Rock and Roll Legend Jon Bon Jovi On Navigating Fame, Personal Struggles, and Making Music That Lasts
…To get the job done, not necessarily to get what you wanted. I guess the end result is I got what I wanted, but I was never the best singer, the best guitar player, or the best writer, but I outworked everybody. I don’t think anybody can ever deny that. There are definitely guys in my past who say, “You weren’t even good.” I was like, “I know. But you were home, and I was out there doing it.” Right. I was the crazy kid that thought a DJ could make a difference. That’s my crazy way of thinking. No one else I know ever thought of that. So, the magic is that it was just a relentless desire to do that…
Recently, NBC journalist Willie Geist sat down with Rock & Roll Icon, Jon Bon Jovi.
Jon Bon Jovi, born John Francis Bongiovi Jr. on March 2, 1962, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, is a celebrated American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actor. As the founder and frontman of the rock band Bon Jovi, Jon has left an indelible mark on the music industry, combining his musical talents with an enduring work ethic and a knack for reinvention.
Bon Jovi’s early life was steeped in the diverse cultural background of his family. His father, John Francis Bongiovi Sr., of Italian and Slovak descent, was a barber and former Marine, while his mother, Carol Sharkey, also a former Marine, worked as a florist and Playboy Bunny. Raised Catholic, Jon attended St. Joseph High School before transferring to Sayreville War Memorial High School, where his musical journey began.
At 16, Jon formed his first band, Atlantic City Expressway, with future Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan. His early forays into music saw him performing in clubs and opening for local acts, gradually building his reputation. Working at his cousin Tony Bongiovi’s Power Station recording studio, Jon recorded “R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” his first professional track, marking the beginning of a prolific career.
In 1983, Jon Bon Jovi founded Bon Jovi, recruiting bassist Alec John Such, drummer Tico Torres, and guitarist Richie Sambora. Their self-titled debut album in 1984, followed by “7800° Fahrenheit” in 1985, set the stage for their breakthrough with “Slippery When Wet” in 1986. This album, featuring iconic tracks like “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Livin’ on a Prayer,” catapulted Bon Jovi to global fame, selling over 28 million copies worldwide.
Bon Jovi’s success continued with albums like “New Jersey” (1988), “Keep the Faith” (1992), and “These Days” (1995), solidifying their place in rock history. The band has released 15 studio albums, sold over 130 million records globally, and performed more than 2,700 concerts in over 50 countries, amassing a dedicated fan base.
Parallel to his band’s success, Jon pursued a solo career, starting with the soundtrack for “Young Guns II” (1990), featuring the hit single “Blaze of Glory.” His solo efforts, including “Destination Anywhere” (1997), showcased his versatility as an artist. Jon also ventured into acting, with roles in films like “Moonlight and Valentino,” “The Leading Man,” and “Pay It Forward,” and TV appearances in “Sex and the City,” “30 Rock,” and “Ally McBeal.”
Despite his public success, Jon faced personal challenges, notably vocal issues that threatened his singing career. Jon’s journey to recovery involved rigorous vocal training and medical interventions. His dedication to his craft is evident in his commitment to daily practice and his determination to deliver the best performances for his fans.
Beyond music, Jon Bon Jovi is known for his philanthropic efforts. He founded the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, which addresses issues of poverty and homelessness. The foundation’s initiatives include the JBJ Soul Kitchen, a community restaurant where patrons pay what they can. Jon’s activism extends to political engagements, supporting various Democratic candidates and serving on the White House Council for Community Solutions under President Obama.
Jon Bon Jovi married his high school sweetheart, Dorothea Hurley, in 1989. The couple has four children and has navigated the challenges of fame and family life together. Their enduring partnership has been a cornerstone of Jon’s stability and success.
As Jon Bon Jovi reflects on his 40-year career, he remains focused on the future, expressing a desire to continue making music and potentially return to the stage. His latest album, “Forever,” reflects his journey through personal and professional challenges, highlighting themes of resilience and joy.
Jon Bon Jovi’s story is one of talent, perseverance, and a relentless drive to excel. From his early days in New Jersey to his status as a global rock icon, Jon’s legacy is a testament to his enduring impact on music and culture.
The following are excerpts from Willie’s interview.
Willie: “Forever” is the new album. And if anybody has seen the Hulu docu-series, they know what a road it has been to “Forever.” You sound amazing. It feels to me like your voice is back. Does it feel that way to you?
Jon: Knock on wood. What folks saw in the documentary was shot one and two years ago. So, I’m well on that road to recovery. I wouldn’t say that I’m 100% there, but I’m at the goal line at this point. Just before our interview this morning, while you were working, I was working. I was doing two hours just across the way in the studio. Every day I sing for two hours. The idea is, can I do two and a half hours a night, four nights a week? Then I’ll say I’m ready.
Willie: So what was the standard for you to cut this album? How did you need yourself to sound? How did you need to feel to say, I’m OK doing an album here?
Jon: The patience you can have in the studio making a record is not the same as the voice that has to be on the road. So, that’s not enhanced. That’s me. I probably sang each song ten times, not three. I just wanted to get the best take of each song. I could do one, take a whole day off, come in and do one on Wednesday, take a day off, come in on Friday. There’s so much that encompasses making a record. But I felt that we had the songs, and that’s when it’s time to go. By the time I went in to make the record, it wasn’t difficult. But I would have made it even better today, because that was eight months ago when I did the vocals.
Willie: So the album is titled “Forever.” What does that mean to you? What is that title about?
Jon: You know, one thing I can look back on in this 40-year career is that there are a lot of songs in our catalog that will live long after we’re gone. Those songs are part of the patchwork of American pop culture. They play on the radio somewhere in this world every day. The magic of music is that it can live forever. The idea that we committed our lives to this project, and whether or not it goes on stage again is to be seen, but the music will now outlive us. That’s the umbrella description of what the album is.
Willie: And within it, you get themes of what the last 40 years have been like for you and this family, which is your band and your family living in the house as well. Songs like “Living Proof” and “Legendary” to me are about the people who got you there. Is that right?
Jon: Yeah, everyone’s contribution, members past and present, whether I collaborated with a writer over the years who I may no longer collaborate with, every contribution is what got me here to be able to talk to you today. So I appreciate and applaud everyone who was a part of it, whether or not they got off the ride at any stop along the way. But yes, in this record, really the theme has been joy. For instance, when we were making “This House Is Not For Sale,” that was a statement record. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of joy in that record. We had something to say. Let’s get it off our chest. And then with 2020, we were all living through COVID. All of us watching television and here in this room were living through the COVID lockdown. Not a joyous occasion to write a record. I was the narrator. I loved the songwriting on the record. It came out great. This one, in light of everything that I’ve been through, vocally and the challenges we collectively faced with COVID, this record is the first time I have felt joy in a long time.
Willie: That’s amazing because I think people watch you move through the world and you seem like a joyful guy who’s hopeful about things. And this voice thing that, frankly, most of the world didn’t know was going on in your life before they saw the doc, you carried that every day, right? And it was preventing you from finding the joy.
Jon: Yeah, I have never not been grateful. And this isn’t a life-or-death situation. I mean, I’m blessed with good health. If my career was going to be sidetracked, oh well, I’ve had a great 40-year run at the top. But there was nothing but gratitude, gratitude compounded by joy. Get me back out on that stage. You know, it would be awesome.
Willie: How different is the experience now for you? Obviously, it’s different than it was 40 years ago, but you still have a bunch of your core guys who’ve been with you as long as you can remember. How different is the experience of making a record today compared to the past with those guys?
Jon: Well, it’s like a maturity when you go into the studio. I mean, everyone’s just a better player than we were when we were kids. Not that we were ever bad. We always knew our way around the studio. But there’s definitely a maturity in the record-making process now. We have an identifiable sound, and everyone is more than capable of contributing in major ways. That makes the process much easier. Every day, I looked forward to it. It wasn’t a labor. You go in and Dave’s already got it figured out on the keyboard part. You’re like, “OK.” You’re not too concerned with thinking, “What synth? What are we doing? What part?” No, this is a Tony Award-winning guy who’s made 16 albums. He knows how to do this. Tico’s a crazy, ridiculous drummer, and Sam with Hugh on the bass. It’s a great band. And John Shanks and I know how to make this record. We’ve done it together for 20 years.
Willie: You said the first song you recorded, or maybe the first one you wrote, was “Hollow Man,” which is a beautiful song. What were you thinking? What were you feeling when that song came through you?
Jon: When you sit to write a record, you’re thinking thematically, not just a collection of songs. That would be one way to go about it. But at this point, I was thinking, “OK, where am I? What am I feeling?” I’m going through a lot. As I’m strumming my guitar and just sitting on the couch, you’re almost asking God to take this vessel and fill it. I’m hollow. Fill me with information. Fill me with what it is that my voice needs to say. And on a day when you don’t know what to say, this is a songwriting trick I have: write that down. Just literally set up the scene.
So, 30 years ago, when I wrote “Bed of Roses,” it was, “Sitting here wasted and wounded at this old piano, trying hard to remember the moment, but this morning, I don’t know.” That’s all I had. But it starts me on this journey. So I’m sitting here and I don’t know what I’m about to say. “What do you sing when your song’s been sung?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And that’s it. Now I’m off to the races. “Who do you fight when the war is won?” What better moment in time for me in my career? “What do you write when your book is done?” And then I was off to the races.
Willie: There’s another song that just blew a hole through my chest, which is “Kiss the Bride.” Obviously, that’s about your daughter Stephanie and what’s coming for her down the road. Was that a difficult song to write? It’s a beautiful song, and we’re going to hear it at weddings for the next 50 years.
Jon: The beautiful thing about it is I only have one daughter, and she’s my baby, right? She’s the eldest. And 25 years ago, I wrote a song called “I Got the Girl.” The queen of hearts will always be a five-year-old princess to me. You know, I got the girl. Now she’s 30, and she’s engaged to be married. So again, it’s been my life’s journey, these records. This time, you know, you’re saying, “I wish that this walk down the aisle was a thousand miles.” Because now I have to put this into perspective. She’s going out to buy a wedding dress, and I’m not going to be number one anymore. You hold on a little tighter.
So, I co-wrote that song with my dear friend Billy Falcon. I was crying when we were writing it, and I was crying in the studio singing it. She is the last person on Earth to have heard it. We still don’t quite know how she’s dealing with it. Honestly, we haven’t discussed it since she heard it. She’s dedicated to listening to it in these opportunities, and she heard me talking about it on television. She’s like, “Dad, what do you think? Do I have to wait till the album comes out?” I said, “Here, babe.” So, I know what it means to both of us.
Willie: You are in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, considered one of the greatest living songwriters. I’m just curious, and people love hearing how the great ones do it. How do you start writing a song? Do you sit there with a guitar? Is it words? Is it music? How do you go about it?
Jon: The process is different for different people. Some people use technology, go into the studio, and create a loop, then come up with a melody and lyrics. That’s typically not me. I often sit on a couch with a guitar or, secondarily, at a piano. I’m not a great player, but I’m good at banging out the chords and figuring out what I want to do and what I want to say. Certain titles give you the mood. “Kiss the Bride” wasn’t going to be a big rock song. It’s just not. “Hollow Man,” when you’re starting emotionally, could go either way. For me, I had to tell a story.
When I wrote “Legendary,” it was me being happy, upbeat, stating the obvious. But for those who don’t know, the simplicity of that chorus means more to me than something complicated. “I got what I want because I got what I need.” This is all pixie dust at the end. What do I have? I’ve got a wife and family that love me. I got a band that believes in me. I’ve had a good life. “I got what I want because I got what I need.” It’s not fame and fortune. It has nothing to do with that. What matters is seeing the family and the friends and the people that believed in me. They went on that journey. They put their lives on the line to say, “OK, we’ll go.” We had nothing. And, you know, guys that believed in me for 40 years or 30 years or whatever time anyone was with me. It’s appreciated.
Willie: The docuseries goes back even farther than that. It’s so fun to see those days of you at sixteen years old with Atlantic City Expressway, seventeen years old, playing in the bars in Asbury Park. It seems to me that there was never anything else. There was no Plan B for you, right? You were going to be a professional musician, maybe not selling out Giant Stadium, but you were going to be playing music somewhere.
Jon: No one on my radar was selling out Giant Stadium. You know, the Asbury Jukes were a big part of my influences as a kid. The 3,000-seat kind of theaters, the E Street Band, at the time when I was going down there for the first time, were playing 3,000-seat theaters. They graduated to arenas in 1980. That was the big time. Yeah. Every step along the way at that time, you thought it was the big time. Whether you’re playing in a bar for your first time at sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, you thought you had made it. So, I never had a Plan B, but I always had naivete.
I was very young. The drinking age in New Jersey being eighteen was integral to the story, not because of the joke of, “Oh, you can get a drink.” No, it was that you could go to a club at sixteen back in the day when licenses were made of paper, and you could use a little bit of white-out and just move your hand across a little bit. Hold that paper license up, and it was up to the bouncer. I remember getting busted playing in a bar, and the owner would lose his mind on you. “You son of a… you could get… I could lose my license!” Being reprimanded and told to sit at a table by the door on our breaks, and “Don’t you move, and you can’t even have water.” But for the most part, I was able to go in and play, which again is integral because my folks’ support was there because they said, “Well, at least we know where you are.”
I took it so damn seriously that I quit my own cover band at eighteen, just barely eighteen, to join someone else’s band as a singer because I thought, “If you don’t learn to write, you’re going to be playing other people’s music.” By the time I was twenty, you know, I had run away.
Willie: Well, you obviously have talent. You’ve got all the things you need to be a star. But it seems to me there’s another very important, maybe more important, element to it, which is a force of will, drive, whatever that is. You were not going to be denied, whether it was running around Power Station, getting studio time on the weekends or late at night, or finding, WAPP to get “Runaway”? Like, at a young age, you knew how to navigate and get what you wanted. Is that right?
Jon: To get the job done, not necessarily to get what you wanted. I guess the end result is I got what I wanted, but I was never the best singer, the best guitar player, or the best writer, but I outworked everybody. I don’t think anybody can ever deny that. There are definitely guys in my past who say, “You weren’t even good.” I was like, “I know. But you were home, and I was out there doing it.” Right. I was the crazy kid that thought a DJ could make a difference. That’s my crazy way of thinking. No one else I know ever thought of that. So, the magic is that it was just a relentless desire to do that.
Willie: And it feels like even when you blew up with “Slippery When Wet” and everything, that continued. There’s this mythology around rock stars: you’re out all night, you’re doing this and that. But the truth we learn in the docu-series is that you were the guy up early the next morning, making sure that the train kept rolling.
Jon: As the singer, you try to take care of yourself. Your job is to do it the next day. So, it wasn’t as if I didn’t have as much or more fun than anybody else, but I had the responsibility of waking up and doing it again. And I had the mindset that we have to do it again. Yeah. And again, it was primarily on my shoulders to get everybody else to believe in it.
Willie: But I’m not sure everyone else in that era, the famous frontmen that people knew, also subscribed to that. Right. They had the fun and maybe burned out because of it.
Jon: I don’t know. To each their own, right? From where we came and the stories that you get out of Johnny or Bruce or those kinds of guys, they’ll say, “Yeah, all I did was work.” So that’s all part of it. I don’t know. For me, that was fun. It wasn’t like I was crying in my room because I was miserable while the kids were out playing in the rain. I was enjoying my work. But I drove myself and others too hard, you know, several times throughout my career. And the burnout comes.
Willie: I’m curious, too, as I watch the series, what you think it is about you and Bon Jovi, the band, that made you survive that era of the ’80s where a lot of bands didn’t. And not only survive, but thrive and find new ways. How did you do that? The ’80s are nostalgic to a lot of folks, but littered with the bodies of old bands that just didn’t continue.
Jon: Again, it was that forward-thinking, to be honest. In retrospect, I thought differently. I was nuts enough to say self-management is the way to go. That was unheard of. After I’d written that soundtrack for “Young Guns,” and that was really emotionally rewarding, I wanted to do more things like it. My first manager didn’t believe in it, and so we had a falling out over it. Self-management began then.
When the grunge movement came about, we didn’t chase that. We didn’t suddenly go and pull out our flannel shirts and pretend to be from Seattle. But we didn’t try to be who we were yesterday, either. For me, I had turned 30. I had gotten married. The Berlin Wall came down. The Rodney King beatings happened in L.A. You’re maturing while you’re witnessing history. You’re seeing what’s going on in the music business, and you write differently.
We got in a room, we wrote “Keep the Faith.” I cut my hair simply because I needed a haircut. I’m 30 years old now. I’m married. I’ve got a different viewpoint. And I’m not interested in trying to be something I’m not.
Willie: You mentioned Dorothea a couple of times. That’s another big reason, isn’t it? That you’re the man sitting here today. That you survived everything that came your way.
Jon: My support system was solid from day one. A lot of that had to do with us growing together. You know, we went to high school together. That’s a big deal because no matter what twists and turns life throws at you, you live it together. For me, that was a very big deal.
Willie: I’m sure it wasn’t always easy, right? Being married to a rock star.
Jon: But in my defense, we’re the same age, doing the same stupid stuff. We just did it together.
Willie: So when you look ahead now, what else is out there for you? What do you want to keep doing?
Jon: To keep doing what I’m doing would be the gift. There have been things in my life that I’ve tried, and some succeeded, and some didn’t. But there isn’t anything on the horizon that makes me go, “Now I want to be the best gardener.” No, I’m not very good in the garden. I’ve come to that conclusion. So for me, I’ve attempted some things that have failed or succeeded. But nonetheless, if I could just continue to make music the way I do, I’d be quite content.
Willie: Would you like to get back out on the road?
Jon: Yeah, in a controlled manner. Regardless of how great I can sing or not, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a 240-show tour again. But when I look at The Stones and U2 and Bruce, that kind of thing, I could do that. Yeah, that would be all right.
Willie: You’ve got your band together. I was talking to you before about Richie Sambora popping up in the Hulu series. It felt like he had to be a part of it and tell his part of the story. Is he someone you’d like to see back with the band going forward?
Jon: Why would I say no? He left us 11 years ago, so it was a very difficult time for all of us because there was no falling out. It was just issues he had with substance abuse. He was a single parent and wanted to bring up his daughter. So we were very dismayed by the whole thing. But for the first three chapters of the band’s history, he was there and a beloved member. But he’d have to figure out how this works now. How does it work now that Phil X, John Shanks, and I have gone on? He’d always be welcome.
Willie: One other cool thing you did was American Idol just a couple of nights ago, the finale. How much fun was that?
Jon: Daunting. Talk about the kid with a chip on his shoulder again. You’re going to sing, but it’s on the biggest show on TV tonight, and go. But I was ready for the challenge, and my voice is far enough along that I knew I could hold my own. So yeah, that was good. It was a good confidence builder.
Willie: Do you still get those little butterflies before you go on stage?
Jon: Well, not prior to my injury. I always welcomed something like that. I was never afraid of butterflies in performing or anything like that. I was never afraid.
Rock and Roll Legend Jon Bon Jovi On Navigating Fame, Personal Struggles, and Making Music That… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.