THE BON JOVI UPDATE!

THE BON JOVI UPDATE!

Sylvie Simmons

It’s a tough life, this rock star business. Soon as you get big enough for the champagne and the girls and the offers that come flooding in, you’re too worn out to do anything more than sit by yourself in the corner of a dressing-room like a man who’s spent the past year-and-a-half bench-pressing Meat Loaf and the Fat Boys! When ROCK-SHOTS popped backstage to visit Jon Bon Jovi at his three-trillionth gig on this never-ending Slippery When Wet tour, he was sitting crumpled on a metal chair with only a pop magazine and a oottle of water for company. Heck, even his brother—one of the road crew and an uncanny lookalike from a distance—was having more fun than Jon! “I don’t know what town I’m in half the time,” shrugged Jon, managing a small smile. ‘‘All I know is I’m tired and I want to go home!” Is it really worth it, ROCK-SHOTS asked? ‘‘Sure!” he grinned. ‘‘I wouldn’t change a thing! I remember talking to you years ago when we were still a support band and working our asses off and I said to you this is what I always wanted! Really it’s great, it’s fun!”

Jon Bon Jovi never considered being anything other than a rock star, ever. ‘‘I graduated from high school—barely, but I made it! I had no intention of going to college. To me, college was just one big frat party," he turns up his nose, "because all I'd ever seen of colleges was frat parties because I'd go there and play them! And I thought, what's the use of that? They're just wasting their old man's money and puking on themselves and I said 'No, I don't even want to go and live in one of those places!'

"I didn't want to think about anything but music. This was it! My parents were very supportive since the beginning-at least they knew what bar I was in-because they saw I was so possessed the whole thing from the beginning that they knew I meant it. I was just dead-set on being in a rock 'n' roll band.

"Sure it's a lot of hard work, but it's just like anything else—if you want to be a reporter, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be President of the United States, you've got to want it bad enough. If you want it that bad, you'll get it!"

Jon hasn't got time to run for President this year (and anyway, he's supporting Clint Eastwood should he decide Car-mel's not big enough—"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 U.N.? People would listen!"), but he's certainly reached the top in rock 'n' roll. Slippery When Wet has earned the band over fifty platinum albums each! He'll have to get rid of the little apartment down by the New Jersey beach and get a mansion to put them in!

"No! I don't want a mansion. I want to be comfortable," grins Jon. "I don't want my house to be a museum. I give the plat-inum albums to my parents—they enjoy it! I don't know, I mean, you're real proud of those because you work real hard for them, but I just don't have anywhere to put them anymore. But I had to move from my little apartment anyway. The lease was up." And they kicked you out? "Yeah," Jon pouts. "Kicked out!"

The new place is already getting to be a bit of a shrine, what with the cluster of fans always hanging around outside. Oth-erwise nothing much has changed, he says. They still haven't named a pizza af-ter him at the local parlor or anything ("Not that I know of!" Jon laughs) and the people who used to be his friends are still his friends. It used to piss him off that he can't just pop down to the record store and buy up some albums, or hang out at a club or a bar like he used to, "but it's OK," he shrugs. "It's just a little bit wild.

"Like, I was at my house," he bristles, “and I brought my grandmother oversale's in her 80s—and while I was out, some reporter knocked on my door and told her they were writing an article about me. I came home and she’s all upset. She said, ‘Some reporter was here, they know where you live and they’re going to print a picture of your house.’ And I was pissed! He comes back the next day and gives a letter to the girl that was at my house and says, Tomorrow there will be a picture of your house and the address. This is news, so we’re reporting it.’ And he just walked away.

“I wasn’t going to go to the door but I just lost my cool. I said, ‘OK, jerk, I’ll talk to you if you do me one favor: at least don’t print my address.’ He printed my address. 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.”

When he was last in England, one reporter desperate for an interview actually hid in the men s room and started asking Jon questions over the cubicle wall! Outside on the streets, girls clawed at him, one stole his favorite jacket! How does Jon stay such a nice normal guy with all this going on around him all the time?

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

“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’ve done it for a million miles, but I can’t do it anymore. So the plane is worth spending the money for, because you can go to bed if you want to or stay up if you want to. On a bus, if one guy’s up you all stay up!”

If ROCK-SHOTS were to wave its magic wand and whisk Jon away from all this for the day, what would he like to do? Laze around in a jacuzzi while a flock of girls tend to his every need?

“No!” swears Jon. “That wouldn’t be comfortable for me at all! If I get a day off I tend to work.” Jon and Richie Sambora got two such days off in L.A. not so long ago and the jacuzzies bubbled away forlornly without them while they wrote songs for Charlie Sexton, Ted Nugent, Bonnie Tyler, Belinda Carlisle, Loverboy and Cher. A regular writing factory!

“Yeah, kind of,” smiles Jon. “I think they came out good actually. The one for Ted Nugent is real good. I’m going to rip it off and keep it for myself!” As for the next Bon Jovi album, “ft’s too early to say yet.” They’ve been recording some of the shows on this tour but not “for a live album,” he says.

The only hints he'll give are that he’s been learning to play harmonica (“from one of those cassette tapes that teach you to play harp for $2.99!”) and he’s been listening a lot to the latest John Waite album and his Beatles CD collection, and that he and Richie have been jotting down “a lot of ideas and pieces of songs—we played a couple at soundcheck and everybody got real excited about them, the road crew and all who’d never heard them, so that was a good sign; I think we’ve got some real good stuff,” and Richie might well be taking lead vocal on one of them: “He’s a great singer, isn’t he? All my guys sing better than I do! Every one of them could sinq lead.”

Which might take just a little bit of the pressure off Jon Bon Jovi. The never-ending tour’s still rolling along—after headlining the prestigious Castle Donington Festival in Britain—90,000 fans!—it’s over the other side of the world for Australia and Japan again. “I want to go home!” he gives a small laugh. “I haven’t seen my parents in awhile and my friends, you know.” Not to mention his pet cars! “I have an old Camaro, a ’69 Camaro, a ’58 Corvette and a Jeep. I like to play with my cars,” his voice trails off. “But it seems like whenever I hit a day off I go into a studio somewhere and do something. Or you sleep or you eat, because those are the rare things.”

He still wakes up in the night sometimes and thinks none of this has really happened, that he’s still sweeping the floors in some studio somewhere or playing in a bar or opening for 38 Special. “You think that it’s a good record, but we never expected this\" He looks genuinely surprised at the success.

So now he’s at the top, what’s his goal today? “Do it again!” Jon gives the famous puppydog grin. And go through all this again? “Absolutely!” says Jon. “I’m just getting warmed up!”