bruce Fairbairn of Black ’N’ Blue fame, shows the band at their most New Jersey-ish ever. Jon lives down by the boardwalk in Springsteen Country (a tiny apartment with views of the beach where Jack Nicholson used to lifeguard).

“Any band that comes from New Jersey,” says Jon, “is going to have to get used to being compared to Springsteen. When I first talked to you, our first record, I just said: ‘We’re from America, period. We’re an American band.’ Because if you say you come from Jersey, because of Bruce you immediately get thrown into that kiss-of-death thing of, ‘Omigod! Another Springsteen! and no one would have even heard the first album!

“With the second album we established ourselves a bit more, so we said to people, ‘Yeah, we’re from Jersey.’ But now—-I tell you, the one thing I’ve learned after travelling around the world is that I dig being from Jersey, I really do! And I don’t care who knows it now!”

There seems to be something about this Jersey place. It seems to have a bit more going for it, something a bit more stubbled and substantial and soulful and other good “S” things than other parts of the country.

“It’s hard to explain, isn’t it?” Jon nods. “But there is this attitude in Jersey that I’ve never seen from anywhere else. Not L.A., because they have their own attitude, and not in London, because they have theirs. Maybe in Jersey they’re a little more black; there’s more of that black sort of soul. But there’s also an attitude that it’s more important to play a song than to do some over-the-top Hollywood production number with all the heart taken out. Instead of writing something on the side of a mountain, we’d rather write it on the wall, if you know what I mean!

“I would say this album—the lyrics especially—very much reflect me, my character, more than anything else I’ve ever done. If anyone wants to find out what I’m really about, they can play this album.

“Basically, if I sat down and looked at the past albums, it’s like I can see where I was growing up, with all the trials and tribulations I was going through—you know, where you sign a contract on the back of a car so that some scumbag owns you for the rest of your life and you’ve got to deal with that, or you’re losing friends while you’re gaining friends and you’ve got to deal with that, too. A lot of things start happening to a band as they start to sell a million records. It gets funky\" Jon runs his hands through his curls. “But after so long, you realize what you are and who you are and you accept it. And the best thing about it is we’re having fun.

“This time when we sat down to write we said, ‘Yeah, we’re having a hell of a good time, let’s write because we’re having fun, and let’s write for the live show,’ and that’s what we did. It’s like the record of a three-year-long party!”

One of those parties your mother warned you about, from the sound of things.

“It is a dirty record,” chuckles Jon. “It was conceived—hee heel— in a strip bar in Vancouver. The album was going to be called Wanted Dead Or Alive, and Richie and I were sitting at the bar drinking and looking at Polaroids, (not those sorts of Polaroids; potential cover photos merely!) and we were there to pick up these girls that we knew. One of them is up there stripping and dancing to our music, and she’s got nothing on”—an occupational hazard of stripping—‘‘and she’s in a plexi-glass shower soaping her body up and we’re not paying any attention and she’s doing everything short of banging on the walls of this shower! So you’ve got half a load on and you’re looking at these Polaroids and I’m going, ‘Oh, I bet that’s wetV One thing led to another and the slippery and the soap and Slippery When Wet came. And we just decided that would be fun, and it would capture the fun attitude far more than Wanted Dead Or Alive, which just made it a little too serious.” Not to mention a little too much like a 38 Special album. Now it just sounds like Whitesnake!

“Now you mention it, yeah. But, you know, I’d never even heard of Whitesnake before we played with them! I just didn’t think of that at the time.”

They recorded in Vancouver, not as an act of charity towards the Canadians who’ve had to suffer Loverboy so long and so bravely, but as a nifty way of getting away from record companies breathing “Write another ‘Runaway’ ” down their necks. Jon: “Not that I would ever let that happen. It was good—no pressures. It was all so easy. I don’t know what it was— something in the air or something—but Richie and I sat down and started writing and didn’t stop. We wrote 35 songs real quickly and demoed 14 of them. The rest just didn’t make it and they’ll die somewhere and we’ll never see them again, because we don’t go back to the stuff we rejected.”

There was this little pizza parlor around the corner from the studio where kids hung out like kids do outside pizza parlors, everyone knowing that if you sniff the oregano of 280 pizzas you receive a hallucinogenic buzz not unlike that from smelling grade-two-octane gasoline pumps. “We rounded them all up and dragged them back to the studio and asked them what they thought. And I gave a tape to my younger brother Anthony, who played it to his pals at school. And we went with what they chose. It was better than having businessmen decide! And I guess they must have chose right, judging by how well it’s doing.”

Jon chose Fairbairn to produce after speaking to Tom Werman and Tom Allom and even the legendary “Countless Others.”

“I was listening to my compact disc in my room, trying to pick out the third single off the 7800° album, and I threw in a cassette of a band called Black ’N’ Blue. I liked it so much production-wise that I put on our CD again and I said, ‘Wait a minute! This doesn’t sound as good as that cassette! What’s the matter?’ And that’s when I realized it was time for a change. So I met up with the producer, and he just had that same Jersey gutter attitude as us”—not to mention that Jersey name, BRUCE—“and it really worked out.”

So there’s all sorts of stuff on the album—the hard rock, the pop, the ballads, even an acoustic Clint Eastwood thingie, Jon’s favorite track. “I finally got to pull Clint Eastwood out of the closet!” beams Jon. I’m still figuring on a way of getting him in one. Anyway, Jon thinks Clint’s “the greatest,” a great influence as far as the spurs and the cowboy longcoats go, and would have voted for Clint as mayor of Carmel if he didn’t live in Jersey. “But I’ll vote for him for President! I’m sure that’s not too far in the future. Now he’s making decisions about ice cream parlors and post offices. But can you imagine Clint walking into the United Nations? People would listenV'

I’m off to imagine Clint for a few minutes, so here’s a long Jon quote to keep you going until I get back:

“It doesn’t lose any of its glamor when you get to be successful yourself. None of it is as romantic as you think it is when you’re a kid, anyway. You think when you sign the contract that the guy pulls out a drawer full of money and that’s it, and it’s much more hard work than that. But I like hard work. I like a good fight. I always like someone saying, ‘You can’t have it!’ because that only makes me work harder. The second anyone hands me anything, I'll lay around like a fat old slob and do nothing—but make me fight for it and I’ll go out and kick anyone's ass! Tell me I’ve got to play below four other bands and I'll say, ‘Yeah? Come out and watch this!’ That’s the aggression that powers the band. It’s not money, it’s not record companies, it’s not any of that shit—I don’t live in the big house with the electric gate; I’ve just got a crummy little one-bedroom apartment. That’s not what I’ve ever been about, nor ever will be about—it’s just the idea of playing. We did that so much!

“I'm still nervous when I go out there.

I was nervous before we went on today. It’s cold out and I feel miserable and hungover and jet-lagged and I want to go to bed. But playing is so cool it’s all worthwhile. It’s the coolest thing!”

Back again, to tell you about the Coolest Thing That’s Ever Happened to Bon Jovi: getting to play with Southside Johnny & The Jukes at their 10th anniversary party at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park!

“I was in Vancouver doing the album and I read in Billboard that the Jukes were having their 10th anniversary party at this little club in Jersey and Bruce was going and Little Steven, and I got really homesick! I wanted to be there. Because those are the bands that I had grown up listening to. So I called up our office and said, ‘Make a plaque of both our gold albums and send it to Southside and write on it, ‘Happy Anniversary, these would never have been possible without you.’ And he said that that was the only gold record he ever got! He said, ‘Why don’t you come down and play?, and I said, ‘Play? you bet!’ And we sang five or six songs and it was just the greatest thing in the world! That’s better than all the money or cars or all the rest of the shit that comes with it!”

One of the best bits about success, that sort of thing. And being able to discover and nurture new bands yourself. First came Cinderella (“I couldn’t get involved too much there because we’d just started our tour”) and now, as part of his plan to colonize New Jersey, comes locals Skid Row. “The guitar player is one of my very best friends. He’s 20 years old and he’s just always been there when I needed a hand or something. When he started playing guitar, he used to come over and watch me play, and then six months later he blew me away and kept going! He’s going to be a big star. I’m going to be in on this right from the ground—and I think it’s going to develop big."

But for now it’s Bon Jovi and more touring; more late nights, more hangovers, more running from the rabid girls (or passing them over to Alex). “Call me what you like,’’ says Jon, “but don’t call me a sexsymbol.”

“The attitude of this band has always been: don’t ever get your feet off the ground.” Easily said, but not so easily done when half the world wants to stroke his (steady on!) ego:

“If that happens I’ll just go home and listen to my father give me some shit about something! I’d rather do that than hang around people who just want to tell you that you’re great! You’ll never see any of us in The Limelight or in any of the New York clubs. It’s not what we do. I’d rather be in a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee than with my ‘entourage.’

“We’re not an image-conscious band. We never wanted to be pin-ups and we’ve never let it happen. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d have played that game. We’re a rock band!"