Wash your mouth out
| Loaded, March 1996 Jon Bon Jovi relaxes over a fine bottle of wine to talk about fame, singing and ... er ... whacking Madonna’s tits with his knob... We’re lounging around the poolside of a luxury South African hotel trying not to stare at Jon Bon Jovi’s chest. It’s bright pink and perfectly hairless. It could be a lavishly expensive new T-shirt from Versace, but no, it’s his real chest, newly shaven for his upcoming role in The Leading Man. He strokes the place that once hosted a carpet Burt Reynolds would kill for and grimaces, “Oh, don’t stare at that, I had it bad enough when I cut my hair. They made such a big deal of it.” He’s not wrong. When, a few years back, Jon Bon Jovi trimmed his hair back from a ridiculous Dave Lee Roth poodle cut to a sleek male model bob, the press acted like it was a world event that really put Bosnia in its place. If we were interested in Bon Jovi the band, we might surmise the haircut was an allegory for the group’s transformation from overblown metal boys to pared down rootsy rockers of merit. But we’re not. We’re interested in his hair. This, incidentally, is Jon’s worst fear. It’s always been the moan of beautiful women that they’re never taken seriously enough. This is patently untrue. From Cleopatra to Monroe to Cindy Crawford, female sex symbols have always been analysed, biographised and slapped on the cover of Time. Marilyn Monroe was not simply a lazy, fat cow, but also a ‘mystery’, an ‘enigma’. It’s your Johnny Depps and Brad Pitts and - Cindy Crawford’s male double - Jon Bon Jovi, who are the modern day dumb blondes trying to persuade the world that they have minds. Beautiful men get the worst of both worlds. Mick Hucknall is thought of as some kind of modern socialist because he is a hideous f**ker who looks like Sarah Ferguson in drag. It’s Jon who frets , as he pumps iron, over why Smash Hits ask him dumb questions and why Bruce Springsteen gets to be on the cover of the Sunday supplements and he doesn’t. “I’m not a junkie for applause and adulation but ...why?” Answer: Bruce doesn’t have the bone structure. Jon Bon Jovi does a Woody Allen shoulder shrug and, in a horrible sarcastic voice, says, “Hey, at least the little girls understand.” He lays by the pool and awaits tonight’s performance in front of 60,000 punters, knocking back a bottle or two of wine to “put out the fire from last night.” Not waving his cigarette lighter above his head, but drowning. “I do drink too much but what am I supposed to do? I’m on the road, I’ve got nothing to do. I sit around all day, bored out of my mind, waiting for the show. I’m trying to curb my drinking for this movie. I have to do a lot of nude scenes so I’m trying to get in shape, but it isn’t working out very well.” He orders a fruit salad and a bottle of wine. As his magnum-packing, ex counter-KGB security guard watches over him, he picks half-heartedly at a piece of mango. It’s unclear who he’s protecting Jon from since there are only three other people by the pool and they’re all pudgy, balding businessmen whose greatest offence so far is their surreptitious glances in our direction and the fact that they’re wearing orange trunks. Jon flicks absently through a British music mag listing the Top 50 albums of last year. “Never heard of them,” he drawls or, when he comes to Oasis, “Can’t be bothered with them,” making the entire Britpop movement look as pathetic as Donovan in Don’t Look Back when he tries to impress Bob Dylan. The only record he is at all enthusiastic about is Black Grape (“now that I have time for”). Yes! The Richie Sambora/Bez interface starts here. He truly perks up as he downs a glass of vino and begins to flick through Vogue. The man who snogged Cindy Crawford in the video for Please Come Home For Christmas is still terribly impressed by a good looking lady. “I was thinking, a real redhead is gorgeous ... Julianne Moore. She’s got a sexiness about her. Cindy’s that brunette thing. She’s a pretty girl.” He pauses for dramatic effect, “She doesn’t look as good in real life, of course.” He’s in full flow. “Now Elle MacPherson is beautiful. Claudia Schiffer is Robowoman. Liz Hurley’s looking pretty good - you think she gives head?” Excuse me? Tired and emotional boy that he is, Jon seems to be most at ease when talking about sex. “Because, you know, Madonna would be so f**king selfish in bed. You’d be giving her head for half an hour and she wouldn’t reciprocate. You’d have to whack it on her f**kig tits. Ha, ha, ha. I’d make sure I jizzed all over her face. Here you go, take this with you! Madonna’s not the kind of girl I would f**k - she would f**k me. No conquest, no throwing her down on the bed and giving her a good pounding. Nah, Madonna’s throwing you down on the bed and f**king you.” Not doing a whole lot to dispel your misogynist metal boy image of yore then Jon? “Nah, man. I love women. I’m just real horny today. I’ve been on the road so long. I haven’t had sex for weeks.” Johannesburg is the last date of a 105 night tour and the band are beginning to feel a little fuzzy. Jon’s knees have swollen up from doing his rock star leap in the air 80 times a night. “Yep, the knees, ankles, throat all start to go. I feel like I’ve been beaten beyond any semblance of sanity and brain power. I haven’t got a brain cell working.” This is partly why he’s taking time out to act. His debut as a window cleaner in the Whoopie Goldberg vehicle Moonlight And Valentino was called ‘surprisingly soulful’. The film he’s currently finishing in London is an erotic thriller directed by John Duigan in which he plays a Hollywood star who becomes a hit man. He starts to tell me more but gets distracted. “I really like older women.” He’s off again. “I had some of those Anne Bancroft situations as a kid. When I think back to how rotten I was at sex then, I could kick myself. In retrospect, it was f**king awful. Now, boy could I make up for lost time.” As he guffaws delightedly to himself, his security guard comes up and whispers in his ear, wiping the grin off his face. Jon lifts the peak of his baseball cap an inch and glances furtively over his shoulder. What? Is Anne Bancroft here? No. But, according to the security guard, the three chublets in their nasty trunks are Russian mobsters. “Murderers, all of them,” whispers the horny rock star, under his breath. “Now there’s a story, we’re lying by the pool, a bunch of morons, we don’t know what’s really going on. You just see these little fat guys in bathing suits that nobody should be allowed to wear. What do we know? It’s scary. The Russians are a lot meaner than the Italians because their freedom is so recent. I’m staying way the f**k away from them.” I make my excuses and leave, too shaky from the 12-hour flight to sit in the vicinity of the Russian mob as Jon Bon Jovi rails about coming on Madonna’s face. This is the world’s poshest hotel and security is so tight that, unless you’re in the band, it’s practically impossible to get to your room. Especially if you’re a girl. “May I help you?” says a stern porter as I step into the shiny gold lift. “No thanks,” I chirrup. “May I help you?” he says, taking a step towards me. I glare at him. “I just said I didn’t need any help.” he jams his foot in the closing door and reaches to grab my arm, “You can’t go up there.” I shove my room key under his nose and he apologises profusely, but not profusely enough, thank you very much. I slope along the corridor of the top floor, past the door where a minder stands guard outside Jon’s room 24 hours a day. Now Jon Bon Jovi is a top pop star, one of the biggest in the world. But do they really think that armed terrorists are going to burst into his room shouting, “Play Blaze Of Glory or Mandela gets it”? I think not. Incidentally, Nelson Mandela has asked Jon and his judo-champ wife, Dorothea, if they would care to meet him for tea the next day. A funny position for a boy from New Jersey to be in. But he’s been living with it since Slippery When Wet shot them to stardom - it’s still one of the biggest-selling records of the ‘80s. “I got the Superman tattoo on my arm when Slippery came out because I felt superhuman. I had an album selling a million a month. I was on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was so inconceivable, it was funny to us.” Nowadays, Bon Jovi are grudgingly respected for surviving the demise of bubblegum metal. “When grunge became big in America, all the bands of our genre were shot in the back of the head. I’m not Eddie Vedder. I don’t come from that generation. I never knew a kid that blew their head off. I grew up in a better time, a better place. In my neighbourhood there was maybe one kid whose parents weren’t married. Family still means everything to me. Family and loyalty. If you’re not loyal, you’re out. I can’t kill you so I’ll just consider you dead. I’m a true Sicilian.” Bon Jovi seem more at ease with who they are than at any point in their career. The show is blinding. Watching from the side of the stage, Dead Or Alive begins to sound like a ballad to outdo Live Forever. Keep The Faith rocks like a mutha and you can even forgive Jon wailing, “Welcome to Johnny’s church of rock ‘n’ roll” during Lay Your Hands On Me (typical banner reads ‘Jon: Lay Your Hands On Me!!!‘). They are f**king fantastic. The sweaty rock ‘n’ roll beast has emerged from the girlie eye liner. They even do a cover of Helter Skelter that makes the Beatles sound like the Stones. Richie Sambora makes an array or marvellous ‘guitar solo’ faces, one for each different note. Tico Torres, engaged to Eva Herzigova, the Wonderbra star, drums like a man who knows he’s engaged to a Wonderbra star. Most blinding of all is Jon’s electric pink chest, glaring neon from under his chiffon, leopard-print blouse. He, as they used to say of Liz Taylor, is not on speaking terms with good taste. If you question him on his range of dodgy Versace attire, he gets quite flustered and starts saying things like, “I didn’t have a belt and Gianni offered me one and I took it, or my trousers would have fallen down.” or, “Gianni and Donatella are just the sweetest, kindest people.” Jon Bon Jovi is a good bloke but you want to tell him to just shut up and enjoy being a f**k-off rich rock star. “But I want you to know I don’t need this. Most definitely life would still be worth living if I couldn’t do this. Whenever I had a job in an auto parts store or a fast-food restaurant, I was happy. I was comfortable. In the next town, you had a paint factory or a brick making factory or you joined the navy and that was how people got out. I just got out a different way. As fireworks burst in the sky, Bon Jovi quit the stage and limo back to the hotel with the help of an eight police car escort. (South Africa not a country that has any real problems, then?) I ride in the front car, getting whiplash as we hit 100mph. Back at hotel posho, the band and crew celebrate in a massive suite equipped with a hi-tech CD system and endless champagne. Jon, barefoot and drained, meets and greets like a trouper, but is getting progressively more drunk, until he becomes quite maudlin and has to sit down. ”Tonight I could have played a few more for the crowd, but I played the ones I wanted to sing. I like to write ballads, I truly do. Is there anything wrong with that?“ He stares at his bare feet which are taking on a bluish tinge. I try to cheer him up by asking if he can do a Mick Jagger impression, then wonder if it was a nice thing to ask since his entire career has been an impression of Mick Jagger. Damn good one, though. He’s at the end of his tether. He just wants to play rock ‘n’ roll but the press won’t take him seriously. He has to go on kids’ TV and he doesn’t want to. He’s just a boy from Jersey who likes to sing. It seems his main bugbear is that he’s not Bruce Springsteen, which makes about as much sense as me getting miserable because I’m not Hunter S. Thompson. C’est la vie. So, Jon, let’s talk about your hair. He sighs and grins, ”Well, it’s been cut and lightened over the years. My pubic hair is natural though.“ |