‘Men can’t get away with leather trousers past 30’
Celia Walden meets genial rock star Jon Bon Jovi and discovers his days of living on a prayer are behind him
Afew weeks ago, Jon Bon Jovi was picking grapes on the French Riviera. Today, he’s in a Manhattan hotel room filled with what I thought was dry ice (but turns out to be mist pumped out by a discreet humidifier), pondering success and sacrifice. We got here by way of Mark Wahlberg and the gruelling daily schedule – involving 2.30am starts and doubleworkout sessions – the Hollywood actor recently posted on Twitter.
“And really you’ve got to ask yourself this,” says the 56-year-old rock star, enunciating each word carefully. “Who is living the better life? Mark or the guy I was just sipping wine with in a little village outside of Narbonne?” Well, surely, it’s the wine guy, I start, realising too late it’s a rhetorical question. “Because I think hard about that guy,” Bon Jovi goes on, “as an example of who is living this short period of time on Earth best.”
To the wine guy, a man who’s sold more than 130million albums and played over 2,800 concerts for the band’s 35 million-plus fans probably looks like he’s living a full life. And if Bon Jovi wanted, of course he could swap places with him tomorrow?
“Sure. And listen, being career-driven is great: I’ve done it; I’m doing it. I’m certainly living life fully. In fact, I must have been living life really fully on the day Marky wrote about his sit-ups on social media, which was why I didn’t even take the time to read it.”
I last sat down with Bon Jovi seven years ago. His band had just released their 10th album, Lost Highway, and was a dark blond, but since then he’s let himself go grey. “Yup, I’m the guy who embraced going grey!”
He breaks out into the wide, white smile that still makes women’s abdomens contract 30 years on. “There are a lot of gentlemen out there whose names I won’t mention – and none of them have embraced the real them, have they?” he says. Then again, surely it’s a rock star’s prerogative to grow old disgracefully? Keep strutting about in leather trousers while you’re still able to put them on yourself? “Oh, I was done with leather pants at 30. The only man to pull off leather trousers at any age is Mick Jagger. But he’s the exception to that rule, because he’s the greatest of them all.”
Serious again, Bon Jovi tells me about the vow he made to himself back in 1986, when his 12-time platinum album, Slippery When Wet – featuring You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin’ on a Prayer and Wanted Dead or Alive – spent eight weeks at No 1 in the US Billboard chart. “I remember saying: ‘The day I turn 50 and I’m still writing ‘bitch’ on my belly and painting my fingernails black, I’m quitting.’ Equally the day I’m not doing this in the style to which I’m accustomed, I’m quitting. So, yes, I’ll embrace the grey hair – but I won’t become fat Elvis.”
We expect rock stars to be wild, impulsive, out of control, but you don’t endure like Bon Jovi without massive amounts of discipline. And perhaps the New Jersey-born son of two Catholic ex-marines inherited that from his parents. Perhaps becoming a musician was his one wild breakaway act. Because unlike the band’s former guitarist, Richie Sambora – whose substance abuse issues have been well documented – he never got into drugs or alcohol and remains married to the mother of his four children, Dorothea.
“We got together in high school, so she’s seen every iteration, every page in the book since the beginning,” he shrugs. “There is no need to explain what the process is because she’s been here since before there was a process. And actually, I’ll tell you what,” he chuckles, “our wedding anniversary is the same as Prince William’s.”
Bon Jovi has previously praised the Duke of Cambridge’s voice after the two met – and sang together – at a charity gala in 2013. “We yapped all night and he really seemed like a special young man,” he tells me.
When Bon Jovi and his wife first set up their own charity, the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation – which has been providing food and shelter for low-income families for 15 years – there was speculation that the musician’s social conscience might take him into politics. “But to be honest I don’t have either the education or the background to do that,” he says.
Well, neither does his President. Bon Jovi hangs his head, clearly wrestling with whether or not to vocalise his views on Donald Trump – something that he’s not done since the days leading up to the election, when he admitted that the
‘There are a lot of men out there who have not embraced the real them … So, yes, I’ll embrace the grey hair – but I won’t become fat Elvis’
‘I wasn’t depressed – I just had lots to deal with, and did’
businessman might somehow win “scares the s--- out of me”. What with the silence – more proof of his restraint, given many of his fans will have voted for Trump? – I now wonder whether the President has grown on him. “Jesus God, no!” He stares at me, aghast. “I pray for my country and the world every single day. And when you have such division in our nation, there’s probably more so in yours as a result.” So if he were invited to play at the White House? He doesn’t have to think about this for even a second: “No.”
I like him for this outburst, and I like him for his meticulous use of language – the way he picks you up on words he doesn’t feel are accurate. The album he’s currently touring with,
This House Is Not for Sale – released after a three-year hiatus during which Bon Jovi says “my guitar and I were not speaking” – was, he tells me, “a reflection of the turmoil I went through” after Sambora quit and he parted ways with his record company after a spat (they’ve since patched things up). Bon Jovi has described that time as “a living hell” but he rejects any notion of a “mid-life” crisis (“it wasn’t mid-life anything”) and “burnout”. “And I certainly wasn’t depressed. No I just had to deal with a lot. But I got through it.”
And came out the other side, it seems, with renewed vigour. “Honestly, I’ve never worked so hard at being great as I have in the last three years,” he tells me. “I’ve had thousands of lessons and worked diligently at being the best I can be.”
That emphasis on his craft alone seems old-school in an era when the social media clutter surrounding artists often eclipses their talent. “Yeah, I really don’t do that stuff,” he admits. “That said, although the music industry is completely different than the one I was born into, it doesn’t mean that it’s worse – just different.”
But is it really a good thing that I know more about someone like Kanye West’s personal life and political views than I do about his music? “Because he does this all the time,” sighs Bon Jovi, holding the flat of his palm inches from his face. “Still he’s an opinion maker,” he shrugs, “and he chooses that route. But don’t even get me started on what I think of his wife and that whole thing…”
I’d love to get Bon Jovi started on Kim Kardashian and a few other things, like how on earth the music industry has managed to resist the #Metoo movement. But he’s so diplomatic that even when he does formulate an answer, it’s as though he’s reading from a script: “I’ve always been a huge fan of equality for women in the workplace and society, so I for one was smart enough to know that whether it was my mother, my wife, my daughter or the women who have worked for me, the backbone of my support has been female. And that’s as much as I can say on that.”
Bon Jovi has to get back to the gruelling schedule we’re never going to read about on Twitter. With his creative block behind him, he’s in a fertile place, “and writing four or five new songs a month,” he says. “Which is wonderful. Because when it starts to come, when you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re laying on the floor with a notebook, that’s magic. That’s joy. That’s living life to the full.”
For Bon Jovi’s 2018 tour dates, go to: bonjovi.com