Richie Sambora, David Bryan, Jon Bon Jovi and Tico Torres attend photocall to open exhibition celebrating 25 years of Bon Jovi on June 7, 2010 in London, England.
The video is now available!
The brand new music video for Bon Jovi's, "When We Were Beautiful" is now up on BackstageJBJ.com, and Backstage JBJ Members get to see it first. The video will premiere to the public at 12:00 am PST Monday, May 24th on BonJovi.com. Want access to this video and other exclusive offers, but not a member yet? Find out more info at BonJovi.com/Join.
This is one of those times when I wish I was a member. *sigh* Guess I just have to wail til Monday.
He’s cornered the market in air-punching anthems, but there is more to rock’s prettiest front man than big hair and bare chests. The singer who runs his band like a business is as interested in philanthropy and politics as he is in power ballads. We meet the chairman of the band
Wherever you’ve come from, Camden, New Jersey, probably isn’t an improvement. Even on a sunny October day, it’s a grim place, recently described as America’s most dangerous city. A man whose day job is performing in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans in stadiums around the world should have no business here. He should be tucked up in bed with a groupie, or whatever rock stars do in their downtime.
But Jon Bon Jovi is not your average rock star. When you tell people you are meeting him, you get two reactions: disdain or “Phwoar”. Both are usually followed by a rousing rendition of Livin’ on a Prayer. So for the conflicted out there, let’s start by getting a few things straight: he is not tiny; he’s a very respectable 5ft 10in or 11in. His hair, while by no means a No 1 all over, is no longer so big that it need dominate our thoughts. He’s a handsome and successful rock star who gets a reliably sneering press (too commercial, too soft-rock, too cheesily uplifting); a stratospherically rich man who nonetheless keeps plugging away with the CDs, the tours, the long absences from his family. And today, he is in a rubbish part of America listening to local dignitaries drone on at a tree-planting ceremony. Why, for the love of God? Is he, as rumour has it, planning to follow in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood,and swap showbiz for politics?
“F*** no!” he says, grinning good-naturedly. “Fifty per cent of people hate you before you walk out the door. You can get much more done philanthropically than you can ever do shaking hands. I probably could run, because celebrity would win you office, and what a shame that would be. The difference between me and the President is that I get to keep the house and the plane.”
It turns out that philanthropy, through his Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, and not politics, is what gets JBJ out of bed. And it is his foundation that has helped to fund today’s tree-planting. But he could just write a cheque, and not bother hacking down here on the train (quicker than the chopper, apparently). “My going there gets the community involved. If you go there, and you speak to people, and look them in the eye and say, ‘You do this, I’ll do that…’ It’s the power of ‘we’.”
Of course, plenty of famous people give money to charity, or support charitable foundations. Bon Jovi is different. He set up his own foundation because he wants to know exactly where his money’s going. He also does most of it when the cameras are categorically not rolling, refusing to do photogenic things more than once during the day because, “This is not a photo opportunity.” Finally, he’s different because he isn’t preachy – he just gets on with it. He could spend his life sitting on a beach; he chooses not to. “What a selfish, miserable, s*** life that would be. It’s a terrible existence! What good are you doing? What purpose are you serving? What legacy are you leaving?”
But then, he’s as successful as he is precisely because, unlike most of us, he never aspired to make enough money to sit on a beach. While his contemporaries wanted to be on the cover of some local magazine, he wanted to be on the cover of Time. He’s an entertainer whose job is to make people love him, and he does it very well. Although low-key in behaviour and appearance (black leather jacket, dark jeans, Chelsea boots that need reheeling and wraparound rock-star Prada shades), he’s in his element, earlier, over the state line in a deprived Philadelphia neighbourhood, where his foundation has pumped in millions of dollars. People cross the street to shake his hand and high-five him. “Yo,” mutters a disbelieving hoody. “Is that Jon Bon Jovi on my block?”
John Bongiovi was born in 1962, in Sayreville, New Jersey. His mother was a Playboy Bunny turned florist, his father a hairdresser; both were former US Marines. He thinks his showbiz gene comes from both of them, but that the Reagan era in which he grew up was inevitably formative too, in all its flag-waving, gung-ho glory. “Coming of age when Reagan was telling the world there’d be a chicken in every pot and God bless America, you’re very easily influenced… Sayreville was a real Polish/Irish/Italian little town. We didn’t have black kids. No one went to college… Bono had Northern Ireland outside his window; we had a white picket fence.”
He didn’t pay any attention in school, and at 16 was playing in clubs before going to work as a gofer at a recording studio in New York. At 21, he got a record deal – after he hand-delivered the single Runaway to New York radio stations – and he had met Richie Sambora, his bandmate and fellow songwriter ever since. The secret to the band’s success, Bon Jovi thinks, is that the songs have universal appeal. “The themes were uplifting and optimistic, but they weren’t specific. You can relate to Livin’ on a Prayer whether you live in London or Wisconsin.”
Access all areas
In 1986, when he was 25, Slippery When Wet, the album that contained that anthem, exploded on to the scene, and Bon Jovi had arrived. Sure, the good looks helped, he concedes, but, without the songs, many of which are now classics (whatever the critics say), “I’d have been the next Terence Trent D’Arby or Milli Vanilli.” He tried to break the pretty-boy mould on the cover of the Slippery album, which was slated to be called Wanted Dead or Alive. The whole band grew thick beards and looked stern for the cover shoot. The publicist took one look and said: “No. No, no, no. And smile.” That was the end of that.
But keeping the show on the road hasn’t always been plain sailing. The band nearly imploded in 1990, burnt out after four years of solid touring. They turned things around, seemingly by Bon Jovi’s sheer force of will. But up until then, they were wild times: Slippery was named in honour of Vancouver’s strippers. Does he feel any nostalgia?
“F*** no! I wouldn’t want to be 25 years old and bouncing off the walls and doing all the great kids’ stuff that we did. But it’s not like [these days] I’m reading a book and going to bed, trust me.” Oh? So what is he doing? “I’ll be uncorking a bottle of wine and sitting in some restaurant and eating and going home. It’s a progression. I grew up in public.”
And he’s growing older in public. It’s a lifestyle laid bare in When We Were Beautiful, a new fly-on-the-wall documentary about the band, which goes a fair way towards showing just how weird it is to be Jon Bon Jovi, yet how seemingly unscathed by it he is: a man whose job is to sing and be screamed at by thousands of people, most of whom want a piece of him. “It’s based on jet lag and hotel rooms and drinking yourself to sleep because you’re bored and restless,” he says, sounding weary. “The sounds of silence are deafening.
I go from a stage in front of 70,000 people to sitting in a hotel room, and your heart’s racing, and it’s...” He shrugs. “You know, it’s my job. It’s what I do. I’m not complaining. But it is what it is.” He says he’s not burningly ambitious, just driven. In When We Were Beautiful, he tells someone: “I’m the CEO of a corporation who’s been running a brand for 25 years. I’m not some guy in a rock band. “I always saw it differently,” he reasons. “Not better, just differently.”
He’s possibly the only rock star who says he applies the Henry Ford theory of management: that someone has to be at the top. Unsurprisingly, it’s him. Everyone accepts that and you don’t pay someone else to run it for you. “You do that when you’re 21. You don’t do that when you’re 47. They should hang a handicapped sticker round my neck if I couldn’t handle my own business at 47.”
Never say goodbye
Yet for all his commercial success, Bon Jovi have to date had little critical credibility with anyone other than their accountant. That could be changing: the new album, The Circle, is terrific. Just before the economic meltdown, he and Sambora sat down and wrote a couple of songs for a greatest hits album. “Nothing of any substance. Then Madoff happened, the Lehman bubble bursting, the election of the President, the promise of hope, and we started writing.” The result is classic
Bon Jovi, with tub-thumpers such as the new single, We Weren’t Born to Follow,
alongside Happy Now, a more thoughtful number inspired by Obama’s election. And they were on The X Factor last Sunday, the single is playlisted on Radio 1 and
Absolute, and they’ve done a Radio 1 Live Lounge.
But Bon Jovi just shrugs. What has he got to prove any more? The last Bon Jovi tour was the highest-grossing and number one-selling tour of 2008, raking in more than $210 million (£128 million), ahead of Bruce Springsteen and the Police, and playing to more than two million fans. He’s sold 120 million albums, and sung at 3,000 gigs to 34 million people. He used to care, he concedes, back in the day when Livin’ on a Prayer had just broken, that all the girl from Rolling Stone magazine cared about was whether they could shoot him with his shirt off. These days, he couldn’t care less.
The title of When We Were Beautiful (also a song on the album) fortunately doesn’t refer self-consciously to those bare-chested times, but rather to his desire for his country to “get back to a simpler time”; less cynical, before the recession. He was horrified by the vilification heaped on Obama during the Presidential campaign.
“There were newspaper cartoons that were blatantly prejudiced – drawings of monkeys. It was beyond my comprehension. I didn’t agree with anything the last President said or did, I wouldn’t have shaken the man’s hand, but I would never have said anything disrespectful of the office. Is it that they think he’s a young man, and a young African-American man, so it gives them the right to be arrogant and
cocky? I think the world of this President, and I’m watching him go grey in nine
months.”
So there will never be a President Bon Jovi, or indeed a Governor Bon Jovi of New Jersey. He’s more interested in his Soul Foundation, with its philosophy, “Rebuilding pride in one’s self and one’s community – one soul at a time.” He puts the hours in, coming to Philadelphia roughly once a month. He wrote his own speech today – “Why wouldn’t I?” – and took two hours over it.
Home for the Bon Jovi family used to be a pile in New Jersey, but for the past three years has been a $24 million (£14 million) loft in SoHo, New York. (He’s typically forthright on the subject of the residents’ committees who control who moves into chi-chi uptown condos: “They want to know all about my money? And get seven referees? Seven? F*** off.”) He wanted the stimulus of the big city. He likes going to museums and talks, and being in the same room as a NYU economist who predicted the economic downturn (“You just shut up and listen.”) He didn’t have that, he says, in New Jersey, adding, “I didn’t know anybody else... It just beats the deafening silence of the house, sitting there doing nothing with just the kids every day.”
He met his wife Dorothea when he was 18, and they had their 20th wedding anniversary earlier this year. He frowns, trying to remember if he bought her anything, then gives up, ostensibly stumped, and says he bought her “stuff. I don’t think we went out anywhere. Or maybe we did? I honest to God don’t remember. How f***ed is that?” Is he a good husband? He thinks about it for a long time, then sighs. “I don’t know that I’m a good one. I don’t know. You do the best you can.”
They have four children: Stephanie, 16, Jesse, 14, Jacob, 7, and Romeo, 5. Stephanie is newly an adult: “Her boyfriend seems OK.” When she was little, he was the clichéd dad who thought he’d take a shovel to anyone who came near her. “As she becomes more outspoken and independent, I pity the fool that comes to pick her up. In fact, I’ll give him 20 bucks if he makes it out of the driveway.”
Maybe it’s all those nights thinking about things before the sleeping pill kicks in, but Bon Jovi is not an easy man to pigeonhole, not least because he knocks your critical faculties sideways with charm. His conversation segues from George W. Bush (“I for one was not proud of the last eight years in American politics”) to Bernie Madoff, to how the youth of today are ever going to be able afford a house: “Everything seems like a million dollars. Did you ever dream of having a million dollars when you were a kid? I never dreamt of having a million dollars.”
He says he feels “socially conscious but not politically engaged”. A longstanding Democrat, he performed at one of Obama’s inaugural balls and did fundraisers for Hillary Clinton (“We’re dear friends”). Yet he’s also an admirer of Arnold Schwarzenegger, calling him “the model of the kind of Republican that I understood. Someone fiscally conservative… and very liberal-minded when it comes to gay rights and women’s rights. Granted, it didn’t all work out at the end of the day… But in theory I don’t care whether you’re Republican, Democrat or independent; if you’ve got the right ideas, I could be supportive.”
Only lonely
Away from the campaign trail, he wanders round on his own; no entourage, no security. But with a world tour next year – including a residency at the O2 arena in London next June – those days are coming to an end. “It’s not any easier [going on tour], but it’s time. If you’d told me a year ago I’d be doing this, I’d have said you were lying. But I’m so excited by the record. I can just imagine what the songs’ll be like in stadiums. I’m that pumped,” he concludes, with a blinding grin, his enthusiasm palpable although his voice never rises above a low, husky monotone that can sound like he’s reading the shopping list. But he’s 47 now. Hasn’t he had enough? He’s mates with Bruce Springsteen, another New Jersey boy. Over dinner
recently, Springsteen told him he always knew he'd still be touring when he was
60. Bon Jovi isn’t so sure. “I’ve always said the minute this is a nostalgia
tour, I’m out, it’s over. I’m leaving on top.” What’s the alternative? He rules
out a return to acting – he starred in, among others, The Leading Man, Moonlight
and Valentino and U-571 (set on a submarine. Jon Bon Jovi in a navy uniform. You
can see their point). He’s made guest appearances in The West Wing and Sex and
the City. He enjoyed acting, and says it gave him humility.
“What I hated was sitting in some waiting room to audition for some s*** role that five other actors already turned down, and I walk in and he goes, ‘You’re too short.’ F*** off.
A working actor is unemployed every two or three months. Wow! That’s a tough gig. I’d rather write a song.” The truth is, he doesn’t much care what comes next, and he doesn’t have to worry about it. “Whatever I want to try, I’ll try it. If I fail, that’s OK. It’s part of the fun. But at 50 I’ll still feel 18.”
Nonetheless, for someone pushing 50, he seems unfussed about ageing. His wife threw him a 40th birthday party and he jokingly told her to take plenty of photos, “Because it’s the last pretty birthday. But I ain’t gonna do no shots, no Botox, no hair plugs, anything. I’m comfortable enough in my skin to know that such is life. I’d rather age gracefully.”
Back in New Jersey, he’s about to be mobbed in a school playground – part-funded by his foundation – by teachers who think he looks just fine. “The kids are going to
paint a mural,” says the head of the charity, as she briefs him beforehand in
the car. “Will you sign it?” For the first time all day, he looks mulish. “I’m
not doing anything goofy.” He doesn’t sign the mural, but he makes another
speech, and successfully works and charms his way from one end of the playground to the other without being ripped limb from limb.
Later, when it’s all over for the day, he reappears at the station, on his own, entirely unmolested, waiting for the train home. Nobody gives him a second glance. How can this man, so charismatic he can hold 80,000 people in the palm of his hand, slip entirely unnoticed through a busy station? “Well, that’s just another fallacy, that you can’t do that,” he says matter-of-factly. Surround yourself with bouncers and tell the press where you’re going and you’ve got yourself a circus, he reasons. Bon Jovi does the opposite and gets away with it, partly because people don’t expect to see Jon Bon Jovi queuing up at the newsstand.
“Being a rock star’s my job. I’m very good at it. If those doors over there opened up on to the stage, I’d go out there and…” He shrugs. Without the stadium and the
screaming fans, he’s just a bloke. He turns it on and he turns it off. The train
comes in, he waves, and disappears into the crowd. “I can always make a buck,”
he said earlier, “and I’m not a fame junkie. I can turn it off, walk away. The
rest of it’s just the icing on the cake.”
Apparently our Jon is not such a diva, he makes his own bed...
Bon Jovi's parayers are answered
There are some terrible stories about rock stars’ diva-like behaviour.
Spandex-clad metallers Van Halen, for example, reportedly loved M&Ms, but if any brown ones were left in the bowls of sweets they requested for their dressing room, there would be no show.
Hundreds of other stories litter music history, whether they’re true or not and it’s kind of expected. Rock stars should be outrageous, eccentric and not like the rest of us mere mortals.
And an artist of Jon Bon Jovi’s standing could surely make some outlandish demands if he wanted.
Since he and band Bon Jovi released their self-titled debut on 1984, they’ve sold 120 million albums and performed to more than 34 million fans in 50 countries. Quite simply, they’re one of the biggest bands out there.
It’s a pleasant surprise then, to discover Jon making his bed at the beginning of our conversation.
“Oh, yeah, it’s the maid’s day off,” he says sarcastically, while continuing to tidy his New York bedroom.
“This is how all big rock stars start their day. They make the bed.
“Actually, I woke up feeling like I’d fought 10 rounds with a boxer,” he adds. “But I’m feeling a little better now. Building up to the release of a new album you go from doing zero miles per hour to warp speed right away. Things don’t start slowly.
“At first you think, ’Why do I still do this?’ and then the psychosis takes over and you start talking to yourself in the third person, you know ’Now Jon...’. Then you get up and running properly and it all becomes natural again.”
Bon Jovi, and Jon in particular as the frontman and driving force of the group, have a lot on at the moment. New album The Circle is out now, released on the same day as a new documentary and tie-in book When We Were Beautiful.
Next June, the band will effectively be moving into London’s O2 Arena for a multi-date residency. At the moment, the 10-date stint kicks off on June 7, but with a few gaps in the schedule here and there, don’t be surprised to see that number go up in the coming months.
“I do love the UK, very much so,” he says. “I considered buying a place there for a while. I just wish it was a little closer. Let’s just get the Concorde working again. It wasn’t environmentally friendly I know, but London to New York in three hours? That’s the need for speed right there. It wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t good food and there was nothing else good about it, but man, it got you there.”
New album The Circle is Bon Jovi’s second in just over two years, their fifth since 2000 marking a prolificacy not seen since the mid-Eighties.
“I’ve found my passion again. I was running off with a bunch of different distractions before: acting, solo albums and things like that, or simply not enjoying the company,” he says, hinting things weren’t always as rosy in the band as they are now.
“It’s great to have that renewed sense of enthusiasm for something you loved as a kid.”
Unsurprisingly, as a long-time Democratic party campaigner and outspoken critic of George W Bush, President Obama’s election last November is partly responsible for The Circle.
“If you think about what the world was like last September, it was a very different place. The last president was in office, the economic downturn hadn’t happened yet, and I’d bitched and moaned about George W Bush so much that it wasn’t even fashionable anymore, so there was nothing left to talk about.
“In October guys like Bernie Madoff former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange, and perpetrator of the one of the largest investment scams in history earning a 150-year jail sentence come out of the woodwork, President Obama changes the landscape of American politics forever. Then you go, ’Wow, there’s subject matter for us’.”
Incidentally, Mr Obama is a friend of Jon’s, the pair have met “many, many times.”
“He’s been to my house. I’ve got a beautiful picture of he, my wife and I in our back yard,” he says, perhaps not realising the most astounding thing about that story is not that a rock star could be friends with the premier, but that he refers to the grounds of his mansion on the banks of the Navesink River in New Jersey as a “yard”.
“Initially we were just fulfilling a commitment when we writing songs that became this album,” he continues. “We were going to write two new songs for a greatest hits. We said to our record label we’d do the greatest hits if we could go to Nashville to record.”
The sessions in Nashville turned into Lost Highway, the band’s 2007 album, and spurred on by the changing landscape, two songs for a greatest hits quickly became 12 for The Circle.
“There’s a song on the new record called When We Were Beautiful, which is like a bookend on the whole thing. It’s about getting back to a simpler time, when the world wasn’t so reliant on more more more, bigger bigger bigger.
“The world had just got punched in the nose and we were still seeing stars from it. It took writing 28 songs in nine months to see that and watch the world go round, and now we’ve got a complete story to tell.”
Adding to the story is the new documentary. As Jon explains, it was originally planned to be a memoir marking 25 years of Bon Jovi, but after some early interviews, something didn’t feel right.
“I was very hesitant about the book anyway, and I wasn’t going to sit there and go through all the cliches, you know, ’Dude, then we got drunk, then I did this chick.’ Who cares? Who needs to know that and what relevance is it?
“We’d hired a very famous biographer to write our story, but we weren’t telling any of those tales so the book was boring and the whole premise was going to be shot down in flames.”
Inspired by watching Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary about Tom Petty (Runnin’ Down A Dream) on a long flight, Jon then decided to create a film of his own and settled on English director Phil Griffin, who’s past work includes videos involving Amy Winehouse, to make it.
“We didn’t want to be completely retrospective, or for it to be just a concert movie, so I went back to our manager and said we’d tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth on film. We financed it ourselves, so no one else but us had a say in it, and it’s been very well-received so far.
“I must admit I didn’t care for watching myself so much during the editing, but I learned some things from it. All I could think was, ’God, I wish I smiled more’.
“In the film I was either caught up in thought or the neuroses of getting out to a gig that I didn’t look happy,” he says.
“Sometimes I look like I’m in turmoil even though I’m quite fine. I’m smiling on the inside.”
Bon Jovi's new album The Circle is out now. The documentary and accompanying book When We Were Beautiful are also out now. Bon Jovi will play a residency at London’s O2 Arena throughout June 2010. For more information visit www.bonjovi.com
New Jersey's Bon Jovi has survived and thrived for a quarter of a century, music critics be damned.
This weekend viewers can catch a behind-the-scenes glance at how these native sons have survived while other groups fell to the wayside.
Showtime will air "Bon Jovi: When We Were Beautiful," a black and white documentary on the group's 2008 Lost Highway World Tour, on Saturday, Oct. 24 at 9 p.m.
The film will help Bon Jovi promote their new studio album, "The Circle," which will drop Nov. 10.
The documentary, which was acquired by Showtime, goes on the road with Bon Jovi to Abu Dhabi, Dublin, Marbella, Munich, London and the closer locales of Madison Square Garden and Central Park.
The band members — Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Tico Torres and David Bryan — also do candid one-on-one interviews with director Phil Griffin, a filmmaker and photographer. They talk about the group almost breaking up, their own personal demons, their success and the loneliness of life on the road.
There's no question that Jon Bon Jovi is the boss of the band, with a hands-on grip on its financial affairs.
"True, it isn't a democracy," Jon Bon Jovi says in the film. "I've had a vision. The vision seems to work."
People who know anything about Jon Bon Jovi — who is a successful actor, and politically and civically involved — would peg Jon Bon Jovi as an empty-headed pretty boy. But in "When We Were Beautiful," he cements a new image, that of a hard-nosed, savvy, ambitious, calculating, worrisome and sometimes profane businessman.
Approached about investing in a pro-football team, Jon Bon Jovi is seen talking on the phone to his potential partner in the deal. Jon Bon Jovi tells the man he wants to meet with him, so he can see that Jon is not a rock-band cliché.
"I'm the CEO of a major corporation who is running a brand for 25 years," Jon Bon Jovi says.
In fact, Jon Bon Jovi just made history when he struck a unique deal to be NBC Universal's first "Artist in Residence." Under the pact, Bon Jovi will appear exclusively on NBC Universal TV outlets for two months to promote "The Circle." That includes appearances on the flagship NBC network and cable channels such as Bravo.
The "When We Were Beautful" documentary, from Oscar and Emmy-award winning producers @radical.media, was done when Bon Jovi had reached a new peak, with the No. 1 album and No. 1 grossing tour in 2008, according to Billboard magazine
On the group's Web site, Jon Bon Jovi lists his hometown as Sayreville. He now lives in a mansion on the Navesink River in Middletown. Sambora's hometown is Woodbridge, and he resides in California now.
Bryan's hometown is Edison, and he still lives in New Jersey, while Torres, originally from New York, resides in Florida.
Music critics have always loved another Jersey artist, Bruce Springsteen. But in "When We Were Beautiful," both Jon Bon Jovi and Bryan tackle dead-on the fact that while fans love them and they've had huge commercial success, music critics have consistently panned them.
"We're still not the critics' darlings," Bryan says.
But Jon Bon Jovi seems to have made peace with that. The rocker points out that he's been "the Tom Cruise of the music business and the Elvis Costello of the acting business."
He says he's received great reviews for his acting, mainly in small independent films, but won "zero commercial success" for those efforts. In contrast, critics don't like his music, but "the masses" do.
"Do I really want to be the Elvis Costello" or the "Cruise and Schwarzenegger" of music "and be here forever?" he asks.
Before the tour's show at Madison Square Garden, Jon Bon Jovi points out to the band and crew that the group has been together 25 years.
"We're not supposed to still be here," he says.
But as "When We Were Beautiful" shows, it hasn't been easy. The band members discuss the time they almost broke up.
"It was almost over," Torres says.
Jon Bon Jovi brought in a psychologist, Lou Cox, to help mediate the band members' differences.
Torres opens up and talks about making peace with his father, beating alcoholism and taking up art and golf instead of the bottle.
"He was a really bad drunk," Jon Bon Jovi says. "'T' was a very, mean, mean man."
Sambora talks candidly about his difficult last few years, a "dark period," when he was living through the death of his father and his well-publicized divorce from Heather Locklear. He credits Jon Bon Jovi with pulling him through that period.
For Jon Bon Jovi, there are the burdens of being away from home, Jersey, and the headaches of taking care of business.
He misses his children, and says he's selfish for touring and being away from them.
"There's four kids at home that are going, ‘Where the f--k are you?'" he says.
Jon Bon Jovi describes doing a concert to thousands of screaming fans, then going to a hotel room, ears still ringing, with no one to talk to. Your family is in another time zone, so you can't call them.
"It's a lonely existence," he says.
Jon Bon Jovi is also seen fretting over tangled plans for the band to do a free concert in Central Park, an effort that he calls a "fiasco." Blaming "lawyers," he is afraid the concert is going to have to be cancelled, and Bon Jovi will be blamed - not Mayor Bloomberg or agents or attorneys.
"No wonder why I've got a f--king headache and I'm going gray," Jon Bon Jovi says.
But the problems are resolved, because the next scene is a press conference with Bloomberg and Jon Bon Jovi announcing the free Central Park concert for July 12.
Jon Bon Jovi tells reporters it's "The perfect bookend to an incredible tour."
As the group gets ready to perform, Sambora jokingly laments that his daughter Ava (from his marriage to Locklear) won't be at his historic Central Park concert. Instead, she will be going to a Jonas Brothers concert that night,
Sambora mimics her voice, saying, "I love Nick."
The group is shown performing to a seemingly endless sea of people at Central Park,
But the documentary starts and ends with scenes of Bon Jovi getting ready for a concert at Madison Square Garden, where they sold out for two nights and ended their tour. Backstage family members — including both Sambora's mother Joan and daughter Ava, and Jon Bon Jovi's mother Carol — kick back with the band before it performs.
The group members celebrate their New Jersey roots and the bond they have.
"It comes from the way we grew up," Sambora says.
Torres similarly sums up Bon Jovi's blue-collar approach to their careers.
"We're going to fight to make it the best band, the best music and the best show possible," he says. "That's inherent in our upbringing. That's a Jersey-New York signature. You'll find it with anybody from that area."
Related:
New Jersey's band opens up at New York screening of ‘Bon Jovi: When We Were Beautiful' documentary
Bon Jovi set to be first band to kick off in new Meadowlands Stadium
Showtime has put up some sneak peak shorts and behind the scenes stuff!
Amazon has the special edition CD/DVD available for pre-sale! According to them, this will be released on November 10, so I would imagine it would ship on that day too. Click here for more details. We're almost there, I can just about feel that CD in my hot little hands.
Don't forget, you can also pre-order the book When We Were Beautiful from Amazon as well. That will be released on November 3. No info yet on the MSG DVD or the Documentary, but I will keep checking.
I can see that I will have a whole lot to be thankful for next month!
According to Crush Magazine, our favorite front man will be appearing on Inside the Actor's Studio on cable's Bravo.
Here is the article, translated to the best of my ability.
Jon Bon Jovi will be interviewed in the program Inside The Actors Studio.
Jon Bon Jovi will be interviewed on cable channel's Bravo Inside The Actors Studio on October 20. The singer will be interviewed by James Lipton just a few days prior to the release of the new book and album of the band.
The program can be attended by the public and the tickets will go on sale shortly. It is not predicted that the band will perform.
According to Amazon, Bon Jovi: When We Were Beautiful will be released on November 3. You can pre-order it from their site now.
I haven't seen the DVD advertised over there yet and the new album isn't available yet, though they do show the release date as November 10.
I can hardly wait!
Oh, I know the picture I used above isn't the cover shown over at Amazon, but I like it better than the picture that is actually being used. The cover shot, in my opinion, should have been the whole band, not just Jon.
*Sigh*
But that's a debate for another day.
After the screening, I asked him why he'd chosen to shoot in monochrome. He said: "I'm a photographer as well as a filmmaker and When this film was originally conceived I had taken a series of photographs of Jon in Minnesota when he was performing. And he saw one particular shot, which was a black and white shot, which he loved, and asked me to go on tour with the band so I could do more photography.
So, I joined the Lost Highway tour just after Minnesota and did a month with them on the road doing stills, all of which were black and white - they always look good like that. And then he said: 'I really like this one picture, it's me - it's a grumpy old guy who sits in the corner moaning about things. I'd like you to make a film like this photograph.' And I said: 'Well, okay, this is your 25th anniversary and as long as you allow me to expose the band like those black and white photographs, I will do it.'
So the working title of the film was 25 Years In Black And White and black and white not because of the colour but because black and white is the truth."
He went on to say he shot around nine months of footage. When asked about the 'work in progress' moniker attached to it here, he said: "In many ways it is complete but I wanted to see what people thought of it, because if they left me I would work on it for another... There's so much footage and so many scenes we could add and so much honesty in what the guys said to me that I wanted to see it on a screen and in a cinema before I said, it's done."
When asked how Jon reacted to the film, he says it was "mixed". He adds: "There were a lot of conversations about what would be included and what wouldn't be included. He felt quite exposed by some of the things that I managed to get him to say, as did Richie, and we had many conversations about that. He's a very good collaborator because he knows what he's good and and he knows what he's not good at, but he has a very big opinion about what he's not good at at the same, but if you talk long enough and hard at him he will give in, because he just gets bored.
"My final comment with some of the lines that he wanted removed from the film was that if Richie's prepared to sit on a boat with me and talk about his addictions, then you should be willing to talk about how great but tiring your life is."
He adds that he was "absolutely not" a fan of the band before he began to work with them. He says: "I think there are many pluses to the fact that I knew nothing about their history - and I didn't read anything about them either. I did a little bit of Googling about who each character was and got their Wikipedia stuff up but I wanted to go into those conversations with them not knowing much, so I could learn something."
He also says it was a conscious decision both to focus on the band themselves, not their families, and to keep their current position at the forefront, without going over the ashes of the past. He adds: "We wanted to refer to the past but I wanted this to be a contemporary look at a band that have lasted a long time and I didn't want it to be a Behind The Music because then I didn't think it would be a film, it would just be a retrospective, I wanted to hear what they had to say now."
The much anticipated documentary was debuted last night at the TriBeCa Film Festival. Our boys were all there and they were all looking mighty fine... (see for yourself)
Jonny was sportin' some new bling (anniversary pressie from Dot maybe?) Richie was all cool with his shades and serious face and David and Tico, well, they seemed to be ready for anything.
From this early review, it seems the documentary was shot in black and white, which I just love and there was some interesting bits about Jon. I'm really looking forward to this come October. I'm excited for the book that's coming too.
So much Jovi, so little time.
When's that summer show again?
According to this, you can pre-order When We Were Beautiful from Amazon and it will be shipped when released (October it looks like).
I really hope they reconsider that name. It hurts my fingers just to type it, not to mention trying to bring myself to say it out loud without rolling my eyes. Who comes up with these things?
Seriously.
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