The occasion is Jon's second solo record, Destination Anywhere. Bon Jovi may not be a critic's darling, but he has probably sold more records than everyone else in this issue put together. So there.

SPIN: Who gave you that piece of art hanging on the wall?

Jon Bon Jovi: Elton gave me that.

Is he a close friend?

Yeah. He's the sweetest, most generous man on earth.

Did you hear the story about the Concorde flight he was on that lost an engine? Pete Townshend was also aboard, and everybody was looking at these two rock stars and thinking, We can't die with these guys on the plane.

Here's another one. I heard that Sly Stallone was on his way to Cannes and the windshield on his private plane popped out. So they had to fly across the ocean like that. [Laughs] And Sly said, "I always wanted to cross the Atlantic in a convertible."

Speaking of Sly, tell me about your own acting career. Did you have any formal training?

Oh yeah, I studied for six years. Moonlight and Valentino [his first film] was only two-and-a-half years ago. I'd written the music for the film Young Guns 2, and it turned out to be a surprising success. I won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award. And I wanted to do it again. That was going to be my outlet. So I was getting scripts with the idea that I would be writing the songs. But eventually the scripts stopped coming, and I thought that if I took acting lessons, maybe I'd meet more movie people. So I took some lessons, and then a couple of years into that, I went on an audition. And eventually I got a role. My first day on the set was the first time I ever acted with a group of people. I had spent two years like this, with a guy in a room. So it was like being thrown right into the fire, but it was cool.

How does it compare to music? Is it a similar buzz?

My greatest creative pleasure is still writing a song, because I created it. Being on a set and making a film is like jamming with a band; it's a collaboration. It's more like being a rhythm guitar player. You just show up, play your part, and walk away.

Does your rock-star status create any special problems on the set? Beefed-up security and the like?

No. I mean, today I'll go to the set [of the upcoming Ed Burns movie Long Time, Nothing New]. Everyone in town knows I'm there. I've been there for two months. There'll be, maybe, a hundred fans out there. They'll stop and take a picture or something. They're not Lee Harvey Oswald; nobody wants to shoot me. They just want to say hi, and that's that.

What was your childhood like?

It was a very good, middle-class, New Jersey upbringing. I was blessed growing up. My parents worked six days a week so we could make it. They taught me and my brother that hard work could get us what we want.

You still believe that?

Yeah. I've always believed that nothing was going to be handed to me, but that if I went out and hustled, I could have it. On Christmas morning when I was 13, I wanted this electric guitar so bad, and my folks hid it under the couch, they wanted to see if I'd act pissy. But I didn't. I just said, "Oh well, I didn't get it." And then they pulled it out.

Do you still have that guitar?

No, I wish I did. I sold it

Before you got famous?

Yeah.

I bet the guy who bought it made a mint.

I heard he did, actually.

Speaking of which, whatever happened to that guy who won your house on MTV?

He sold it two months later. After he posed for all the pictures for MTV. He made himself $100,000. [Laughs]

Who were your heroes growing up?

Southside Johnny. Bruce [Springsteen] and Steven Van Zandt, of course. They made the impossible possible because they were 20 miles from your house and they were writing songs about the streets that ran through your neighborhood. The Who and Led Zeppelin and all those groups were just too unobtainable for a kid from Jersey. Too big.

When did you know you were going to be a big rock star?

You don't ever know. When you play a bar you think that's big. Then you get your first bus, and you think that's big. When [1986's 12-million-selling] Slippery When Wet hit, though, that was the big time.

Was it too big?

When Slippery came out, we were thrust into it so fast that when I now look back on it, those aren't fond memories at all. I was burned out beyond belief. I was getting shots of steroids in order to sing every night. My eyes were sunken, I weighed about 102 pounds. It was too much to enjoy, it was too fast.

Can you look back on it objectively now?

Yeah. I know now that if I'd taken one wrong turn 15 years ago, I could have been the one rolling the room service tray into the room instead of the one receiving it. And I don't take any of that for granted. Ever. But when Slippery hit, we were wealthy, and we did all the goofy things. We felt that the way you showed your love for your family was to buy them a house, or a Ferrari, or Cartier. But I've had success now for ten, 11 years, so I've gotten past that. What's important now is when [guitarist] Richie [Sambora] calls me and says, "How ya doing?" I get much more out of that.

When did you, Richie, and the band decide to take a break from Bon Jovi?

When it started to feel like an oldies act. I knew when to put in "You Give Love A Bad Name," I knew when to pull out the big stadium trick, when the fireworks should go off. I thought, I'm not going to get caught in that. I'm going to walk away from this. Like the words to "Every Word Was a Piece of My Heart" [from his new solo album, Destination Anywhere]: "It was all I had to give you / And I gave it to you / And now I'm walking away."

How do you feel about the music press?

Well, they're obviously not big fans. We're not the critics' darling, we never were. We were always the people's band. The harsh reality is that we've sold 70-odd-million albums, and I'm not on the cover of SPIN this month. I'm an article inside it. And whoever is on the cover this month or next month, I'm sure we've sold more records than they have.

Does that frustrate you?

[Shrugs] You can't demand respect. You just have to stay around long enough. SPIN once asked me if Bon Jovi released our late-'80s records in such quick succession because I was afraid it was all a fluke, that it would soon be over. I didn't realize it then, but the answer was yes. But now we know that we could walk away and we'd all be fine. Now we know that the band is going to make it into the '90s, that there's going to be a next record. It's no longer a question of whether or not we're going to make it into the millennium. We're going to.

Do you consider yourself an optimist?

Sure. I have nothing to be pessimistic about. My life is blessed, I know that. I'm grateful for it every day. And it bothers me to see kids of this era saying, "We don't have a future, we don't have a job." I was born during the Kennedy era, when we still believed. My parents believed that they could own a house and a car. And when I was old enough to vote, and Ronald Reagan was telling us that everything's going to be okay, the bad guys are still in Russia and we're the good guys and all that nonsense, and you're 18 and impressionable, and you're watching the debates between him and Jimmy Carter and he whoops Carter's ass on TV, you think, Yeah, I could vote for that guy. Up to that point, people still believed they could achieve things. I did. I took the longest of shots and said, "I'm going to be a rock star."

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