Bon Jovi: The Kids Are Alright

 Bon Jovi has hit the top with an image tailor-made for today’s teens

Bon Jovi backstage before a performance, Illinois, early March, 1987. Pictured are, from left, David Bryan, Tico Torres, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Alec John Such.

 

Jon Bon Jovi‘s hair is about fourteen inches long. Its color is somewhere between chestnut and auburn, and the frosty streaks in it give it a sizzling golden sheen. When Jon musses it or boosts it with a squirt of hair spray, it flares around his face like a nimbus, a halo – an aura of shiny fuzz. The hair has great body and good texture and a nice, natural wave, and the ends don’t look the least bit split. He calls it ratty, but that’s just a bluff. Truth is, it would be safe to say that Jon Bon Jovi has the most wonderful hair in rock & roll today.

As Jon tells it, the length of his hair is neither fashion nor fetish but instead a reaction to suffering, as a kid, years of punitive shear jobs by his father, a New Jersey hairdresser. Now twenty-five, Jon is considerably past the age when his father might yet come after him with snippers without invitation, but still the fourteen rebellious inches of wonderful hair remain. Sort of an ongoing separation therapy, maybe. Sort of Oedipal when you think about it.

And most assuredly a sort of talisman that reminds Jon that he has sold some 7 million albums precisely because he is so conscious of and reverent toward his days as a buzz-cut kid – and therefore, he figures, so attuned to kids around the world.

This wonderful hair is at present whipping around in a soggy Florida breeze. The breeze is funneling through the van that is carrying Jon Bon Jovi and his four band mates to a charity softball game in St. Petersburg. At the moment, no one in the van is paying attention to Jon’s hair because the members of the band are listening to bass player Alec John Such, who is reading a newspaper article that touches on the one subject that matters to all of them: kids.

“Listen to this,” Alec says, rattling the paper for emphasis. He points to the article, which is headlined The Pace Of Puberty Varies. “It’s a letter,” he says, “from this kid.” The magic word thus invoked, everyone in the van is rapt. “This kid,” says Alec, “wants a peris transplant.”

“A penis transplant?” asks David Bryan, the keyboard player. “Where does he want it?” Guitarist Richie Sambora is chuckling. “Hey, Al,” he says, “are you volunteering?” The question is followed by a full round of seat thumping and hollering, incriminating comments and cackles. Even Jon, who hardly ever shucks and jives with his goofy, rambunctious band, is grinning.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Alec says, and he shuts everyone up by reading the advice columnist’s sober response: “A penis transplant is not the solution to your problem because it has not yet been successfully done.”

If it had been, though, you can bet Bon Jovi would write a song about it, or play a charity softball game for it, or at least consider it in the course of charting their career. In other words, if it matters to kids, it matters to Bon Jovi – and conversely, if it doesn’t matter to kids, Bon Jovi pays it no mind. This holds true for politics, bad news, weird ideas, strange sounds, unpopular positions: Bon Jovi has no truck with any of them, because kids, as far as the band can tell, don’t dig it. And kids are Bon Jovi’s compass.

The band is proud of the fact that no artistic or political goal steers it. “Why would we want to do an experimental album?” says David Bryan. “That’s just selfish.” And the boys in Bon Jovi respect kids so much, so to speak, that they even brought in local youngsters to pick the songs for their current album, Slippery When Wet. This is a band that, above all, utterly believes in its audience.

 

And its audience clearly believes in the band. Masters of melodic, welterweight, metal-edged rock, they are now on a full-house world tour and have the Number One single, LP and compact disc in the country. With 7 million copies of Slippery When Wet already sold – PolyGram expects it to continue into the double digits – they are on the way to having the best-selling hard-rock album in history. That they have been accused of making middling music that has neither the snap of heavy metal nor the crackle of more topical pop doesn’t matter to them. That they have become a popular joke – strutting rock stars with little butts and big hair – doesn’t bother them one bit. After all, they figure, as far as jokes go, they’ve got 7 million punch lines.

He started as John Bongiovi, and he started in Savreville, New Jersey, and he started a band as soon as he could balance a guitar. His parents – the aforementioned hairdresser father (who now, with Jon’s full cooperation, cuts and colors his son’s hair) and a mother who in her younger days was a Playboy bunny – passed through the usual stages of parental grief. (Why must our son go to high school in sunglasses? Why does he hang out in bars all the time? What is it about that damn Telecaster anyway?) In exasperation, they finally called a cousin for an opinion on whether or not Jon and his band were wasting their time.

This was a cousin in a position to know. Tony Bongiovi owns Power Station, the preeminent New York recording studio, and has produced albums for Talking Heads, the Ramones and Aerosmith, among others. At the time, Tony was looking for a young, unformed talent he could develop. He went to hear Jon and his band the Rest and recalls thinking, “There was a magic there.” The band disbanded, but in 1980, right out of high school, Jon came to the studio.

The terms of Jon’s stint at Power Station were eventually so excitedly debated that it took a lawsuit and the complete disintegration of Tony and Jon’s relationship to sort it out. Tony says he developed a sound for Jon, advanced him money and studio time, freely lent his expertise and “accelerated the process” of Jon’s success. Though the Bongiovis are a close Italian family whose members are used to helping one another out, Tony says his work with Jon was equivalent to a $200,000 advance, and he was entitled to a cut of Jon’s future earnings.

Jon says that he never even knew Tony before he came to hear the band. Jon also says that he was an “errand boy” who swept floors and was allowed to use the studio only at odd hours and was charged for the privilege. Tony’s influence on his career, Jon says, was “slim to none.” They parted company when Jon signed his record contract. Tony then initiated a lawsuit against Jon in 1984. The settlement gave Tony producer’s credit, a fee and royalties for the first album; a cash award and a one-percent royalty for the second and third albums.

At any rate, being at Power Station meant Jon got to hang around with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie. “It was a great experience,” he says, “for teaching me now how to treat being a star.” He was also able to record nearly five LPs’ worth of material, some of it with regulars like Roy Bittan of the E Street Band. One of those sessions resulted in the song “Runaway.” Featured on a radio-station compilation album in 1983, the song, with its chiming keyboards and urgent beat, became a regional hit – and suddenly John Bongiovi found himself something of a star before he even had a band.

Jon recruited one from the scenic environs around Exit 11 of the New Jersey Turnpike. There was David Bryan Rashbaum, once a Juilliard-bound pianist, who had joined Jon in an earlier band (he later ditched Rashbaum for what he calls the “better showbiz name” of Bryan); Tico Torres, a steady veteran drummer who had toured with the Marvelettes, Lesley Gore and Lou Christie; and Alec John Such, who was playing bass with a thriving New Jersey band, Phantom’s Opera. Last to join was Richie Sambora, who had played with Alec in another New Jersey band called the Message. (“There was no message,” says Alec, just to clarify things. “That was just the name of the band.”)

Derek Shulman, a senior vice-president at PolyGram, heard Bongiovi and his band at a performance for record executives. They all agreed on a sliced and diced version of Jon’s last name for the band, and Shulman signed them immediately. More than anything else, Shulman was struck by Jon’s appetite for success. “With Jon,” he says, “I felt he had an unbelievable desire to be a star. He had a burning desire to be huge.”

The girls are a problem. Shrieking and weeping, they storm Al Lopez Field in the seventh inning of the softball game and cling to Jon as if he were covered with Velcro. (The game is subsequently called on account of hysterics.) Whooping and squealing, they bust down the gates around the civic center in Fort Myers before the concert there the following day. (The doors are opened early to ease the crush.) During the show in Jacksonville, they divest themselves of red satin garters and pink scarves and trainer bras and shirts and wads of paper on which they have written things like Jon I Love You Please Call Me. Charlene.

Of course, that’s not really the problem. The problem is that if you get too many girls, what with their enthusiasm and all, you might scare the guys away. Or, more exactly, if your demographics skew too female, the downside risk is that you alienate your male consumer. On the other hand, without your females, you can’t break out. And Jon and his colleagues, inflamed as they are with the desire to be huge, will have none of that.

At first, they were just like any other arena act. Draped in black leather and outlined in eyeliner, they opened for ZZ Top, Judas Priest, the Scorpions and 38 Special, playing constantly and everywhere – dinky towns as well as megalopolises. “Runaway” became a national hit, and they began racking up decent sales: their first album, Bon Jovi, sold well, and the next, 7800° Fahrenheit, even went gold. But if they hadn’t done something different, the most they could have hoped for was the best heavy metal usually gets: teenage male audiences that top off around 2 million and have to be maintained by constant touring. They had that audience, and they didn’t want to lose it, but they knew that wasn’t all there was.

 

 

 That meant girls.

Bon Jovi made its break by making nice: nice dispositions, nice looks, nice songs, nice attitude, all of which appeals to listeners who think they don’t like heavy metal. It appeals especially to girls, who are usually spooked by heavy metal’s adulation of the ugly. The band started its shift after the second album. Off went the leather, and out went the word: the band was tight and lively, and the guys were… they were… all right, damn it, they were cute. And fun. In a further effort to distinguish themselves from their more metallic rivals, the members of Bon Jovi frequently grinned and made few if any oversights in hygiene, and their increasingly playful performances made it seem as if they were just tickled to be onstage. Even the band’s name, in a genre where band names often refer to things bestial or impolite, had a cheery ring to it.

The songs followed suit. Rife with roaring guitar riffs and chords full of portent, Bon Jovi’s music became all the more sprightly and tuneful. The lyrics, once standard-issue suicidal, now were tales that turn out happy, or rousing shouts of rock & roll imperatives, or heartbreak sagas that end with each individual involved becoming a far, far better person. “We wanted to give people something positive,” says Richie Sambora, who writes most of the songs with Jon. “We don’t want to get heavy. We don’t want to tell people politics, things like that.” And if the songs verged on cliché, well, so be it. “Maybe it’s clichés to critics,” says David Bryan, “but it’s not to the kids. And they grow up, and then there’s more kids, and they don’t know it’s a cliché.”

And then there’s that, you know, hair. Jon’s, of course. The whole band, in fact, has nice hair, as well as the kind of good looks that blur the distinction between pop-culture creations you’d enjoy terrorizing your parents with (like anyone in Metallica or most of the guys in Venom) and those you’d like to marry (like Rick Springfield and, well, Rick Springfield).

All this nice making had to be done, of course, without getting too genial and pretty for the male fans, who like a little nasty with their blasting guitars. But Bon Jovi’s ascendancy coincided with a political and cultural conservative retrenchment in which this kind of good, clean fun was right at home. Even the band’s elementary patriotism (“I’m so happy that I go on the road and I come home to America,” Richie explains) had its hook. If this verged on something so centrist and compromising that it had no core, it also verged on being a perfect, pleasing concoction for the times – and Bon Jovi knew it. “We want,” says David, “to make everybody happy.” The splintering of Van Halen, which had started this heavy-metal trend, made it an even more perfect moment. “The timing was right,” says Alec Such, “in that kids were looking for something else besides the satanical.”