Jon Bon Jovi: “I didn’t want to perform half-assed. If it was the end, I was good with that”

On April 30, 2022, Jon Bon Jovi was in Nashville when he had a realisation. Leaving the stage after the final show of Bon Jovi's latest mega-selling U.S. arena tour, an office to which he had long become accustomed, the New Jersey cowboy returned to his dressing room, took stock, and thought: “That’s it. I’m done.”

Increasingly, over recent years Jon had found his voice wasn’t what it had been. Once the golden throat of American radio rock that had helped its owner and his band chalk up more than 130 million record sales, take residence in stadia around the world and become one of the most well-known musicians on the planet, Jon’s vocal cords were now dragging their heels to the point that, “I didn’t want to fuck up our legacy.

“I didn’t want to go out there and perform half-assed. It's just not worth doing at this point,” he says, bluntly. “If I couldn’t be that guy and perform like that anymore, I wasn’t going to do it at all.”

“That guy” is the Jon who first appeared in the 1980s, and who became a stadium God for the next three decades. Even if it took until their 1986 third album Slippery When Wet to turn the band into megastars (selling 14 million copies as fast as they could be pressed, and giving the world universal hits Livin’ On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name and Wanted Dead Or Alive), the singer was notable for his songwriting sharps, a game show host smile, and the ability to perform as if Jesus Christ himself was the opening act and they had to pull something special out of the bag. Not only did Bon Jovi write a load of rock’s greatest songs, they had one of its finest vocalists singing them. When he boasted that he’d ‘Seen a million faces and rocked them all’, even this bravado has, over four decades, come to sell the true figures miles short.

In the spring of 2022, though, Jon wasn’t feeling this. Sensing this may well be the last waltz, he decided that if he was going out, he was going to do so having had a pop at the champ and aimed high. That is, opening each show with an a capella chorus of Livin’ On A Prayer, as he’d done at Wembley Stadium in 1995. Head high, balls out, death or glory.

“That's what took me through those 15 shows, that took audacity, that took big balls,” he says. “You're supposed to warm up to that. But I went and opened with it, out of desire, out of sheer will, thinking, ‘Fuck it, I'll power through it.’”

And just as Jon Bon Jovi was thinking, “That went okay,” his wife, Dorothea, told him, “No, it wasn’t.”

And, so, come the end of the tour, with a calmness of acceptance, Jon said out loud that maybe it was time to hang up his spurs.

“When I walked off that stage in Nashville, I did literally say that I think that’s good for me. All you can do is give everything you’ve got to give. I left the stage feeling completely fulfilled, as though I'd given it my all that night. And I knew it wasn't quite right. But I gave everything I had to give.

“If that was the end, I was good…”

Since we’re sat with Jon talking about all this in a suite in London’s beautiful Corinthia hotel, this was obviously not the end. Jon is good, though. All easy charm and still with a good dose of the bullshit-free manners of his hometown (“Oh yeah, I’m definitely still just a guy from Jersey – that never leaves you”), he’s in a very happy mood indeed. He marvels fondly that it’s been four decades since he first appeared in Kerrang!, and points out that he was actually in this very room when he realised COVID was going to be the disruptive force it became, seeing a news broadcast while in London working on a song for the Invictus Games with Prince Harry.

The Bon Jovi smile is all present and correct as well, the sort of boyish grin that could light up the back of a stadium when deployed at full strength. But it’s also more natural today, one of genuine contentment and something approaching relief.

There’s a new Bon Jovi album in the bag, the feistily-titled Forever, the story of which is partly told through the band’s new four-episode, five-hour documentary, the ominously-titled Thank You, Goodnight. Telling the story of playing bars in Asbury Park and dreaming of being like fellow Jersey-ite Bruce Springsteen, to becoming the biggest band on the planet, to the departure of longtime guitarist Richie Sambora, to present day, throughout it also focuses on the Jon of two years ago facing the idea that his voice won’t let him do this no more. Notably, it follows him as he gets the surgery that will hopefully correct his issue.

“When I went to see the doctor, I said, ‘I can give 100 per cent of 80 per cent,’” he explains. “He wanted me to accept that. I was like, ‘You don't understand, I'm retired, that’s easy to say, that's fine.’ And he said, ‘Now we can talk about surgery.’ That made me like him more, because he wasn't a cut-happy throat surgeon. I have faith in the recovery. And God forbid it don’t work, but at this point one thing we'll know is I tried everything.”

The recovery time for this is long. “The doctor said I wouldn’t see any difference for a year.” Bon Jovi haven’t played live since, but they have made a record, and Jon himself sang at the Jimmy Buffett tribute concert in a duo with, of all people, Pitbull. Still, it’s steps every day to get where he wants to be. Even talking needed a recalibration.

“Though I never knew what was wrong, I could tell that innately something was off. So you start compensating. Imagine you were favouring one leg over the other, to a point where you learn to walk with a limp and think that that's natural. Then you get the surgery, and you're told that you don't have to walk with a limp anymore. But it takes a long time to rebalance these two legs, so you had to learn to walk again. I've literally had to learn how to pronounce words again, and change the way [I speak] that usually just came so naturally, like pronouncing a vowel.”

Jon does vocal exercises every day, and the band keep track on progress when they rehearse every month, a marker he says has been showing consistent improvement. When it came to making the record, it was still one step at a time, but the fact that it happened and is here speaks to the progress.

It’s also a record that has the same relaxed, easy feel as Jon does today. He describes a sense of joy about the whole thing, where the band’s last couple of records had been about reasserting themselves (This House Is Not For Sale, 2016, their first record since Richie left) and looking inward (2020’s unintentionally prescient 2020). When we put it to him that there’s a feeling of something approaching innocence to it, that they sound like a band just getting together to play music with no real expectation, given the question mark over everything, he agrees.

“Look, if you write that, you will have hit it right on the head because there was a certain joy founded in that innocence,” he says. “If you think back to 2020, you can't promote it, you can't tour it, you can't do anything, you're writing very heavy subject matter. Obviously, it’s not a joyful record, but a very artistic record. This House Is Not For Sale, I'm very, very proud of as an album and everything about it. But yet, it was a statement record, again, not a joyous record.

“It [took] the better part of a decade to then come through all of those things compounded by a throat surgery that only God saw coming, and then to get to this place. And I think it's because, although I'm not at the finish line of the recovery I'm well on the way, you can find joy.”

There’s still work to be done, and there are still question marks looming, but things are getting better. On live plans, he says he hopes to do Wembley next summer, but that’s still in the lap of the Gods. If it happens, awesome, but, with a zen-ness, rather than any sort of conceitedness, he also shrugs that, “If it happens or not, it’s not gonna change my life in any way.”

And that’s partly where this happiness, this joy comes from. At Jon Bon Jovi’s point in life, 62 years old, 40 years in the game, having already won the game so many times and in possession of all the spoils that come with it, there’s no real need for him to go to such trouble to keep going, other than the love of it and it’s because it’s what he does. It’s better than the alternate reality where that night in Nashville was the full-stop, certainly.

“It’s worth [having surgery and fighting to carry on] to try to make it whole again – it's worth the shot,” he says, smile widening. “I could have never in my wildest wet dreams have thought that 40 years into our career, I'd be sitting here talking to Kerrang!, and I'm not on the ‘Where Are They Now?’ pile.

“It’s worth the shot, man.”

Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story is streaming now. Forever is released on June 7 via Island.