For years the frontman couldn’t enjoy the rock star ride – and now that he finally is, a vocal injury could end it. He explains how he stays upbeat, even with the US ‘at a precipice’
In 1982, Jon Bon Jovi recorded a song called Runaway during his downtime while working at a New York recording studio. Every record company he approached rejected it, but a radio DJ encouraged him to enter an unsigned band competition, which he won. Not long after, Bon Jovi was driving back to his parents house in Sayreville, New Jersey. “I was alone in the car and I heard Runaway on the radio for the first time,” he recalls. “I wanted to roll the windows down and drive fast – I hoped that I would get pulled over just so I could tell the cops that was me on the radio.”
Alone and driving fast with the radio on: it could be a Bon Jovi lyric. And 42 years, 16 studio albums and millions of sales later, the journey that started with Runaway now reaches new album Forever. As on the band’s recent documentary series, Thank You, Goodnight, it’s Jon Bon Jovi looking in the rearview mirror: one song is about buying his first guitar, while another revisits the band’s days playing on the Jersey shore. But those early gigs built up into a career that he now realises he often wasn’t allowing himself to enjoy. “I was competing with myself for a long period of time,” he says.
