god i'm beautiful


Q August 1996
And rich. And famous. And in films. Bon Jovi have been to the brink, cocked a manly New Jersey snook at it and bounded back fitter, feistier, fabber. Trading “body fat ratio” with Jon Bon Jovi and licks with Richie Sambora, Phil Sutcliffe learns, “We never wanted to be coulda-done-this, shoulda-done-that.”

Making an entrance isn’t about fanfares of trumpets, stately stairways and portentous announcements from uniformed flunkies. To make an entrance, all you need is what Jon Bon Jovi’s got. It works like this: in a large, characterless room, a dozen or so operatives shuffle about their pre-tour megaband business from laptop to fax to video screen; in walks Bon Jovi; the room misses a beat, sucks in a breath, all eyes flicker his way and the jaws of a few who are new to this mundane phenomenon sag for a moment before hastily resuming their habitual manly silence.
Before them stands a man of modest height in plain black T-shirt and jeans. His skin is an immaculate brown, his stomach flat, his big head handsome. But that’s not it. Jon Bon Jovi is radiant. More radiant than a pregnant woman. More radiant than the Queen Mother. More radiant than a pregnant Queen Mother. Fundamentally bursting with what could only be described as the essence of himself, “it”, oomph, star quality. No wonder Mrs B fell for him.
Hey, and here she is, Dorothea, his enduring best girl since their teens, a formidable sylph who came fourth in the American karate championships a few years ago. There ensues a great big splonker and a nice bit of nuzzling. She has 15-month-old baby Jessie James in her arms. His Wild West-obsessed dad gives him a hug and a kiss too, murmuring, “The star of the show!” Something catches Jessie’s eye. He points at a video screen running endless repeats of the band’s promo for the single Hey God. “Daddy” he hollers.
It’s rehearsal time. The Bon Jovi team has taken over part of the theatre complex at Pepperdine, a plush private university in the foothills overlooking Malibu. It’s a serious affair in keeping with the weight and power of their recent songs, like Hey God, and their discovery that, somewhat to their own surprise, they really do have a future beyond the strutting 80s era of poodle cuts and over-inflated anthems.
They run through I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Bon Jovi stands by the microphone, arms folded, fiercely intent on every note. When they’re done, authoritative as the bygone Man From Del Monte, he delivers a brisk, “Cool”. But then they try to recall Stick To Your Guns, a song they haven’t played since they recorded New Jersey in 1988. Bon Jovi has to play guitar and he can’t remember the chords. Humbly, he submits to coaching from guitarist Richie Sambora and classically trained keyboard player David Bryan, who sings at him again and again,“G,G,G,A,G” and even “C major 7th”, though he may have been kidding about that.
Three hours of toil concluded with exemplary discipline, Bon Jovi calls time out. For a reviving shot of this or a snort of that? Perish the thought. Roadies produce bottles of mineral water, juice and jugs of celery, cucumber sticks, carrots and other crunchables. The band fall to, resolutely manifesting enthusiasm - though Bon Jovi himself balances a remark about maintaining his seven per cent body fat ratio with a wolf-grinning promise to return to smoking as soon as the tour is over “because I like it.”
But at present, they’re pigging out on moderation. They’ve done wildness and now, in their 30s and 40s, it’s domesticity’s turn. After famous adventures with Ally Sheedy and Cher, Sambora is married to Melrose Place star Heather Locklear. Drummer Tico Torres weds Wonderbra marvel Eva Herzigova in the fall. Bryan is married with two-year-old twins.
As for Bon Jovi, he’s dragged out of bed at six every morning by his 3-year-old, Stephanie. “It’s, ‘Daddy, what time is it?‘” he says. ‘Still dark out, darling. Go back to sleep.‘ ‘Daddy, what time is it?‘ ‘ OK, it’s scrambled egg time!‘ We watch Sesame Street and all that shit.”
Today he’s following the early rising with a seven-mile run, a workout, two meetings about possible movies, the rehearsal, Q photo session and interview - for which, he lets it be known, he’s cancelled dinner with his mate Tom Cruise.
A university administrators office has been set aside. Bon Jovi selects the boss’s swivel chair and puts his feet up on her desk - in which position of casual command, he looks invulnerable. It’s hard to imagine that, not long ago, the world of Bon Jovi - the man and the band - was falling apart.
“I call 1991 The Grey Summer,” he says, “I was here in California with my wife, but all I’d do was drink. Excess. Confusion. Disappointment. Anger. I’d just sit out on the deck and question everything I’d done up to that point.
It wasn’t what I thought it would be as a kid and I’d sit in front of the mirror and dream about being Southside Johnny. I didn’t know it was going to get ugly. The innocence was gone. And I would just drink away ... those blues. I spent that summer wallowing in it.”
A few months earlier, when promoting his solo movie soundtrack album Young Guns II: Blaze Of Glory, the previously amiable lite-metal market leader had suddenly presented himself to Q as a complete pillock. “I can’t wait to get to Tramp because it’s full of the most amazing pussy,” he averred, amongst other doltisms.
He’s not overjoyed to review this former self, though he refuses to plead the Fifth. “I may have talked about pussy. I may even have chased it,” he says, “But it’s highly unlikely I would have followed it through - I can’t swear to it because I can’t remember those times. Back then the bond I had with my wife was the only thing remaining consistent in my life. She stopped me jumping out of a moving car one time.”
He doesn’t elaborate. Perhaps he was a man who got married quite a long time after his wedding. It may have been delayed until he got the complicated bonds within his band sorted out.
They were in a mess, paradoxical as it sounds, in the aftermath of extraordinary success. The 16-month, 237-date world tour of their second massive album New Jersey had wrecked them. “Burned, bloated and disgusted,” they didn’t talk for months. Meanwhile, says Bon Jovi, their manager Doc McGhee - notable for his conviction re the import of 40,000 pounds of marijuana (suspended sentence, loads of community service) decided there could be advantage in division and his camp ran a campaign of poisoned whispers.
“Finally we went to do this MTV awards show. They were giving us a lifetime achievement award. What had we done? Four miserable albums and we weren’t getting along. I realised that all we were there for was to help the ratings. So we show up and I won’t sit with them and they won’t sit with me. I get loaded. I collect the prize, walk off stage and gave it away to a girl I knew.”
And that was the moment the revival began. Somehow, depressed and drunk, Bon Jovi took control.
“In the limo afterwards, the manager said, There should be some changes around here. I said, Great idea! And I fired him.”
Suddenly the hellraising singer emerged as an imaginative and resourceful leader. Given trouble at t’mill, he hired a professional mediator for the band. “My guys were not into it,” he says, giving way to laughter and adopting a Joisey bozo cadence. “‘The f**k, I ain’t layin’ on no couch for no shrink. We’ll kick this guy’s ass.‘ I said, It’s not like that, he’s just a neutral party. It was a blessing. In front of him, we could talk openly and admit the truth about how we felt about one another.”
The air thus cleared, their collective troth was plighted anew when Bon Jovi took them for a boys-only break to the Caribbean island of St Thomas. After that they set up management company BJM, their own label Jambco and in the Italian-American spirit of their two front persons, talked of one another as stand-up guys again - “You’d be lucky to have Richie Sambora as your friend,” says Bon Jovi, “and I missed him when all that was happening.” They recorded Keep The Faith and it sold 10 million worldwide, despite succumbing to grunge in America.
Everything was hunky-dory once more. So that was when they backed off the cheery inspirational anthems that had made them huge - rock ‘n’ roll as an act of faith in, well, something or other - and began to let reality into their music.
Hey God was Richie Sambora’s idea originally. “I was riding in a limousine one winter day. We pulled up at a light and there was this homeless man on the pavement,” he says, “We had eye contact. It was a serious moment. I felt very guilty. He was sitting in this cardboard box and I was in the back of a limousine. I thought, What the f**k can this guy be thinking of me? I thought, in his head, he had to be writing a letter to God. God, what the f**k happened to me?” With Bon Jovi - they both write words and music - he worked up Hey God’s stories of hard times in the city and a chorus that’s boldly impolite to the deity. “Hey God, tell me what the hell is going on, seems like all the good shit’s gone.”
Jon Bon Jovi, an American from a working class Catholic family, opens Something To Believe In with, “I lost all faith in my God, in his religion too”. “I have a hard time with organised religion,” he says and commences a passionate peroration. “How is it that a baby can die at birth and under Catholicism he doesn’t go to heaven because he has original sin until he’s christened? How come if you go to confession, walk out of church and say ‘God damn it’ for some reason, then you get hit by a bus, no good, you go to hell? How come they won’t let women be priests? You got a priest makes his vows, he’s skimming money, he’s sleeping with little boys. You go to mass three times a day, sing a song, put money in the plate, that’s supposed to absolve you of your sins. I have a hard time with all those things.”
You’ve lost your faith entirely?
“I question it, that would be the nice way to put it.”
This isn’t the approach that made them rock’s premiere target for female underwear (pre-Pulp, that is). And it gets worse, particularly for adherents to the American dream and for anyone who might still crave the band’s wrapped-in-the-flag, punch-the-air espousal of it during the 80s when the young couple in Living On A Prayer were just fine because Bon Jovi trumpeted that poverty was ‘halfway there’.
In the mid-90s, Jon Bon Jovi feels trapped by his morale-boosting past. He has a Superman tattoo on his left bicep: the rock star from space come to solve all our problems. But in My Guitar Lies Bleeding from These Days, he wrote, “I can’t sing no song of hope, I’ve got nothing to say. There’s nothing good to write about.”
Dealing with reality creatively in the aftermath of the band crisis, has deepened their music, reckons Bon Jovi. At the same time, he has no relish for dark thoughts. He’d love to deny it all. “You gotta find something - anything,” he says, “For me it was rock ‘n’ roll I could believe in as a kid and hold to with both hands. I never wanted to be a coulda-done-this, shoulda-done-that. If I could preach anything, I’d preach this: regardless whether you want to be a writer or a singer or the President of The United States...”
Bon Jovi wants his dream back, please mister. Sometimes he almost persuades himself. But deep inside, where the songs come from now, he knows the cliches won’t wash any more. Bon Jovi’s surviving original members - bassist Alec John Such left last year - seem to have taken the resolution of the late 1990-‘91 crisis as a cue for earnest personal development. Sambora has been taking ‘masterclass’ lessons with a LA R&B maestro canned Tony Dunno. Bryan has been working with a Jersey shore piano veteran called Morris Banton; Torres has stepped out as a painter (his exhibition, already shown in New York, comes to a London gallery in July).
But inevitably, Bon Jovi himself has been most conspicuous in his diversification because he turned to movie acting. Hollywood brat-packer Emilio Estevez, who co-opted him into a Young Guns II walk-on, suggested he had potential - beyond dishiness and a speaking voice that hits some coarse-grained spot between Henry Fonda and Jack Nicholson. He’s been taking classes intermittently ever since.
However, the first time he went to a director’s office to discuss a part, he ran back out again while the mogul was finishing a phone call (much as he’d pulled out of an appointment with a psychotherapist during the band crisis - though in that case he never went back). Subsequently, his second career offered many more opportunities to extend the scope of the ‘humility’ which he refers to so much at the moment.
“Rejection is every day, part of the routine,” he says, and proceed to tell of his most publicised thumbs-down, failing to land the Val Kilmer role in Heat. “I completely understand that. I was seriously in the running and I know that I would have done a good job in it, but he’s an amazing actor, one of the best of my generation. It’s funny, I’m starting all over again. Like the two meetings this morning, I’d never met those people before, whereas they’ve seen you and heard your music for so long they think they know you. That is a difficult hurdle. A humbling experience...
” Nevertheless, he’s got a start with a pivotal and favourably reviewed supporting part in last year’s Moonlight and Valentino (with Whoopie Goldberg and Kathleen Turner, a flop). As a result, he spent three months filming in England last winter for a starring role in the Leading Man.
“The house painter in Valentino wasn’t that much of a stretch,” he says, “I was just a nice, simple guy enjoying his life. Pretty much me. But this guy, Robin Grange in The Leading Man is more of a chameleon’s role. He’s not exactly devious - it’s more he tries to give people what they want from him. For instance, by f**king this other guy’s wife.
When the director, John Duigan, wanted to have this shirtless scene, I said, Sure man but I’m gonna shave all the hair off and get it all buffed up,” he says (removal of his fabled thoracic Axminster was the most painful experience of his life, but the news for those who have fretted is that it has grown back). “I just watched Raging Bull again. It’s amazing the physical transformation that he makes - you don’t even see Bobby De Niro in that face. That’s inspiring. I wouldn’t be afraid of gaining 50 pounds or cutting my hair off or dying it blond or blue. That would help me.”
While acting has become “a passion” he says that The Leading Man proved it’s entirely compatible with his music career.
He took to England. Agreeably billeted in a small mansion adjoining Wandsworth Common, he’d walk Steph to her nursery then drive to the studio. “There was so much spare time,” he says, “In the morning I took about 3 minutes to get dressed and put some powder on my face and I’d be sitting around for an hour and a half while the girls got made up. I sat in my trailer, drank a lot of coffee and wrote songs. You know, it was the first time I was alone with myself in my whole life. No family, no band. I was with my wife from when I was 18 and I still lived with my parents then. Never had much chance to be alone. And look, I knocked out ten songs, the first batch for this next solo album. No tucking-the-kids-in-bed stories, I promise.”
He starts to recite his new lyrics with the gauche, unactorly enthusiasm of a sixth-form poet. “I’m fond of this one. It’s called Learning how To Fall. The first verse is, ‘I was standin’ on a wire/Lookin’ down there was no net/I was walkin’ across fire, thinkin’, Is this as hot as it gets?‘ And then, the whole gist is, ‘Everything came so easy/A king’s ransom couldn’t please me/Now I’m learning how to fall’. I loved writing it. It’s very me.”
Bon Jovi describes this summer’s 30-show tour of festivals and big outdoor gigs (including Milton Keynes, Manchester and Glasgow this month) as ‘carnival time’ for the band, part of a plan to pace themselves for the long haul and achieve the longevity that once looked beyond the scope of a strident and yet, it seemed, thinnish talent.
Having turned down their first, premature award for their life’s work, could he forsee, in due course, a gracious acceptance speech at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? “I like the idea in theory, but I don’t know if we’d ever get nominated,” he says, “We’ve never been into any good ol’ boys’ clubs. I guess I’ll probably care when we’ve done our 25 years on the road to qualify and they don’t pick us. You bastards! But at least by then we’ll be able to say we’re the only band that sold 150 million records and didn’t get in.”