Jon Bon Jovi: He'll Be There For You...

 Almost 25 years after his band hit it big, the rock star tells the Star his first responsibility is to his fans

The Jon Bon Jovi who’s playing the Rogers Centre on July 20-21 has learned a lot in the quarter-century he’s been fronting one of the most popular bands in modern musical history.

Or maybe he hasn’t.

“In the early days, I thought I had to be the one who cut the vein open and bled on the stage or the audience wouldn’t come back. I don’t do that anymore.”

But less than a week after telling me that in an interview, he got so carried away during a concert on home turf at the Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey that he tore a calf muscle and had to finish the evening in visible pain.

“My first responsibility is to my fans. I never want to disappoint them,” he insists, and so, on July 10, he kept on singing the anthemic “Livin’ on a Prayer,” including its lyric that could define this driven artist’s relationship with his public.

“We’ve got each other and that’s a lot.”

Rock ’n’ roll is an art form built on excess and Bon Jovi’s success has been no exception to that rule.

But he’s never been connected to the worlds of sex and drugs. For him, the music has always been enough.

“I think I realized early on that ‘beat the devil’ wasn’t that great a game to play. That stuff just wasn’t inside me. Heroin never appealed to me.”

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have his own addictions.

“Driving my voice was always my demon, my dark thing, even if it was a product of innocence,” he recalls. “I don’t blame the record companies and the promoters for pushing me. They were taking every opportunity instead of seeking out the best ones.

“They went for ‘get while the getting’s good’ and when you’re 25, you say, ‘That’s cool, man, let’s go for it.’ If I was a victim, I was a willing one.”

Right after they hit it really big in 1986 with their third album, Slippery When Wet, they went on an exhausting world tour where Bon Jovi kept straining his voice to the max every night.

“People would come to see us just to hear if I was going to make it through each show,” he remembers. “You know, just like they’d show up to watch someone really wired on booze or drugs have a total burnout, they came to watch me trash my voice. And I kept doing it.”

Bon Jovi later admitted he received steroid treatment during this period to keep singing every night but denied there was any lasting damage to his vocal chords.

Still, after another brutal world tour in support of 1988’s New Jersey album, he realized some changes had to be made.

“As a kid, you’re out there trying to establish a foundation for your career. You want to do everything you can, be all things to all people and so you just look at your life in the short term.

“But once you stop, pull back and look at what you’ve been doing, you can really scare yourself.”

In Bon Jovi’s case, he married his high school sweetheart, Dorothea Hurley, in 1989. They had four kids and are still a solid couple, a rarity in his business.

He attributes his ultimate stability, as well as that of the other members of the group, to the fact they never betrayed their New Jersey roots.

“It was great that we lived in the shadow of New York City, out there in the burbs. There weren’t any Joneses for us to keep up with it. Getting a lot of stuff didn’t mean anything in my ’hood when you were growing up. Getting to age 18 alive and in one piece meant a lot more.”

He also feels that the circumstances under which Bon Jovi came to fruition aren’t likely to be repeated.

“We were in a time and place that a band could cut their teeth without everybody watching your every move. You could even make a couple of albums without a record company deciding what you had to sing.

“I’m not knocking any artists today, but I just don’t think another band could come along in 2010 with the music business being what it is now and sell 120 million albums or perform to two million people. “

Something else that Bon Jovi feels has helped his stability in the long run is the philanthropic work he’s engaged in for the past decade. His name has been linked with activities for the Special Olympics, the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and many others.

Currently, he’s most heavily involved with the Philadelphia Soul Charitable Foundation, rehabilitating a block of 15 homes in that city.

“When you’re a little kid, you see all the bad things in the world and promise you’re going to fix them one day, but then you forget about all it,” he says. “Back when I was 20, it wasn’t the first or even the 10th thing on my mind.

“But when I hit 40, I started looking for something more in my life. Something to believe in. I was raised Catholic, but I have a lot of issues with what’s gone on in that Church. I’m heartbroken by it. The way I was raised was regimented by fear. Eat meat on Friday and you go to hell. What does a kid learn from that?

“You’ve got to find your spirituality wherever you can. I found it in good deeds. The greatest reward I have in my life is putting a roof over someone’s head and handing them the keys when they never thought they’d have a place of their own.”

All of this, however, doesn’t mean that rock ’n’ roll has ceased to be a powerful part of Bon Jovi’s life equation.

“Someone asked me what song we’re opening with on this tour and I told him, ‘We’ve got 70 songs and it could be a different one every night.’ You start with how you feel. Can you hit the big notes that night? Then you go on to what moves you emotionally. How do I feel today? That provides the spark that lights the fire.”

Retirement is a word that isn’t even in the 48-year-old’s vocabulary. He wants to die the way he lived: onstage.

“I think about the last concert we just played in London. We sang 30-some songs, a lot of my heroes were in the audience and we played everything until it hurt.

“Yeah, that’s the way I’d want to leave it.”

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