Jon Bon Jovi gazes down at his designer boots as though it’s the first time he’s seen them. ‘You like them?’ he says. ‘Stolen!’ Stolen isn’t some hipster label. He means they were stolen from a photo shoot he did a few weeks back. Pointing both thumbs at his leather jacket, he adds. ‘I stole this, too.’
The 62-year-old Bon Jovi frontman circles the carpet of his hotel suite at the Corinthia London like dogs do before deciding where to sit and, once on the sofa, draws his legs in, yogi-style. ‘We’ve met before, right?’
On his group’s 1987 hit ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’, Bon Jovi declared, ‘I’ve seen a million faces and I’ve rocked them all’, so it’s impressive that he recognised this one – not least because 28 years have elapsed since our last encounter. From the side of the stage in Stuttgart, I witnessed a rock star at the peak of his powers, lobbing million-sellers such as ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ and ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ to 75,000 fans who roared every word back at him.
In that moment, there was no reason to believe Bon Jovi wasn’t set to follow his heroes the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen into their dotage. ‘I’m never gonna be the fat Elvis’, he told me – a soundbite he repeats almost three decades later when I ask him if he still maintains his goal of seven per cent body fat. ‘No,’ he says, ‘But I still have a 31-inch waist and I can run five miles.’ How fast? ‘Huh, well, let’s just say I’ve seen baby carriers go past me.
Nevertheless, my genes have been good to me.’ He runs his fingers through his impressive silver mane: ‘I still have the hair.’
Anyone who has seen the new four-part Disney+ documentary Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story will know the singer’s physique is not the reason why he’s slowing down. Decades of touring have robbed him of his singing voice. His atrophied vocal cords won’t close when he tries to sing, robbing him of a fifth of his range.
Prior to an operation in the summer of 2022 by leading throat surgeon Robert Sataloff that would either fix the problem or render it irreparable, we watch Bon Jovi contemplate ‘having someone take a knife to your vocal cords, [then] waking up and it not being there. This thing [the vocal cord] as big as your thumbnail – but 120 people are employed by it.’
On the other hand, he told ITV’s This Morning that he had ‘no issues’ recording the band’s new album Forever, released last Friday, and has even hinted that the band will hit the road again ‘very soon’, so presumably the operation wasn’t a total failure.
The album itself is a purposeful reaffirmation of Jon Bon Jovi’s personal and political values. Topics addressed range from the attack on Capitol Hill by Trump supporters in January 2021 (‘The People’s House’) to his own daughter’s upcoming wedding (‘Kiss The Bride’) and the staying power of his own band (‘Legendary, We Made It Look Easy’).
Indeed, failure seems to be something Bon Jovi sees as a mere test of initiative en route to some grander triumph.
At the dawn of the 80s, he was already planning his ascent, pulling all-nighters at New York’s Power Station – the studio owned by his cousin Tony, where the likes of Chic and Roxy Music recorded albums.
As an errand boy, Bon Jovi watched David Bowie lay down vocals for ‘Let’s Dance’. (‘You spoke when you were spoken to,’ he says.) Bon Jovi recalls the moment Mick Jagger asked him how his demos were going. Within five years, Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi’s third album, released in 1986, was outselling the Rolling Stones by a margin of around eight to one, eventually shifting 16 million copies.
Jon Bon Jovi and family at the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Ohio
He remains aggrieved about the music industry’s reluctance to acknowledge the scale of his group’s impact: ‘Slippery When Wet wasn’t nominated for a single Grammy, go figure!’ he says. He’s similarly irked when talk turns to his band’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 – an honour he feels was insultingly overdue. Accepting his award, his first words were, ‘I didn’t know whether to do the f*** you speech or the thank you speech.’
To understand why Bon Jovi wasn’t taken seriously, you only need to recall the group’s early image: Spandex, cowboy boots, waistcoats on naked flesh. And the hair. So much hair. This may explain his cautious response at the photoshoot hours before our encounter, when he refused to try on any of the clothes sourced for him by YOU’s fashion director. A Louis Vuitton suit on the rail received short shrift, the singer declaring, ‘My grandma would love this.’
Over the course of our conversation, what emerges is the bluntness of someone who once described himself as ‘the CEO of a major corporation who has been running a brand for 25 years’. He used to long for people to compare him to Bruce Springsteen and in Thank You, Goodnight, Springsteen pops up to do it himself, talking about the closeness of their friendship.
The pair take frequent road trips around their native New Jersey, where they ‘talk about all the things we couldn’t talk about to somebody who hasn’t lived it’.
On tour in Japan, 1984, from left: David Bryan, Tico Torres, Alec John Such, Richie Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi
What do people do when they see them out together? ‘Oh, people know us in the area anyway, but when it’s the two of you, it’s almost like sightings of Bigfoot. One time we were driving and at a stop light there were people collecting for war veterans. I had a buck in my pocket, so I rolled down the window.
The man collecting saw it was me, leaned in the window, and he’s like, “Oh, Jon, hi, man, thanks.” Then he saw Bruce in the passenger seat – this old guy ran down the line to the other guys going, “You’re not going to believe who just gave me a buck!”’
Back in what Bon Jovi calls ‘the grey summer of 91’, he could probably have used some wise words from The Boss. This was when the road-weary band ceased contact with each other, with Bon Jovi and his wife (of now 35 years) Dorothea Hurley relocating to Malibu in search of serenity. When they got there, it turned out their neighbours were Robert Downey Jr and Kiefer Sutherland – ‘young men going through the same phase of their lives’.
Also concerning was Bon Jovi’s drinking and his growing neurosis: ‘I was starting to freak out about having to go into elevators.’ He went to see a therapist but arrived 50 minutes late, leaving only ten minutes of his allotted time. On the way back, his resulting rage spiralled to the extent that Hurley had to stop him jumping out of a moving car.
His childhood sweetheart turned lifelong partner features in the most successful Bon Jovi song from this turbulent period. On the million-selling mea culpa ‘Bed of Roses’, he sings about a tryst with ‘some blonde [who] gave me nightmares’, all of which makes him realise ‘the truth is, baby, you’re all that I need’.
Over the years, he’s stopped short of outright denial when asked about on-the-road indiscretions, but in an interview in April he did confess he ‘got away with murder’: ‘I’m a rock and roll star. I’m not a saint. I’m not saying that there weren’t 100 girls in my life. I’m Jon Bon Jovi!’
Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney perform together in the Hamptons, New York, 2012
To watch Thank You, Goodnight is to get a fuller sense of why their marriage lasted – were she given good reason to, Hurley would be no less swift to throw him out of that moving car than stop him from leaving it. She certainly isn’t afraid to dispense home truths. Immediately after a show in Nashville in 2022, Hurley finally tells him what the rest of his band can’t bring themselves to: his voice is no longer up to the job. In that moment he looks bereft. ‘It hurt my heart,’ he tells me.
For Bon Jovi, watching the documentary was ‘like watching the ghost of Christmas future’. Of course, it might be that he’s trying to reconcile the carefree, mic-twirling Bon Jovi with the silver-haired father-of-four choking back tears about the many sacrifices his bandmates made in their early days.
Asked why he started crying at that point, his eyes water all over again. He talks about his drummer Tico Torres, ‘ten years older than me, with a record deal, a wife and a house [who] gave it all up to follow a 21-year-old kid’; David Bryan, who was set to become a doctor, and guitarist Richie Sambora, who had planned to pursue a solo career.
Bon Jovi says the arrogance of youth prevented him from understanding what he was asking of them until years later, when he had something to lose. ‘In some ways, that’s what growing old amounts to: fear for what might have happened and fear of what may yet happen.’
Some of the most poignant scenes in Thank You, Goodnight centre on the departure of Sambora, who cited ‘deep family issues’ as the reason he failed to board the plane for Bon Jovi’s 2013 world tour. The pair convened to watch the documentary at Bon Jovi’s house last year: ‘Just the two of us, late into the night. I gave him a hug and haven’t spoken to him since.’
Bon Jovi’s four children have all swerved the spotlight, except for his actor son, Jake Bongiovi, 22 [Bongiovi is Bon Jovi’s real name] who last month married Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown, 20. ‘It was a very small family wedding and the bride looked gorgeous and Jake is happy as can be,’ Bon Jovi told The One Show. Is it novel to have someone in the family with whom he can compare fame?
‘Millie’s wise beyond her years,’ replies her father-in-law, ‘wiser than I was at her age. She and Jake are figuring things out together. You talk to them and they say, “we’re developing these [ideas for] films together” and I’m taken aback.’
Jake Bongiovi and Millie Bobby Brown, who wed last month, New York, 2022
At the Hamptons on Long Island, a three-hour drive from New Jersey, where Bon Jovi and Hurley spend most of their downtime, they enjoy a close friendship with near-neighbours Paul McCartney and his wife Nancy Shevell. The week Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary came out, the two couples watched it at McCartney’s house.
‘What was that like? Unfathomable!’ he trumpets boyishly, ‘Even now, I refer to him as Beatle Paul.’ To his face? Sure.
One time he says, “Why do you call me Beatle Paul?” And I tell him, “It’s because I’m too old to call you Mr McCartney and I’m too in awe to ever call you Paul, no matter how close we become!” He’s Beatle Paul.’
And he’s OK with that?
‘Yes!’ he replies. ‘But only with me!’
Bon Jovi seems more delighted about this arrangement than any of the awards he craved for so long. He’s earned the respect of the rock stars for whom he was once getting coffee. Now all that remains to be seen is whether his voice will heal enough to survive the three-hour shows to which his fans have become accustomed. ‘In all honesty, I can’t tell you the answer to that,’ he says.
The temptation to borrow a line from his best-known song becomes too much: are we halfway there?
‘I see what you did,’ he says, with a smile. At present, the diary remains empty. But who would dare doubt him?
Jon Bon Jovi’s album Forever is out now. Thank You, Good Night: The Jon Bon Jovi Story is available to watch on Disney+
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Grooming: Katya Thomas at Carol Hayes.