Jon Bon Jovi reveals why he may never tour Australia again
Jon Bon Jovi has opened up about a health issue that could spell the end of his band’s touring days, as a warts-and-all documentary on the rock legends drops.
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Jon Bon Jovi doesn’t know if he will ever tour Australia again. In fact, if he’s honest, he doesn’t know if he will ever tour anywhere again.
The veteran rocker, who founded Bon Jovi 40 years ago, has been struggling with the voice that propelled stadium rock anthems such as Livin’ On a Prayer, Bad Medicine and You Give Love a Bad Name, for years.
After a long and exhaustive journey of trying every treatment under the sun, he finally underwent surgery in 2022 for an atrophied vocal cord and wasn’t sure if he’d even be able to sing again after it.
He’s now recovered to the point where he and his bandmates have been able to record again, with the band’s 16th album Forever, due out June 7, but the question of whether he and David Bryan, Tico Torres, Phil X and Hugh McDonald will be able to hit the road to support it is very much “up on the air”.
The band has been rehearsing, and the singer says he is about 90 per cent there, but until he can get back to full capacity and reach the lofty live standards he has set himself, he’d rather stay home. Indeed, when a doctor asked him whether he could live with continuing to perform being “100 per cent of 80 per cent” – as many ageing artists do – Bon Jovi flatly rejected him, saying he’d be better off retiring than tainting the legacy of the band.
“To be clear, I can sing,” Bon Jovi says over Zoom call from his New Jersey home. “In fact, I’m here in New Jersey because we’re rehearsing for the next two days. My goal is to be able to sing two-a-half hours a night, four nights a week. Until I’m there, I’m not ready to go on the road yet.
“Everything is about a legacy at this point, to be honest with you. There’s no reason to make crass decisions that might in fact take away from that. I’m not motivated by applause, I’m not motivated by being on the stage again and any of that nonsense, so for me, it’s about did I say something with this record? Can I put it out? And if I’m healthy enough, can I support it?”
Even so, the signs are promising. The band’s last tour in 2022, documented in the new documentary Thankyou, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, left its lead singer in despair, sometimes literally curled up on his dressing room floor with the realisation that some of the shows had been sub-par.
The first time he performed live after his surgery was at the MusiCares Person of the Year Awards in February – where he was being honoured for his creative achievements and philanthropic works – and he says it was the first time he had felt joy in a decade.
“My wife said it best to the kids in a text,” he says. “She just wrote ‘#He’sBack’. It was a magical moment because I really felt like me again. I’d said that the next morning when I woke up was the first time in a decade there weren’t other voices in my head, voices of doubt or fear. It was the first time I woke up and went ‘Oh, yeah, I know that guy’.”
With the 40th anniversary of the band and the new warts-and-all documentary, the 62-year-old is in a reflective mood. The four chapters of Thankyou Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, trace the rise of band from the New Jersey suburbs to selling 120 million albums worldwide, the drug and booze fuelled excesses of their peak (from which the singer says he largely abstained), the intra-band tension that led to founding guitarist Richie Sambora and bassist Alec Such leaving and the uncertain future.
Once he’d decided to dive into the extensive archives to mark the milestone, Bon Jovi’s “first and only choice” to direct was Gotham Chopra, who was best known for making documentaries on sporting greats such as Tom Brady and Kobe Bryant. The parallels with the singer’s situation and elite athletes facing the end of their career were obvious to both, not to mention the story of the underdog who became a world-beater.
“The parallels with athletes are very familiar to me,” Bon Jovi says. “It’s about how that guy like Michael Jordan didn’t make the high school team, Kobe Bryant as a teenager was benched and couldn’t hit a basket. It was the hard work. It wasn’t innate talent. And it takes hard work to persevere even if you get lucky enough to write the one song – because then the challenge is to do it again and again and again and again and 18 albums worth of again. So that’s where the work ethic comes in … some athletes have great careers, but there’s only one Kobe or Magic or Larry Bird.”
Chopra says he was attracted to the project not just because of the band’s success and longevity, but also because of the potential for a comeback story, even if no one knew how it would end. By shadowing Bon Jovi around, Chopra catches him at his most vulnerable and at times the documentary almost plays out like a thriller as the increasingly desperate singer tries to heal his voice. Equally important to both parties was that nothing be off the table in terms of interview subjects and content.
“I think that was really important,” says Chopra. “Right from the outset John didn’t want to do a vanity piece and did not want to do a puff piece. It was important that it’s a story about the band and not just about him, so we set out to get everyone. We achieved that except for Alec, who had unfortunately passed away.
“It was very important to me to have that freedom to figure out what this wants to be and I didn’t really want it to be just a greatest hits retrospective and so off we went. And they call it unscripted for reason. You don’t quite know – and we still to some extent don’t know – how it plays out except for the fact that there’s a new album.”
Integral to the band’s story was the departure of Sambora, who left the band in 2013 for “personal reasons”. Chopra says that the guitarist, singer and songwriter took some tracking down, but once Sambora realised that this was going to be a “definitive” document of the band he spent 30 years in, he readily agreed to two interviews.
“He was charming and warm and funny and combative and all of the things that anybody who’s been a fan of his for years knows already about him,” says Chopra. “He was all of those things in the interview.”
A few months after Sambora’s departure, ahead of the band’s 2013 tour of Australia, Bon Jovi told this writer that “Richie was never fired from the band – he just didn’t come to work anymore”.
In 2024, apart from the time Sambora reunited with his bandmates when Bon Jovi was inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 2018, the singer says the situation remains unchanged.
“Same as they were for the last 11 years,” he confirms. “Unfortunately he was having some issues with substance abuse and anxieties and being a single parent and so it led to his leaving the band.
“But never was there a fight and so subsequently I’ve made four records going forward and … it was incredible that all of these guys came around me with kind of fervour that we accomplished what we did, with each and every one of them contributing along the way. So I have nothing but love for Richie or for Alec or any of the current members.
“There’s no animus but the honest to goodness truth is that in 11 years he didn’t come back. And he didn’t go out and make solo records and he’s not on the road with anybody else so this train kept rolling and I mean that with all due respect. I make records and write songs and sing and go play. And that’s what David wanted to keep doing and what Tico and Hugh wanted to do. Phil X has done a great job and we keep rolling.”
Thankyou, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story is now streaming on Disney+.
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