ARMS OUT FOR BON JOVI
Why are the Jersey boys so huge here?
Map out your future, but do it in pencil.
In the beginning, there was the hair.
Fourteen inches of chestnut poodledom, fawned over in a silly Rolling Stone magazine cover piece in 1987, and long since trimmed and turned debonairly mature. But John Bongiovi always had his sights set high. His mother was a part-time Playboy Bunny, and his father was a hairdresser. In all sincerity, what the hell else was he going to do but be a rock star?
The guy fronting the band that bears his redesigned surname will be back in Montreal next week to do precisely that. Unsurprisingly, tickets for Bon Jovi’s April 4 Bell Centre date sold out in a day (additional ones were made available later), so another show was added for April 5, with tickets again going from $56.75 to $586.50. Unsurprisingly. But not unamazingly. Those numbers apply only to a handful of touring artists in 2018. And Bon Jovi does it every time out.
He does it particularly well here in Montreal and Quebec. In 2010-11, Bon Jovi sold out the Bell Centre five times, in less than a year and a half. Which prompts the questions: how and why? After many other touring rockers have fallen by the wayside or folded themselves into the retirement/oldies circuit, why does a Jersey dude from Sayreville resonate so deeply with a largely francophone audience?
An unlikely shared connection between two peoples — Jerseyans and Quebecers — and the power of a kind of sanitized dream of rock ’n’ roll.
THE BEGINNING
It was still called the Montreal Forum when Bon Jovi headlined here in 1987. Slippery When Wet was well on its way to selling 28 million copies globally. Bon Jovi was the massive face of appealing hard rock. They were also derided as the ultimate lightweights, an MTV confection of empty party lyrics and girlie hair. Rolling Stone famously published that demeaning cover piece. James Hetfield of Metallica famously tattooed “KILL BON JOVI” on the headstock of his King V guitar.
So not everyone loved them. But Montreal did. Perhaps it started with their scrappy underdog mentality. JBJ was a kid who came from not much and worked as the janitor in his cousin Tony’s recording studio so he could be near greatness. This is a kid who was so hellbent on becoming a rock star that he had already sung onstage with local/global hero Bruce Springsteen before he graduated from high school. That kind of aspira- tion was guaranteed to resonate in a city full of people who always feel they have something to prove.
UN GARS DE CHEZ NOUS
Montreal radio legend Terry DiMonte of CHOM believes there’s a personal resonance between JBJ andthecity.
“Jon has the persona of a guy whose feet are firmly planted on the ground,” he says. “Years back, (promoter) Donald K. Donald asked him to help Missing Children’s Network. And he willingly pitched in, came into the studio and did an acoustic thing for us.
“I think Montrealers have a deep connection to that gars de chez nous vibe. Right from the get-go, the story about him mopping the studio floor — that image quickly fizzles if he isn’t really that guy.”
This is also a rock star humble enough that he keeps the platinum albums in bubble wrap in the garage. Admittedly, a big garage.
And Montrealers tend to like their charity efforts local, like Fa- ther Emmett (Pops) Johns and Dans la rue. In that tradition, ask somebody in Philly about the derelict townhouses Bon Jovi refurbished on the QT. Or the Soul Kitchen restaurants in Red Bank and Toms River down the Jersey Shore, where needy patrons can experience a restaurant meal and devote their labour time if they can’t pay.
“That’s not Hollywood stuff,” DiMonte says. “That’s hands-on.”
THE PERSONAL
And then some. Aldo Nova was a Montreal rock star when JBJ was working at cousin Tony’s Power Station studio in New York in the early ’80s. Nova mixed his 1982 self-titled album there, and the two spandexers bonded. When JBJ took the plunge and began recording his demo of Runaway, he asked Nova to play guitar.
Peter Barbeau was Céline Dion’s drummer for six years, and also played with Sass Jordan.
He was working with Nova when “Jon called, looking for someone to help him finish a song for the (1990) Kiefer Sutherland film Young Guns II. He was sort of estranged from his band then, and contacted Aldo. Jon sent us a very rough cassette demo of Blaze of Glory.”
They worked diligently, sent back a 48-track demo “and he was over the moon with it. He took ours and re-recorded it with the best musicians in the world, and it took him to No. 1 as a solo artist.”
Bon Jovi would go on to work on Nova’s 1991 career relaunch Blood on the Bricks, at Le Studio in Morin Heights.
“He spent about a month here,” Barbeau says. “We took him to the Main, and all over town. I can tell you that he loves the vibe of Montreal, the fact that it’s different from U.S. cities.”
THE TOURISTS
The love affair is mutual. The Québécois-Jersey connection goes way back. Head down to Wildwood this summer and listen for the accents. Then stay at the actual Quebec Motel by-the- Sea.
Yes, Wildwood’s Quebec Motel opened in 1963, and legend has it that French-Canadians were so important to Jersey business that they hosted the mayor of Quebec City at the ribbon cutting. Cape May is another long-standing destination, for a simple reason: in the ’60s and ’70s, Jersey was an affordable ocean option for bluecollar Quebec families. I know, because mine went there. Wildwood has been cited as the third-ranked Québécois vacation spot, after Myrtle Beach and Virginia Beach, and that means north of $150 million in spending.
Jersey has always been popular with la belle province, and not just because the beaches are relatively close. There’s something about the scrappy underdog mentality of a state perennially in New York’s shadow that appeals to a province with its own inferiority complex.
NOT-BRUCE FROM NON-JERSEY
Of course, Jersey also means That Other Guy.
Here’s something interesting: the two shows Bon Jovi will play in Montreal next week will take them to around 25 performances in our city. Bruce Springsteen? He’s played about half a dozen. Somehow, Bon Jovi worked in Quebec the way Bruce did everywhere else — as the patron saint of uplifting blue-collar arena rock.
Bruce was a major rock star when JBJ was growing up about 20 miles north. But he was also a guy from the ’hood. You could aspire to Brucehood.
And you could change it. Why didn’t Springsteen translate in Quebec, where the scarves and purple booties did? Bruce is a fine lyric writer, where JBJ writes in broad arena party colours. Bruce’s English would be too highly worked (or with the wrong iconic imagery), whereas JBJ was comprehensible. Livin’ on a prayer. Keep the faith.
Essentially, JBJ took the bluecollar Jersey ethic and rinsed the blue out of it. Oh, he kept the workingman solidarity bit (“Tommy used to work on the docks …”), but bleached out the bummer. Where Bruce was always aspirational and romantic but a realist, JBJ was a cheerleader. Every story ended well. That’s a much more accessible U.S.A. for a Montreal/Quebec audience than tales of factory ghost towns and mumbo-jumbo about fuelie heads and reservoirs and Janey and unemployed men with death in their eyes. JBJ universalized America without being a Van Halen dog about it.
Interestingly, like Bruce, JBJ is also the boss. When Springsteen signed his first record contract on the hood of a car, he signed it for himself. Go back and read the liner notes of Born to Run or The River, or even Born in the U.S.A. Look for the credit “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.” You won’t find it. The E Street Band were/are employees. And JBJ learned from the master. There is one member of Bon Jovi with a record deal: Jon. The blood brothers of lore are employees. Mind-numbingly wealthy employees, admittedly, but with no stake in the company.
THE TRUTH OF PURPLE BOOTIES
In the terrible ’80s, the members of Bon Jovi wore those booties, ass-tight jeans, possible lip balm, muscle shirts, scarf-belts, scarfscarves, $500 American Standard Poodle hair, fringed jeans, fringed jackets. The first time I realized I had a soft spot for JBJ was when he hilariously admitted that if it hadn’t been for the wives, they’d still all be wearing that. There’s also the undeniable kétaine resonance in a city where everyone over 50 might still be dressing like they were in Gentle Giant if the wives allowed it.
So he’s honest. He’s always been remarkably blunt. A born businessman, he understood from the janitor days that his chosen business of rock ’n’ roll meant being honest enough about same in interviews. Why hide that your 2000 album didn’t do that great in Europe, or that the U.S. forgot you for three years, or that you didn’t tour South America for 15 because the singles weren’t popping ?
SAYONARA, SAMBORA
Speaking of candour: the fact that, one night in 2013 in Calgary, guitarist Richie Sambora — the yin to JBJ’s yang — simply ghosted the band, “didn’t come to work” and has reportedly never been seen by anyone in Bon Jovi since … that’s just one of the weirdest band ructions ever. It was, however, entirely par for the course that JBJ was straight about it, and the remaining band members played the gig and continued with the tour.
Because Jon Bon Jovi just gets on with things. DiMonte tells a story about a time “probably 20 years ago, Bon Jovi was producing for Aldo Nova. I went up to meet them for what was supposed to be a 20-minute conversation. Half an hour in, he says: ‘Sorry, Terry, will you forgive me, I have to call my pop.’ Called his father every day. Then came back and did another half-hour.”
And I’ll back that up. So the phone at the Gazette rings, and secretary Annie Sutherland patches the call through to my desk. It’s Jon Bon, calling on time to the minute from Anchorage, Alaska, and yes I will take it.
It wasn’t just that he remembered my name — that’s easy; the handlers tell you — but that he remembered parts of a conversation we’d had previously. He baldly ventured that “you probably don’t sit at home listening to Bon Jovi albums,” and was right. I assured him that, as the journalist, I would indeed have the last word in this forum. And he stated that I was a conduit between him and his fans, and hoped that in whatever critical licence I deployed, I would represent his own voice honestly.
That is as close to a perfect distillation of the critic’s subjective but honourable approach as I know. Whether in pencil, pen or on screen.