Jon Bon Jovi - Australian 60Minutes Interview 13/07/97

Liz Hayes: His fans number in the tens of millions and on one thing they agree - Jon Bon Jovi is the sexiest man alive. Uh, he can write songs, sing and act as well but for those who've made him a superstar, that's just a bonus. Through the 80's and into the 90's they bought warehouses of his albums and sold out his concert performances around the world. Bon Jovi's great talent is knowing what his audience wants - HIM.

**Cut to JB singing at New York Supper Club with that fancy light thingy going across his face that everybody has spoken about. Narration continues:**

LH: These fans in New York [one tiny flash of fans] couldn't give a hoot that the man they've come to see is a 35-year-old, happily married father of two. He's Jon Bon Jovi and that's all that matters.

**Another little grab of the concert**

**Interview room - [Hotel somewhere]**

LH: Would it be fair for me to say that what you do for a living is, in many respects, seduction?

JB: [Bit of a pause] There's a seduction to it ... sure. You know ... there's a sexual aspect of what I do that um, you seduce the listener, you seduce the audience. There's some sexual tension in it, yeah.

LH: And you're aware of that?

JB: [Pause] Yep.

LH: So how do you do that? I'd like to know!! [laughs]

JB: I'd like to know too!!

**Cut between concert singing Midnight in Chelsea and interview room**

JB: Nothing that I do on that stage is planned. None of it is contrived. If you like it or don't like it the least you have to say about it is that it's natural - it's real. I mean, it might look goofy sweating all over somebody in the front row but, on the other hand, there's a part of you that completely lets go.

LH: So, you're a natural seducer.

JB: Well, I don't know. I'm working on it. [grins]

**Cut to In These Arms video. LH narrating over the top as follows:**

LH: Bon Jovi's career in rock has been the seduction of millions. In the 80's, his band played the biggest venues in the world ... with Bon Jovi out front whipping up the fans into mega hysteria.

**Back to the interview**

LH: Was it true that it became so crazy - it still may be happening for all I know - that women would take their underwear off in the street if they saw you and hand it to you? [Laughs]

JB: [with an incredulous look] THAT'S an out there kinda ... No!! [grin]

LH: It never happened? [laughing]

JB: [big grin] Get a mental picture of that ...

LH: I did!!! That's why I had to ask.

JB: Here it goes ...[making an action of someone struggling out of their underwear pretending to hand it over] "Here!!!" No!! I don't want their dirty underwear!!! [laughs]

LH: Precisely.

JB: Noooo!

**Cut to Livin' on a Prayer video. LH narrating over the top as follows:**

LH: Looking back now, Jon Bon Jovi was always going to be the "young rocker most likely to succeed". He had energy, good songs - a presence. But it was a while before "John Bongiovi" - son of a Sicilian hairdresser - was able to reroute the life his parents had mapped out for him.

**Back to interview**

JB: You know, I had a wide array of jobs. I worked in a shoe store; I worked in an autobody shop; a fast food place; I sold newspaper subscriptions door to door. You know, I did whatever I could to hustle a buck.

LH: All the time believing that you're going to get out of those jobs eventually?

JB: Oh yeah. You know, I certainly didn't want to grow up and be the Assistant Manager at Kinney's Shoe Store.

LH: And what do Mum and Dad say now?

JB: [Pause] Why don't you call home more often!!! [laughs] Ah ...

LH: Because we're talking about a very Italian family aren't we?

JB: Yeah.

LH: A very "family" family.

JB: I think my mother would trade the houses and the cars and everything else for ... lunch! But I don't have time most of the time, you know. [laughs]

**Narration over some interview footage**

LH: Bon Jovi says from age seven, when he first took up guitar, he always knew what he wanted in life.

**Back to interview**

LH: And when was your first "public" performance?

JB: Oh boy. I must have been 13 or so at a talent show in what was to be my high school, years later.

LH: Hair-raising?

JB: Came in last place. [laughs]

LH: [laughs] They had NO IDEA did they?

JB: No ... They blew it. [grins]

LH: What was it about music ... Was it about music? Was it about fame? Was it about recognition? Was it about money?

JB: No. Um ... No it was nothing to do with that. It was the power of Rock 'n' Roll. You know I think that the way that the song moves a person.

**Cut to Runaway video narration over top**

LH: For Jon Bon Jovi that ability to move people with his words and his voice was his ticket to ride the charts. Though it took a song called "Runaway" for record companies to realise it.

**Back to the interview**

JB: Yeah, the song was somewhat of a fluke because it started to break nationally without a record deal, without a band, without anything. And that eventually turned all those record companies who went flying through their old dusty tapes and said "Aha!!"

LH: I recall this, I've got this. You sold 350,000 of those ...

JB: Of the first album, yeah.

**Cut to You Give Love a Bad Name video. Narration over the top as follows:**

LH: When the record companies saw the pretty boy package that voice was wrapped in, THAT was the clincher. Soon there was Bon Jovi the band; Bon Jovi the videos; Bon Jovi the Body Corporate. Selling fashion for Versace. And there were the hits - one after another.

**Cut to Wanted video. Narration as follows:**

JB: There was just consecutive number one singles, number one albums. Sales records, merchandising records, ticket sales records. And it all just was thrown in our faces and we didn't even know what was happening.

LH: And then there were the concerts. Even now he shakes his head at the memory of them. Two relentless, year-long, round-the-world tours that included sell-out performances in Australia.

**Cut to footage of fans outside a hotel during Australian tour and JB waving down to them etc. Back to interview**

JB: My first trip to Australia wasn't a pleasurable one because I was physically burned and I didn't put on the type of show that I wanted to put on. I mean my memories of the first time in Australia ... the good ones were the hundreds of people out the front of the hotels and the airport arrivals and bad ones were the doctors backstage giving you cortizone [not sure how to spell that, sorry] shots to put you on the stage that night.

LH: And the cortizone was for ....?

JB: It takes down the swelling in the vocal chords ... that kinda stuff.

LH: And that's just sheer exhaustion?

JB: Yeah ... you're just burned.

LH: So much so that I read where you had to, on occasions, write the name of the town or the city you were in on the microphone.

JB: Yeah. That's true. And I've blown it. I've sat there and gone "Hello Osaka!!!" [spelling, not sure] and they've gone "You're in Nigoya" [again, spelling] and you go "Oh!! ... I like Nigoya too!!"

**Cut to NY concert, JB saying: "So yesterday the album came out, the album called Destination Anywhere" Narration as follows:**

LH: For Bon Jovi those days of whirlwind world tours are gone now. He gives only selected performances. Tonight, it's an exclusive Supper Club in New York.

**JB singing the part of the Midnight in Chelsea which goes "It ain't hard to understand just why she's holding on to her own hand. It's Midnight in Chelsea. Midnight in Chelsea" **

LH: The old fans have come to be seduced all over again as much by those famous good looks as the songs.

**JB singing "They're to busy saving me". Back to interview**

LH: Do you get annoyed by it?

JB: No. Not at this point in my life. You know like we were saying before, maybe ten years ago I would have been more annoyed by it because I felt I had so much to prove. You know, I was the "angry young man". You know, I think the body of work has to speak for itself or otherwise you ARE just Fabio. There has to be more than one component that makes up the "magic".

LH: Sure. You have to be more than a pretty face is what you're saying to me. But it HELPS to have a pretty face.

JB: It doesn't hurt.

LH: It also doesn't hurt to have a pretty bum! [laughs]

JB: [grinning] I BEG your pardon!

**Cut to scene from Moonlight and Valentino where they discuss the painter's arse. Narration as follows:**

LH: The flip side of Bon Jovi's appeal came to the fore in his first major film. He played a house painter in a love story called Moonlight and Valentino.

**Back to interview**

LH: And is acting going to overtake singing?

JB: No. I don't think it's ever going to replace my "day job" as it were. Singing has always been my first love but songwriting gives me the greatest personal satisfaction because it's something that I've created and it's something that'll be with me forever. You know when you walk onto and walk off of a movie set you're just a part, you're just a piece of the puzzle and in songwriting it's all yours.

**Cut to Blaze of Glory video. Narration as follows:**

LH: It was those songwriting skills that launched Bon Jovi into movies. His song, Blaze of Glory, from Young Guns 2, won him an Oscar nomination and the bit-part that's led to ... bigger things.

**Cut to clip of a kissing scene from what I assume is Leading Man. Narration as follows:**

LH: He's just had his first starring role in an erotic thriller called, Leading Man and there are a few more films in the works.

**Cut to what I assume is video of Midnight in Chelsea. Narration as follows:**

LH: And as for the day job ... well, that's going fine too.

**Sound up for part of Midnight in Chelsea "I'm the man I wanna be"**

**Back to interview**

JB: I don't know where I'm going ten years from now cause who woulda knew that I'd be HERE ten years ago. I'm just gonna do what I want to do. I'm the man I wanna be, you know. I'm enjoying this.

**Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick** [lol]

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