BON JOVI'S View From The Top

BON JOVI'S View From The Top

Sylvie Simmons

It’s the meanest part of midsummer. The air smells like a tramp pissed in a Turkish bath. It’s still in the 90s outside, and inside there’s 18,000 people layered like angel's food cake in an arena outside Washington, D.C. An exuberant bunch, good natured; they’re not even rude to the opening act, Keel. It’s Keel’s first night on the tour; Bon Jovi have lost count. The crowd’s half U.S. Party Animal; the other half’s girls. . .smiley, hairbrushed, dressed-in-white girls, flicking Bics, bouncing in their seats, and generally adding to the all around heat and damp.

Meanwhile, in that whitewashed universe they call backstage, David Bryan is doing the rounds, all chatty. Richie Sambora is posing with a bunch of meetthe-group prizewinners who gape at the groupies, all tight-white and blonde. I don’t know where Tico Torres and Alec John Such are, but Jon’s hidden away somewhere warming up his voice while a security man in yellow (the fattest thing I’ve seen in my life, like the sun fell out of the bleeding sky or something) heaves himself around like a snowplow moving us from one place to the other and back again. Outside, on the ramp, people are killing for backstage passes.

Back in the arena it’s smoking. Dramatic intro music is pouring out of the speakers, a keyboard rises out of the dry ice, with David attached. There’s Richie in a corner in a long coat, some fireworks, explosions and general mayhem—and here’s Jon, all in black right up to his headband, wearing a black leather jacket with a “Ban The Bomb” sign on the back. The crowd’s going crazy as Jon runs to one side, runs on the spot, gesticulates and runs around some more, grinning like the cat that got the cream and got laid all at the same time, taking bouquets and touching hands, kind of like those days when Bruce first learned to walk on the water. And, as the crowd sings just about every song, he stands there and listens. Not the hand-on-hip this-is-only-what-ldeserve cockiness of a Dave Lee Roth; no, it’s with more of a fascinated awe. A kind of disbelieving delight, like he’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll tell him it was all a dream and they’ve still got to open for Loverboy or something too horrible to think about. But for now he’s gonna enjoy it. . .

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think none of this has really happened and when you wake up in the morning they’ll tell you’ve got to open for Loverboy, I ask?

“Oh yeah, all the time.” By a sheer effort of will, Jon Bon Jovi manages a smile. Two hours after the show began he’s crumpled in the corner of the dressing room, like a cigarette with half the tobacco poked out. The man is exhausted. His voice sounds like that of a good-natured zombie with its throat flaked off. “Or to think about how it’s gotten to where it’s gotten. It’s a bit wild.” He gives an embarrassed little shrug. A nice guy, Jon Bon Jovi. The kind of guy you’d like to imagine your favorite rock star was like, back when you imagined these things.. . the kind of guy, life being what it is, who rarely makes it to megastar.

So what happened? Did the Lord zap a few more platinum albums down Bruce’s way, miss and hit Bon Jovi’s house? Did they know when they were making Slippery When Wet that all this would happen?

“God, no! You think that it’s a good record, but we never expected this. Eight point three million,” his voice trails off, lost in thought. “Who could ever think that would happen? It’s incredible.” A truck pulled up when they were in Canada the other day and unloaded 60 platinum albums between them. Just for Canada! By the end of the tour, Jon reckons, they’ll have about 50 apiece. He’s going to have to get rid of the little apartment down by the beach and find a bigger place to put them all.

“I’ll give them to my parents, I guess,” Jon smiles. “Anyway, I don’t have that place any more. My lease was up and they took it back.” Kicked out? Surely not! “Yeah, kicked out, can you believe it?” I’ll believe anything of New Jersey; they still haven’t named a pizza after him (everything on it, Bon Jovis on the side) at his local Jersey pizza parlor.

Forced to buy a mansion, then?

“No! I want to be comfortable. I don’t want to live in a museum.” Though it is getting to be a bit of a shrine, what with the fans hanging out outside, and it didn’t help that a local paper printed his address. A reporter came by, terrorized Jon’s grandmother, and came back again witn a letter saying, “Tomorrow there will be a picture of your house and the address; this is news so we’re reporting it.” “And I wasn’t going to go to the door,” says Jon, “but I just lost my cool. I said ‘Okay, jerk-off, I’ll talk to you if you do me one favor: at least don’t print my address.’ ” They printed his address.

"Hold onto that sonofabitch! That's what goes through my mind! Because if you fall, then it's all over!"

"I love jumping in the crowd. I got my ass kicked out there tonight! I'm falling apare look at me!"

That’s success for you.

“Those are the things that piss me off. When I’m at home, I want to watch TV and cut the grass and be a slob—normal kind of stuff. That’s when it gets me down. Otherwise I don’t mind it. It’s OK to go out and people say ‘Hi,’ and you say ‘Hi,’ you know. It’s cool.”

Hell, when he was in England last, one reporter was so desperate for an interview he hid in a cubicle in the men’s room and started interviewing Jon over the dividing wall! Eight point three million kind of does things to people. How the hell do you stay normal with record companies kissing your ass, groupies trying to kiss everything else, guys spying on you in the bathroom and 18,000 people a night looking up at you like you could make the crippled walk?

“I don’t pay attention to it,” Jon shrugs. “That’s really what it is. Like, I don’t walk around in diamonds with an entourage and a limousine. We still drive in a van. I drive my own car to the airport.”

To your private jet, though.

“To my private jet, yes. But if it wasn’t for that jet I could never be out here. I couldn’t be on a bus anymore and singing two hours every night and running around and then getting on a bus to drive eight more hours. I’ve done it. I did for a million miles, but I can’t do it anymore. So the plane is worth the money, bee jse you can go to bed if you want to or ;tay up if you want to. On a bus, if one c oy's up you all stay up, or else everybody sitting on your bunk drinking.”

You’d need some sleep to do 'hat show: two hours running Lord only ki >ws how many miles backward and for ard across the stage (he’s getting some sneakers sent over from Europe w h a pedometer built in, so you’ll know text time!) and singing your guts out, f ing through the air on a rope, leaping i o a scrum of bodies in the front row and oming out scratched and shirtless. You’d need something, anyway. Jon doest do drugs. Then again, they always say people from New Jersey don’t need to: nee there’s so many weird, free chemicals in the factoryized air.

“Yeah,” Jon grins. “Many a night they’ve looked at me and said ‘Man, you’re stoned,’ and I’m not, so I believe that stuff about New Jersey. But fear is the greatest thing to keep you going. Nervous adrenalin.”

Maybe he thinks if he stops he’ll never start again, but even on the rare day off, Jon’s working. He and Ritchie have set up their own flaming writing factory, delivering songs on their rest days to everyone from Charlie Sexton to Ted Nugent, Bonnie Tyler, Cher, Belinda Carlisle and even Loverboy. Has the boy no shame?!

“Loverboy’s is their first single, so’s Ted’s. Charlie’s still looking for more material and Bonnie’s was just an album cut.” And Cher’s, so Joe Lynn Turner told METAL, is a “Zeppeiinesque remake” of her old pop hit, “Bang Bang”!

“I don’t know if it was supposed to be a Zeppeiinesque remake, but it sort of has a duh-duh duh-duh dum dum dum thing to it.” Jon sounds passably Zeppish. “And I think that’s why we got involved in the production, because she wanted to do that with it. It came out good for what it is.”

What’s the song you did for Nugent like?

“Good, real good,” Jon beams. “I’m going to rip it off and keep it for myself! It’s in the ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’ sort of vein—a love song.”

Love? So Ted’s wimping out, then?

“Definitely not! He’s still a wildman.”

And what about stuff for your next album?

“We haven’t sat down to write a lot—a lot of ideas and pieces of songs is all we have really. We played a couple at soundcheck last week up in Canada and everybody got real excited about them— the road crew, who’d never heard them—so that was a good sign. That’s the trouble really: time.

“When you do get some time off you eat or sleep, because those are the rare things. But it seems whenever I hit a day off I go into the studio and do other people’s stuff.”

I thought rock stars were born to spend their time off in the jacuzzi having their toes rubbed.

“That wouldn’t be comfortable,” Jon splutters, his own toes modestly covered in black boots. “It’s best for me to work.” Even if he looks like he’s working himself into the ground. The man is pale as a slug.

“I want to go home,” Jon says in a near whisper. Home is, geographicallyspeaking, just down the road on their private jet, but he won’t get back there for a few months yet. There’s a handful more East Coast dates, then over to England to headline the Castle Donington Metal Festival, then Australia and Japan and Hawaii and—Jon seems to wither at the thought.

“I don’t walk around in diamonds with an entourage and a limosine. I drive my own car to the airport... to my private jet. ”

“It’s been a long tour”—he’s too worn out to sigh, even. “It’s been over a year already. I’m tired, real tired, and if you ask me now, all I want to do is go home, watch some TV and sleep. But,” a slow smile creeps over his face, “this is what I always said I wanted. And we’ve worked our asses off for it. It’s great. It’s fun.” And the light in the eyes dies down again.

Is there anything he’s always wanted to do that he can do now that he’s got the clout of a megastar?

“Well, I want to be able to sit down and play the piano instead of paw at the piano. And I really want to learn how to play the harmonica. I bought one of those cassette tapes that teach you how to play harp for $2.99, you know, but I want to learn it properly. I just want to get to be a better musician. I play good enough to write songs, but I’m not a great player—and I want to be."

“I always wished the guys did that when I was at those shows, you know, touched you, said ‘hi’... ”

I noticed there was a mobile recording tonight’s show. Are they planning a live album to give them some breathing space for that sort of thing, then?

“Not a live album. We’re storing material, maybe some B-sides.” Like on the single they released in Britain, to coincide with their Donington Festival appearance, which was quite a coup for the band. Only a couple of years ago, METAL readers will recall, Bon Jovi were at the bottom of the bill, dodging bottles of piss and a pig’s head (“Where do you get a pig’s head? And how do you smuggle it into a show??” Jon reasonably asked back thenj-and other traditional forms of British hospitality. This year they were back as headliners'. I remember interviewing Jon one time and he told me he loved going on first ’cause he could kick the headliner’s ass! What now?

“Hey, those kids are tough'. They’ve been out in the mud all day, they’re drunk, they’ve pissed in the bottles, they just want to go home. And I have to make sure they don’t want to go home. It’s still a fight.”

Does it feel a bit weird to have won the record-selling fight so quick?

“No, we worked hard. Sooner or later we hoped it would happen, we wanted it to happen, and we were ready to fight for it. This is what I’ve always wanted since I was in my first band with the kid across the street who played guitar, and a drummer who could almost keep a beat and a bass player who had a bass but didn’t really know how to play it. We put Beatles tapes on and tried to sing to them. I was dead set on being in a rock ’n’ roll band;

this was it.

“And it’s like anything else: if you want to be a reporter, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be President of :he United States, you’ve got to want it bad enough. If you want it that bad you’ll get it.”

President of the United States w uld probably be easier. A lot of people may want to string up Reagan, but they’ve never actually done it—Jon gets stuck on a rope every night and hauled from one end of the arena to the other. What r ?ust go through the guy’s head when lie’s hovering above those thousands of upturned faces all shiny and wet with awe?

“Hold onto that sonofabitch, that's what goes through my mind!” Jon laughs. Because if you fall, then it’s all over!

“Sure it’s a great feeling, that emotion you feel from everybody. That’s why we still do it. Same as it’s emotional whe> the kids sing. When they sang ‘Warned,’ that’s what it’s all about. When the do that you don’t care that you’ve been on the road for 15 months and your th oat is a piece of hamburger by now and all you want to do is go home, because it’s worth it!

“I love jumping in the crowd. I gc my ass kicked out there tonight! I’m fa ling apart: look at me.” He shows me a giant bruise on his shoulder and fingernail scratches forming a roof over his nipple. “They got my shirt and shit! But it’s fun,

I like it, that’s why I do it, and it makes the kids happier.

“I always wished the guys did that when / was at those shows, you know, touched you, said ‘hi,’ gave you the nr crophone. There was a couple of guys i: the front row who looked like they were in a club band here in Washington, so I pave them the microphone. Now they go home and say ‘Hey, I sang with the i and tonight,’ and that’s what it’s all about.”

But with success a lot of people change. They don’t want to be touhed by the grubby paws of the masses Jon just grunts. He’s even thinking of fitting in a few club dates. . .

But for now, the jet’s waiting the band’s pacing outside—they’re Closer than ever, Jon says, after all this me: “We’re more than friends, we’re bt others"—and Jon’s beginning to look a bit fuzzy at the edges. The best bit about all this travelling around, he says, is you learn that people in general are really nice; I guess the world isn’t as bf d as we’re brought up to believe it is.”

A final question. You used to say, when you were at the bottom, your goal was to l get to the top. What is it now that you’re K there? “To do it again,” Jon grins.