Whoa-oh, livin’ with grey hair: What Jon Bon Jovi teaches us about ageing

Here’s a statement I didn’t foresee writing any time soon: Jon Bon Jovi can teach us a lot about ageing, and his insights are actually quite good.

If you haven’t caught it already, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story is a four-part Disney+ series charting 40 years of the New Jersey band and it’s well worth a look. There are the usual rockumentary hallmarks: the dive-bar beginnings, the stratospheric heights with monster tunes like Livin’ on a Prayer, You Give Love a Bad Name and Bad Medicine, the burnouts, the falling-outs, the comebacks. But it’s also a thoughtful portrait of a 61-year-old rock star trying to reconcile a youth well behind him with a body and a voice that’s no longer co-operating in the way it should.

Jon Bon Jovi is a lesson in ageing in rock and how to do it well.Credit: AP

At nearly five hours, there’s a lot of archival material alongside contemporary interviews – all of which is hurled at viewers in a rather scattergun fashion. But darting back and forth between the 1980s-’90s and today at breakneck speed lays bare the contrasts between then and now and, intentionally or not, gives a clear perspective on the march of time. Not least, ageing in rock and how to do it well.

Jon Bon Jovi’s grey hair is nothing new. But when set alongside just how crazy the looks were back in the day, and how some of his colleagues haven’t exactly moved on from that, it throws a big spotlight on defying expectations.

The volume of old footage here is a vivid reminder of not only Bon Jovi’s global pop-rock megastardom, but that they looked magnificent. The songs and the stadiums were big, and the hair was an even bigger part of it. JBJ is a hirsute fellow, that’s for sure, but his hair back then was just stupendous – teased, tousled, hair-sprayed, bleached and, well, just fried within an inch of its life. There’s a moment where he’s being interviewed on MTV by another frizzy big-haired frontman, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, and between the pair of them you can only wonder what carnage might have been unleashed by a stray spark to those highly flammable barnets.

And it’s not just the hair. There are the torn jeans and ripped T-shirts, the sunnies and the scarves, the jewellery, the chest hair. Eighties hair metal didn’t hold back, which is why, with the present-day, conservative JBJ, you wonder how he got here at all.

The mane was tamed into a shorter version in the 1990s, when he started doing things like wearing black polo necks and turning up as boyfriend material in Sex and the City. The current JBJ has a neat, face-framing, collar-skimming grey crop. He dresses in a pretty low-key way in plain jeans and T-shirts. He looks more like the guy who does the band’s financial planning than their lead vocals. In comparison, former bandmate Richie Sambora remains no stranger to purple hair dye and jewellery, and continues to sport the kind of spiky, feathered mullet that’s the long-time trademark of rockers like Rod Stewart, half of the Rolling Stones and numerous others.

This seems to be a good place to throw in a big caveat about ageism and sexism in music and culture – and judging people on their looks. Writing a piece such as this about famous older women in music would be a totally different kettle of fish: misogyny and ageism is par for their course, and we do what we can to battle that.

But, in general terms, the difference here is that women are more likely to change their looks and style more frequently than men, and are expected to put a huge amount into the upkeep of their appearance and style as much as the work they produce, whether they want to or not. Whereas some of the elder statesmen in rock, they found a look that worked well for them in 1982 and, by god, they’ve stuck with it.

Many have successfully made a move forward, like the de-mulleting known to many Australian hall-of-famers, of which Iva Davies of Icehouse made a particularly elegant transition. But elsewhere there are many clinging on to a bottle of hair dye as keenly as they cling on to their youth.

Or it could just be that they simply don’t care. Robert Smith of the Cure, for example, now 65, has had the same black bird’s nest, smeared lippy and eyeliner combo since the early ’80s, which he has said is a theatrical thing and part of his on-stage ritual, plus his wife likes it.

Some acts, like Alice Cooper or Kiss, for example, have kept their pantomime theatrics, too, and that might not necessarily be a bad thing. Last month, Kiss sold their back catalogue and likeness for $US300 million ($454 million) to the same company that created the ground-breaking ABBA avatar Voyage concerts, ensuring in a more virtual way that ageing can be halted.

But back to JBJ. Perhaps one of the most interesting things about his ageing is that throughout the documentary, he’s hand-wringing over his internal, not external, mechanics. The hair is long forgotten. Instead, there are concerns about his off-kilter live vocal performances. He discovers he needs surgery to give his vocal cords a “facelift” because they deteriorate “as we get less young”, says his surgeon, choosing his words carefully.

Big hair, don’t care: Bon Jovi.Credit:

This, of course, sparks a soul-searching exercise for JBJ about whether his performing days are over, whether this music icon has turned out to be mortal after all. At one point, he looks back, 40 years on, and says profoundly: “What a great moment in time, and none of us knew it.”

Did the hair maketh the man? The twist in the story is that JBJ is clinging on to his youth, but in a different way. The good news is he continues to recover from surgery. “I love that I’m still full of piss and vinegar at 61 years old,” he says about the prospect of touring again. So maybe that’s the secret to good ageing, and being Jon Bon Jovi with the good hair: it’s what’s on the inside that counts

Thank you, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story is on Disney+.

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