Bon Jovi
The seemingly never-ending Jersey Syndicate tour of 1988/89 consolidated Bon Jovi’s status as one of the biggest bands in the world. It also took them perilously close to breaking point.
The Jersey Syndicate tour of 1988/89 consolidated their status as one of the biggest bands in the world. It also took them perilously close to breaking point.
One day in August 1988, somewhere over the Atlantic at an altitude of 30,000 feet, the voice of rock ordered a drink. “I’ll have a whisky and American,” said Tommy Vance. After much rattling around in the drawers of the drinks trolley, the stewardess gave an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, sir, we’re all out of American.”
The reply came in a low growl: “I don’t care, just gimme the whisky.”
It was a surreal experience, hearing that voice coming not from a radio but from the seat beside me on a flight from London to New York City. Like so many rock fans, I had tuned in over many years, and on a semi-religious basis, to Vance’s Friday Rock Show on Radio 1. Such was his status as the don of rock DJs that he once appeared on the cover of Sounds magazine with the headline: ‘Metal Guru’. And it was on an assignment for Sounds that I joined him on this trip to New York, where we would each interview the two leading figures in Bon Jovi. The band’s new album was about to be released. Titled New Jersey, after their home state, it was the follow-up to Slippery When Wet, which had sold eight million copies in the US alone.
Slippery When Wet was the game changer for Bon Jovi. Where the band’s first two albums – their self-titled debut from 1984 and 1985’s 7800° Fahrenheit – had failed to make the US Top 40, Slippery had blasted to No.1, as had its first two singles: You Give Love A Bad Name and Livin’ On A Prayer. It was the biggest-selling hard rock album in America since Def Leppard’s Pyromania, ZZ
Top’s Eliminator (both ’83) and Van Halen’s 1984, and Bon Jovi’s popularity had skyrocketed all across the world. In the UK, where Livin’ On A Prayer had reached No.4, the band had headlined the 1987 Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park, with Dio and Metallica among the supporting cast.
And there was more to Bon Jovi’s success than just a bunch of great, radio-friendly rock songs. In the era of big hair and MTV, Jon Bon Jovi, singer and boss of the band, was the clean-cut, allAmerican poster boy of rock’n’roll, whose pretty face was on the cover of teen mags like Smash Hits as well as rock/metal mags like Kerrang!
During the flight to New York, Tommy and I listened to pre-release cassettes of the New Jersey album on Walkmans. The first single, Bad Medicine, was a pumped-up, straight-to-the-chorus rock anthem, just like Slippery’s You Give Love A Bad Name. I asked Tommy what he made of it all. “They’re going to be the biggest band in the world,” he said. “If they’re not already.”
Manhattan was baking in high-summer heat as Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora held court in an apartment overlooking Central Park. The place served as a home and office for Bon Jovi’s manager Doc McGhee, the walls lined with gold and platinum discs for Slippery When Wet and albums by Mötley Crüe and Scorpions, also clients of McGhee Entertainment, Inc.
Today McGhee was away on a business trip. If fact he was fortunate to still be at liberty, having been convicted four months earlier of drug-trafficking charges pertaining to the seizure of 40,000 pounds of marijuana by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency in North Carolina back in 1982. McGhee’s punishment was a five-year suspended prison sentence, plus a fine of $15,000 and an order to undertake an extensive programme of community service. There was a running joke about McGhee’s apartment: when the front doorbell rings, the toilet flushes automatically.
Jon was sitting behind McGhee’s large and highly polished desk, Richie in a leather-bound armchair beside him.
Both of them were dressed down: Jon
in a white shirt, faded blue jeans and sneakers, his hair unkempt, Richie in a grey singlet and jeans, although he had with him a widebrimmed cowboy hat, which he wore for the Sounds photo session.
Bon Jovi were a tight unit. The band’s line-up – completed by drummer Tico Torres, bassist
Alec John Such and keyboard player David Bryan – had been together since 1983. But it was Jon’s name on the albums and concert tickets, and Richie was his second in command, a charismatic guitar hero and his co-songwriter. In conversation, as on stage, the two played off each other, and the warmth between them was evident; Mick and Keith this was not.
Even so, on this hot afternoon, as Jon slumped in his chair, his body language and the tiredness in his eyes spoke of what he and Richie had been through: the punishing 14-month world tour in support of Slippery, the mind-altering experience of major stardom, and the pressure to come up with another multimillion seller. For Jon, aged 26, and Richie, twenty-nine, life now was very different from how it was just a couple of years before.
Jon was enjoying the view from the top. “It doesn’t suck,” he said, grinning broadly. And when he spoke of his hunger for even greater success, he revealed what drove him: after years of struggle, his motivation was born from a fear of failure.
“Of course there’s a fear,” he said. “It’s not for monetary reasons – I mean, how much money does a guy need? It’s because there’s no high like knowing you can do three Madison Square Gardens just in a fucking phone call. It’s ludicrous – a dream. The high is to play to a sold-out arena full of people who really enjoy your music. I faced that reality at the beginning of the Slippery tour. We went to Japan and we figured, no problem, we’ll do the Budokan.” He paused for effect, then laughed. “It was a fucking stiff! It was going to be a halfhouse, so I did anything I could to get kids in there. You realise that you’d give all that money back to fill that hall. Money doesn’t mean shit! It was a humbling experience.”
“What I always got out of rock’n’roll as a kid was the dream of something bigger and better.”
Jon Bon Jovi
Jon and Richie had begun working on the New Jersey album just a month after the Slippery When Wet tour had ended in Hawaii in October 1987. “We were demoing songs before Christmas,” Jon said with a weary expression. Richie was more bullish about it. “We’re sick, man!” he said, laughing. “We had seventeen songs written between November and December.” Richie also said that the album was easy to make. “We did most of it live,” he said.
“And quick.”
Even so, Slippery When Wet was a hard act to follow, and it seemed more than a little disingenuous when Jon claimed that “there wasn’t a conscious effort to follow it up”.
New Jersey was recorded with the same team that made Slippery – producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock – and at the same facility, Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, Canada. The band also retained the services of songwriter Desmond Child, the so-called ‘hit doctor’ whose pop sensibility had elevated You Give Love A Bad Name and Livin’ On A Prayer.
Child co-wrote four songs on New Jersey, his fingerprints all over Bad Medicine and Born To Be My Baby. Two other noted hit makers were also involved: Holly Knight on the cowboy song Stick To Your Guns, Diane Warren on the overblown Wild Is The Wind.
Jon had originally envisaged New Jersey as a double album, an idea subsequently vetoed at boardroom level at record company Mercury.
The label bosses got what they wanted, which in essence was Slippery When Wet II. At a time when Def Leppard had elevated arena rock to an art form with their ground-breaking, big-production blockbuster Hysteria, and Guns N’ Roses had emerged as the new stars of American rock, their raw, explosive and expletive-ridden debut album Appetite For Destruction blasting to the top of the US chart, defying all conventional wisdom in terms of commercial rock music, Bon Jovi had, to a large extent, played it safe, not messing with a winning formula. And yet, in the finer detail, there was evidence of subtle change, a sense of the band reaching for something deeper.
Amid the pop-metal anthems and power ballads was Blood On Blood, with an epic sense of drama reminiscent of New Jersey’s greatest rock hero, Bruce Springsteen. The brief acoustic track Ride Cowboy Ride also played against type. And perhaps most significant of all was the name of the album. As Jon revealed, there had been various working titles, all of them along similar lines to Slippery When Wet.
“The album was going to be called Sons Of Beaches,” he said. “And we had all these other wild titles like Sixty-Eight And I Owe You One, all this nasty shit that was humorous in a way, but it parodied Slippery and would have left us pigeonholed. People would have said: ‘Oh, these guys are chasing comedy now.’”
Without a trace of embarrassment, he explained: “The cover of Slippery was supposed to be this great pair of tits, but nobody would let me do that. It had to be a black album cover with raindrops on it. And now, two years later, I realise that what that did was leave the words ‘Slippery When Wet’ open to your imagination. So it was only as nasty as you thought it was. It could be tits, or it could be a road sign. Great! And yeah, Sons Of Beaches was great for the hands-up-in-the-air anthem stuff, but maybe it didn’t say: ‘Christ, these guys have got a hell of a lot better writing songs.’ And short of calling it ‘Bon Jovi IV’, this is as close as we can get to saying: ‘Make up your own mind.’”
There were times during this interview when Jon spoke in platitudes. When playing down his newfound wealth, he described his band as “the same old dudes in new shoes”. He had another pat line about the place he called home: “Jersey’s not a place, it’s an attitude.” There was, however, a surprising degree of honesty in what he said about his years growing up there. “When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of New Jersey,” he admitted. “A one-way ticket to
New York City was all I could think about. It took me a couple of world tours to realise how much I longed to be at home, to be with the people I know, in the places I know.”
In the New Jersey song 99 In The Shade, Jon’s lyrics romanticised the summers of his youth. “I wanted to remember the Jersey shore the way I saw it as a kid,” he said. “Not much of a boardwalk, a couple of rides on it, but there was cotton candy and sausage sandwiches and bikinis and winning a record on the boardwalk.” Richie had similar memories: “It was special. It was the best time on earth, man.”
There was sadness in what Jon said about how the place had changed: “It’s a ghost town. It’s a shame. I mean, fuck, there are hypodermic needles coming up on the coast…” But as he said with a shrug: “I’m not going to reflect that in my songwriting right now. I feel too good about life. It’s kind of funny how being from Jersey is fashionable now because we made it fashionable. But it just happens to be the name of a fucking album.” He shook his head and laughed: “I should have called it Bon Jovi IV.”
In the way Richie explained it, he made it clear that he and Jon knew their limitations. New Jersey was not a serious rock album of the kind that Springsteen made with Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The River. “It doesn’t go down that deep,” Richie said. But there was meaning in Bon
Jovi’s music, and just as Livin’ On A Prayer was a working-class anthem that held the promise of a better tomorrow, so that optimism was at the core of New Jersey.
“If you’re not optimistic, you’re dying,” Jon said. “What I always got out of rock’n’roll as a kid was the dream of something bigger and better. You can write negative things – this is a negative world. But rock’n’roll is entertainment, and if
“As much as success is a Godsend, it can be an evil. It can eat you up.”
Richie Sambora
somebody turns on their radio when they’re stuck in traffic on the way home and a song makes them a little happier, maybe they’re not going to get out with a fucking gun and blow somebody away. I want to bring people a little smile. By saying we’re fun, I’m not saying: ‘Gee, golly, we’re a fun band!’ I’m saying: ‘Let’s think about better things.’ There’s enough shit in the world. Let’s brighten it up just a little.”
At the end of the interview, the two men reflected on success and the impact it had had on them.
“You’ve got to know how to surf up here,”
Richie said. “As much as success is a godsend, it can be an evil. It can eat you up. We watch out for each other.”
Jon, for all his burning ambition, spoke of the difficulty of adjusting to such a high level of fame. “It’s hard for me to think that I’m that guy,” he said. “That’s why you don’t see me at parties, trying to get my face in the papers all the time. I don’t feel comfortable doing it.” But when asked if there had ever been a point when he would have traded all the fame and the money for a normal life, his answer was as fast as it was blunt: “Fuck no!”
The release of New Jersey, on September 19, 1988, came at a time when hard rock dominated the US album chart. In the first half of that year, George
Michael’s Faith and the Dirty
Dancing film soundtrack had hogged the No.1 spot. Then
Van Halen hit the top with OU812, followed by Hysteria and Appetite For Destruction. After New Jersey debuted at No.8, it shot to No.1 and remained there for four weeks. A review in Rolling Stone magazine described the album as “so purely commercial that it’s practically beyond criticism”. New Jersey also went straight to No.1 in the UK, with Top 10 positions all across Europe, and it was on this side of the Atlantic that Bon Jovi embarked on the first leg of another marathon world tour, beginning in Dublin on October 31.
As Richie had told me on that summer’s day in New York, the Slippery When Wet tour had been a steep learning curve. “We got to be a better band,” he said, “and we got to be closer as people. No matter how close five guys can be, you get closer. You know a little bit more about everybody. You know about… their socks! You love each other a little bit more. You hate each other a little bit more.” He also admitted to feeling daunted by the thought of doing it all again. “It’s the prospect of how long this motherfucking tour is going to be,” he sighed. “That’s what gets to you.” And in that, he revealed the sense of conflict that was starting to eat away at the band. They were flying high, yet trapped in the grind of the album/tour cycle. It was as if Richie knew what was coming.
This time on tour, Bon Jovi would reach breaking point.
They named it the Jersey Syndicate tour, a tongue-incheek reference to the mafia. The joke was extended with aliases used in hotels by Jon and his personal bodyguard Danny Francis. In honour of Britain’s most famous gangsters, the Kray twins, Jon was ‘Ronnie’ and Danny was ‘Reggie’. The difference was that Jon was simply a fan of movies such as The Godfather and Once Upon A Time In America, whereas Danny, a tough Londoner, was linked to organised crime before, working for Led Zeppelin and others.
In Dublin, on the night before the first show of
“Since Richie and Cher became rock’s most famous couple, I sensed some resentment in Jon.” Jon’s bodyguard Danny Francis
the tour, Jon met with his friend Joe Elliott of Def Leppard, who had recently made his home there.
“I took Jon to my local boozer,” Elliott recalls. “They were used to seeing me in there. But when I walked in with Jon, this woman just screamed and dropped her glass on the floor. She nearly fainted!”
Such was the effect that Jon Bon Jovi had on his female fans. As Danny Francis says: “A big part of my job was stopping girls from ripping him to pieces.”
Francis had been Jon’s minder since the start of the Slippery tour in 1986. “We were very close,” he says. “Almost like brothers.” What he witnessed on the Jersey Syndicate tour is expressed simply: “Jon was having the time of his life,” he says. “Until it all got too much.”
After two gigs in Dublin – the second, on November 1, featuring a cameo from Joe Elliott on a version of Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town – Bon Jovi headed through Europe, the UK and Japan before the first leg in North America began in January 1989. Over seven months, the band played 119 dates.
Jon enjoyed the perks that came with high status. Two Lear jets were hired, at a cost of $20,000, so that he and the band could travel from the Midwest to Las Vegas to attend the world heavyweight championship fight between Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno on February 25. George Francis, Danny’s father, was Bruno’s trainer, and after Tyson’s victory Jon met two legendary figures: Muhammad Ali, the greatest fighter of them all, and Colonel Tom Parker, the former manager of Elvis Presley.
Another example of the privileges of fame came on March 9, when Jon, on a night off in New York City, had a little too much of a good time and got arrested. After drinking heavily with his girlfriend Dorothea Hurley and the everpresent Danny Francis, he had insisted that they go skating at the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, where they scaled a security fence, only to be met by cops. What saved them was a fax sent to the police station by the owner of the ice rink, a businessman called Donald Trump. The hand-written message read: “If you arrest Jon Bon Jovi for breaking into my property, my daughter will never speak to me again.”
Most surprising of all was something that happened in the midst of that North American tour. On April 24, ahead of the band’s show in Las Vegas that night, Jon and Dorothea were married at the Graceland Chapel. They had managed to keep their plan a secret, and no family or friends were present. It was only when there was a short break between shows, in the first week of August, that the newlyweds celebrated with a party in New York, billed as a ‘Post-Elopement Extravaganza’, with Danny Francis as Jon’s best man.
There was no time for a honeymoon. On August 12 and 13, Bon Jovi played at the Moscow Peace Festival, a two-day event with an anti-drugs message, set up by Doc McGhee as part of his rehabilitation. The bill also featured Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions and two other groups connected to Bon Jovi: Skid Row and Cinderella. The audience for both shows was in excess of 100,000. All artists performed for free, and the proceeds were donated to charities for the victims of drug and alcohol abuse.
It was beyond parody: an anti-drugs event starring some of the most renowned druggies in the music business. And for a so-called Peace Festival, there was little in the way of harmony backstage. Mötley Crüe felt betrayed by McGhee after he chose Bon Jovi as the headline act. Attempting to calm the situation, McGhee assured the Crüe that Bon Jovi would not use any fancy tricks – specifically, pyro – during their performance on the second night. But this was a lie. At the start of Bon Jovi’s set, spotlights illuminated Jon as he walked from an enclosure in the middle of the arena to the stage, on a path lined by Russian soldiers, and when the band hit the first notes of Lay Your Hands On Me, the opening number from New Jersey, the pyro went off like it was the Fourth of July. Moments later, at the side of the stage, McGhee was knocked out cold with a single punch to the chin from Mötley Crüe’s drummer Tommy Lee. After the show, there was talk of retribution among the members of Bon Jovi, but in the end it was David Bryan and Tico Torres who had to be pulled apart by Danny Francis as they grappled in a hotel room, so drunk they couldn’t remember how the fight had started.
The tour rolled on and on. After Moscow there was another huge outdoor show in the UK, at Milton Keynes Bowl on August 19, then a second run through North America and on to Australia and New Zealand. It was in late November that the band finally got a break. And together, at a secluded hotel on Australia’s semitropical Great Barrier Reef coast, they partied for days on end. They called it the Lost Week.
Jon had instructed Danny Francis to organise the trip. “Money is no object,” he said, “but it’s got to be money well spent.” What ensued, at Club Mirage, was the bachelor party Jon never had. An Australian strip-club owner named Big Lou brought along some of his girls. Jon was a married man and Richie was dating superstar Cher, but the other members of the band and their entourage had no such inhibitions. The final bill, as
‘Doc McGhee was knocked out cold with a single punch from Crüe’s Tommy Lee.’
charged to Jon’s credit card, included $15,000 for champagne alone. Francis proclaimed it “the longest and wildest party in the history of rock’n’roll”. What he also remembered was Jon’s act of contrition, as the band’s private plane took off, bound for Europe. Hands clasped together, eyes looking to the heavens, Jon whispered: “Please God, just let me get away with this and I promise I will never sin again.”
For all the fun and games of the Lost Week, it was only a brief respite. The tour resumed in Portugal on November 29, and continued throughout Europe into the early days of the new year. The band were running on empty, and there was even a degree of tension developing between Jon and Richie. As Francis noted: “Since Richie and Cher became rock’s most famous couple, I sensed some resentment in Jon.”
The band had been on the road for 15 months when the tour came to an end in South America. The last stop was in Guadalajara, Mexico, where two shows, the 231st and 232nd, were scheduled for February 16 and 17. But on the day of the first show there was a major incident at the venue, a stadium owned by the city’s university. Three hundred students had gathered in protest after the university was threatened with closure due to profits from previous concerts being withheld by a promoter. Although riot police were deployed, a peaceful resolution was eventually reached. But it was too late for the Bon Jovi show to go ahead as planned. Instead the band had to play two shows on the following day, afternoon and evening.
The first passed without trouble. The second did not. A heavy police presence and a rowdy, drunken crowd proved a combustible mix. When a hail of bottles and stones was thrown from the audience, aimed at the police guarding the stage, the reaction was swift and brutal: fans pulled over the security barriers and beaten. The band, shocked by what they saw, got off stage as fast as they could, straight into a tour bus with the engine running, and rushed through the streets of Guadalajara to the safety of their hotel.
Later, in Doc McGhee’s suite, members of the band and crew eased the tension with beers and tequila shots. Only Jon was not present. The mood was sombre. As Francis recalled: “We all knew that the tour had gone on too long, and that after what just happened we were lucky to be alive.” When Francis went to Jon’s room there was only a brief exchange between them before Jon said quietly: “I’m done.”
New Jersey had been a huge success, selling 11 million copies and confirming Bon Jovi as one of the biggest rock bands in the world. But in the wake of the Jersey Syndicate tour, Jon changed. He put the band on hiatus and fired Doc McGhee. Soon after, Danny Francis was also out. “It’s not personal,” Jon told him.
“It’s business.”
Six months after that dramatic night in Guadalajara, Jon’s first solo album, Blaze Of Glory, was released. Its title track shot to No.1 in the US. In an interview at that time, he insisted that this was not the end of Bon Jovi. “I want us to be together,” he said. “I feel a loyalty to those four guys.” But he added, pointedly: “I can’t do it unless it’s going to be a good time.”
In Jon’s mind there was one absolute certainty: that the long road he had travelled, touring the world for more than a year at a time, was an experience never to be repeated. As he had said to me back in the summer of 1988: “Being in a rock’n’roll band is supposed to be fun. And when the fun stops, it’s over.”
“Being in a rock’n’roll band is supposed to be fun. And when the fun stops, it’s over.” Jon Bon Jovi