The Dirty Little Secret That's Bon Jovi

"Has some-body got a coat hanger? Quick! Hear me? Bon Jovi needs a coat hanger! This is an emergency! Lissun to me! This girl outside, she--I need a coat hanger for Mr. Jon Bon Jovi!"

The husky bruiser in black is barreling through the otherwise sedate corridors of WSHE-FM, a south Florida rock radio station, declaiming his distress.

Two startled young men poke their heads out of somewhere. "Jon!" yelps the willowy one to his puggish pal. "We can't have that guy running past a live microphone screaming that Bon Jovi needs a fucking coat hanger!" He tugs at the front of his frayed Hedonism II T-shirt. "Think about it, man. Our image with parents of chicks in this state is bad enough without people getting that kinda announcement over the airwaves!"

"Outa my hands," says his lion-maned companion, Jon Bon Jovi, dressed in blue Adidas stretch pants and matching tank top and rubbing his cleft chin--the trademark punctuation of his Mediterranean good looks.

Bon Jovi picks up an issue of Billboard and begins thumbing through it, calmly thinking out loud.

"I tell you, I couldn't sleep last night. Too many girls outside the hotel screaming like crazy. Jeez! So I sat up listening to Hank Williams' Greatest Hits Volume Two'.' The Williams song that finally took Jon's horny mind off his fortissimo female fans, he says, was Mansion on the Hill, largely because it struck Jon that no less an artist than Bruce Springsteen may have gotten the idea for "that song on Nebraska, Mansion on the Hill, directly from Hank--the concept, the title! People say I steal--hell, I borrow. I love Springsteen as much as anybody, but the next time somebody tries to tell me he's a complete original...."

It seems the insomniac Bon Jovi seeks a Billboardlikc tally sheet to buttress his own humbler (continued on page 88)Bon Jovi (continued from page 79) borrowings. Alas, art is not the business of keeping score.

Jon pauses, looks up at his jumpy friend as the hanger entreaty resounds in the background and shrugs. "Completely outa"--a small, growing grin--"my hands."

It's a sun-swept banner Saturday at WSHE-FM, 103.5, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Saint Valentine's Weekend-- traditional prelude to spring break in the edgy Eighties. Heavy cruising along beaches and breakwaters from Miami Beach to Hollywood, Florida, is already bumper-to-bumper berserk, and every dashboard radio and ghetto blaster along the 25-mile seaboard stretch has been synchronized for the just-concluded live chitchat with singer Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist/side-kick Richie Sambora. And now it's time to slip the concert-bound rockers back into their waiting limo. But, no, that's where one overwrought nymph, trying to seal herself up inside, has accidentally locked everybody, including herself, out. Hence, the frantic search for a wire hanger. Soon, a chauffeur springs the door and these cowboys are on their way.

The brief interview was one more dash of genial hucksterism for a sold-out concert stand at the local sports arena by Bon Jovi, the biggest new American band since the advent of another coliseum-filling hard-metal act that carries its leader's last name: Van Halen.

Hard metal is a pop merger of hard-rock blare and heavy-metal bluster whose greatest identifiable traits are any identifiable traits at all--e.g., Eddie Van Halen's ferocious guitar virtuosity, Sammy Hagar's adenoidal howl or Jon Bon Jovi's splendidly whooping good-time warble, served up on such likably loutish road-house fare as Runaway, In and Out of Love, You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer and Wanted Dead or Alive.

Still, it's neither the petrous material nor Jon's pealing pipes that have enabled his band to notch several consecutive number-one singles from Slippery When Wet, the 10,000,000-selling album that knocked Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975--85 out of the peak slot in the country's record surveys. Bon Jovi's massive acceptance isn't rooted in its musical prowess, though Sambora is a reasonably dextrous guitarist, Tico "Hit Man" Torres a flinty drummer and Alec John Such and Dave Bryan more than facile on bass and keyboards, respectively. It isn't the recklessly choreographed stage show, either, in which Jon soars savagely on a Peter Pan wire, while the band weaves an elastic net of sportive stridor below.

No, the key elements in Bon Jovi's recent popularity ride are, in ascending order, the sloppy grin on Jon's mug, made ubiquitous nationwide by nonstop touring and numberless bedroom beefcake pinups; the fact--which he gleefully volunteers--that his group's handle "sounds like some sort of jeans or spaghetti sauce"; and, most of all, the corkscrew hair twisting across his rippling 25-year-old chest. The bashful but game Jon Bon Jovi (baptized John Bongiovi) is strong evidence, both symbolic and actual, that rock-'n'-roll primacy--despite the majority of rock headliners who are a tad long in the tooth, stiff in the ligaments and soft in the saddle--remains the province of newly exploding hormones amid the freedom with license to exploit them.

This mating dance between Bon Jovi, its baser urges and its potential mass audience comes at a critical juncture in the rock epoch. After a period of standoffishness born of market sampling, focus groups and a smattering of outside political pressure, MTV (and the record-industry trendmeisters it mirrors) is again dispensing hard metal in a big way-- along with special programing that spotlights its chief practitioners, Bon Jovi and the Bon Jovi-discovered Cinderella. Not long ago, such acts were taboo to trumpet, because they upset parents and delivered only cult-sized sales for all the headaches they inspired. But now, with rock so accessible to 20-to-45-year-olds, teenaged kids absolutely demand something only they can love, and hard metal fits the high end of reflex rebellion at the record-store cash register.

The members of Cinderella, by the way, look exactly like their anti-Disney handle suggests: oily androgynists and reupholstered cross dressers, cranking out skull-splitting doses of cartoon despoliation. These pixilated dim bulbs can push an easy 3,000,000 albums a season to average kids with average socio-sexual phobias. Catering to a mere developmental impulse in a generation weaned on a relentlessly recycled toy-rock rubric, Cinderella cannot hold a candle to Bon Jovi in terms of long-range commercial potential. That's because Bon Jovi appeals to those who have outgrown comic-book heroes and now want somebody who resembles them on their best night out.

Bon Jovi fans, particularly ones from borderline-rural suburbs like Jon's own Sayreville, New Jersey, fiercely identify with his apparent hormonal ferment and, in concert, cheer his every celebratory Muff Dive (a Bon Jovi-concocted quaff, equal parts vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice, fast emerging as a juke-bar staple). While the guys in Bon Jovi's audience can easily if wishfully see themselves in Jon's good fortune, the girls, well, they envision him in a linen envelope.

Rock 'n' roll is one livelihood without a heritage of proprieties. That the four horny instrumentalists who support the bandleader in Bon Jovi's eager enterprise are voluntarily becoming minor characters is owed largely to the fact that most are slightly older, more worldly-wise, and they're getting a flamboyantly undisguised charge out of showing the kid the ropes.

"When we met Jon," says Sambora. "we saw, for a change, an unjaded, professional young guy who knows and lives his business. We gave up wives, girlfriends, homes, you name it, to go 150 miles per hour with him toward the end zone."

Heard this speech before? Uh-huh. Except that when Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Wilson expressed the need to excel, their soliloquies had none of the language you hear in investment banking or the front offices of the N.F.L. True rock 'n' roll demands purity of purpose in some visceral category or other.

"The song Wanted Dead or Alive is about the way we live," Richie continues. "We are modern-day cowboys--we ride into town, put on a show, take the money, hit the bar, take the ladies and we're gone. And we do the same thing the next night in another place." He winks. "The fans want to take a piece of you home, and their parents, they wanna throw us in jail, see us hung." He shrugs happily, nudging Jon. "So we're wanted: dead or alive."

"I don't mind," Jon says brightly. "No complaints here." Is this backhanded affirmation the trickle from an actual well-spring of creative passion? Where does Bon Jovi get its inspiration for such songs as You Give Love a Bad Name and the more pointed Social Disease?

"The gutter," Jon assures me straight-faced, even in this era of feckless sybarites and deflated debauchees. Bon Jovi's true quest, it seems, is for females who are professional cowgirls, who know and live their business.

"That," Jon smirks, "has a lot to do with why we named the album Slippery When Wet."

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"We gave Bon Jovi the best table in the house. They made this place their headquarters while they recorded Slippery (continued on page 93)Bon Jovi (continued from 88) When Wet" says Eric Poison, 23, manager of Vancouver, British Columbia's, leading strip club, the No. 5 Orange Street Showroom Pub and Hotel on Main Street.

"In spring '86, the guys would come in every night, order hamburgers and a drink from our [insert commercial jingle here] 30 different kinds of Scotch and 60 imported beers," Poison elaborates, proudly gesturing around the oak-and-brass-appointed night club. "We made them feel at home. The No. 5 is not like the unpleasant strip clubs you usually see in the States. Our strippers are recruited from the finest dancers in Canada, and our clientele includes the best Vancouver business people and visiting foreign executives, as well as other dignitaries who are in town. The girls take the stage from an elevated area that leads directly to the dressing room, so there's a great view from everywhere in the room, but normally there is no mixing with the customers."

Normally?

"Well, see, the girls would come out before and after their acts to hang out with Jon and the band, help them unwind." Which is a polite way of saying that Norma Jean, Jessey, Cybelle, Laurie, Jamie and Evelyn went out of their way, in every blood-rushing sense, to help these boys reach their avowed end zone with all pistons firing. Whenever they appeared on the raised strip platform to spotlight their attributes, the darlings put an extra half twist of zeal in their peel to please the randy rockers crawling over the front table. Afterward, they nuzzled with the lightheaded lads over cocktails, reacquainting them with a time-honored tenet of the rock life: What you don't see, ask for.

If Jon and his colleagues somehow lacked imagination when it came to informal applications of these girls' vocational verve, they were suitably galvanized, Eric Poison assures, "by Evelyn and Laurie, who do the shower act."

The shower act?

"You don't know about the shower routine? We have a special performance every evening with Evelyn and Laurie. An illuminated glass ladder comes down from the ceiling, and they ascend as our custom-built light system goes into action. The girls dance for about ten to 15 minutes and strip completely. Then our Plexiglas shower on stage is turned on. The girls hop in and soap up, get a nice lather going.

"Jon and the band were checking all this out, having a wonderful time, and they got the idea for the album from Evelyn and Laurie-- slippery when wet!"

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Back in Florida, as the 1987 Bon Jovi Tour Without End bumps and grinds onward, Bon Jovi confirms, "That's more or less how it was. We had done an old-West-style album-cover photo with this tough little five-year-old tomboy, who was dressed in dirty jeans and a cowboy hat. We put her in a corner with her punk-tomboy attitude and shot that for the cover, thinking we'd call the album Wanted Dead or Alive.

"We took the Polaroids of the cover back to the No. 5 Orange, and I was sitting there with my drink, looking at 'em, thinking they look too cold and stiff. And as I'm thinking, the shower routine starts and the two girls begin dancing to a Bon Jovi song, In and Out of Love.

"Young and wired,

Set to explode in the heat.

You won't tire,

'Cause baby was born with the beat....

"I wasn't paying a lot of attention, just waiting for the girls to get off from work so we all could get out of there.

"So I'm looking over my shoulder at the girl, and I'm listening to Richie complaining about something, and then I'm watching the girl soaping herself up.

"We started talking nasty things, saying, I'll bet that's wet! Soap it up! Slippery when wet--just like the road sign!'

"Everybody thought it'd be a great album title, but we wondered, How do we take this shower act and get it onto record shelves in shops across Middle America? Big problem."

While Jon Bon Jovi wrestled with that marketing quandary--ultimately settling for a photo of a black-plastic trash bag splashed with water, the words written on it in his own finger-tip script--the girls had dropped the soap, left the stage and toweled off for a night in and/or out with the band. The after-show line-up would vary, Evelyn and Laurie sometimes going along for the ride, plus Norma Jean, the Marilyn Monroe look-alike; Jessey, a sandy blonde with a frizzy halo; Cybelle, a gorgeously ripe brunette; and Jamie, who's dark-haired and dramatically athletic; plus a few friends from the No. 5 Orange's sister strip spa, the Marble Arch.

The entire troupe would usually gravitate to the condominium Bon Jovi had rented for the more than two months it took for the band to complete its recording at Little Mountain Studios, Jon ushering the women into makeshift weight-training rooms to pump ironies until the sun came over the surrounding mountains.

"We'd put the girls into Jolly Jumpers," Jon says, referring to a spring-supported exercise harness devised to keep tots upright while providing happy bounce-ability. "They have amazing muscle tone. It certainly was an education," he summarizes.

More than likely. Does that mean that the lady heard moaning ("Ohhh, uuuhhhh, ohhhh, right there, ohhhh-- you mean that's it?") in abruptly terminated ecstasy at the start of Social Disease was one of the No. 5 talent roster?

"Nah, that's Dirty Angie," says Bon Jovi. "She wasn't a stripper. She was one of Richie's other friends up there. We made a lot of friends, gave them nicknames. Richie, he calls me Captain Kidd. The King of Swing is Richie's nickname. His comes from two California women whose names have to be protected, but one of them is an L.A. rock star and she saw Richie one night, late. She called him the King of Swing, and I guess I should evade the rest, because he had a lot of fun with them."

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Obviously, the band members and Jon share a certain code as well as a musical bond. Rock has traditionally been the world in which you can do as you please at any cost your conscience and physical constitution can stand. The lifestyle is predicated not so much on personal excess as on the will to pursue a curiosity about oneself to its limits.

When keyboardist Bryan says, "Before we sing harmony, we've got to get into the right frame of mind; we've got to drink a pint of beer and get some bare ass in our face," is he hinting at a behavioral pedigree by which the band is bound?

"Absolutely," says Jon. "Tico and Alec, they used to play in strip bars before we got together in 1983. The girls would turn around and flash the band nightly, because they couldn't show it all to the audience. That's why Tico wants to buy his own strip bar and call it Tico's Firehouse. He flew home during the making of the record to check out locations but hasn't found one yet.

"It's a dream for him, right? And every one of us has his own dream, something he's always wanted in the real world. When we got signed to Mercury Records--on July 1, 1983--there was a lot of tough stuff going on. Tico quit Frankie and the Knockouts; Alec quit Phantom's Opera to devote a life to being broke; people divorced and sold their houses; and me and Tico wound up living in this little apartment in Philadelphia, (continued on page 150)Bon Jovi (continued from 93) being pretty miserable a lot. The point of view in so many Bon Jovi songs, like Living on a Prayer, is 'Whew, man, growing up is tough.'"

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Jon was born on March 2, 1962, the son of hairdresser John Bongiovi, Sr., and his gift-shop-owner wife (and former Playboy Bunny), Carol, in Sayreville, New Jersey, a 110-year-old township tucked into the sprawling clay fields at the mid-section of the Garden State. The Raritan River port's first important product was sunbaked brick from the gooey argil, and a good many stately edifices along the country's Eastern Seaboard were constructed at the turn of the century with Sayre & Fisher Brick Company's "reds." Today, the borough's chief baked exports are Hydrox cookies from the gigantic Sunshine Biscuits oven on Jernee Mill Road.

Jon, like his father, itched for something slacker than the factory life. His mother toted home his first guitar--acoustic-- from a trade fair before he became a teenager. Jon distinctly recalls wrapping the instrument in a blanket and throwing it down the cellar stairs "to hear the weird twong of the strings as it crashed."

Al Parinello, a guitarist working in an area club band, gave 14-year-old Jon his first lessons.

"He asked me, 'Why do you want to learn to play?' I said, 'To get chicks, what else?' 'Good thinkin',' said Al, and the first song he taught me was House of the Rising Sun, about the New Orleans whorehouse.

"That was the same year I lost my virginity--to an older girl. By 15, I was an old man. But I was never very good at picking up girls, and I'm still not." He seems embarrassed. "I had no lines, so music was my method."

To finance any additional ambitions, he toiled part time in the Sayreville 7-Eleven, commuting on his Suzuki 75 via the tracks of the Pennsylvania and Raritan River railroads to avoid being busted--he didn't have a driver's license. With some of his first pay check, he purchased a copy of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks--no irony intended--the album that sparked his interest in music as a possible way to go.

"I began hanging out at the rock concerts at Kennedy Park or the block dances on the tennis courts behind the Borough Hall, getting an 89-cent pint of beer to oil me up. By this time, girls were easier to find, 'cause instead of going to Sayreville High basketball games, I was hitting the hippest Asbury Park night clubs."

The leading one of the mid-to-late Seventies was the Sunshine Inn, where the Bruce Springsteen--bossed Steel Mill gigged before crossing the street to the after-hours Upstage Club to watch the likes of B. B. King and Aretha Franklin bassist Chuck Rainey woodshed when they were in Asbury. Tico Torres and Alec Such were frequently among this slit-eyed crew, since they were musically active on the Jersey shore's intersecting "Barbary Coast" circuit of strip joints--the Serenade, the Tropicana, et al.

When Rocky's Warehouse, a cantina catering to the younger crowd, became the Fast Lane, it joined the Stone Pony as one of the crucial see-and-be-seen teen spots.

"The first time I played the Fast Lane," says Jon, "was with the Fat Pet Clams from Outer Space. Later, I did better and jammed with Bruce and with the E Street Band. The clubs would close around 3:30 A.M., and I'd get to school at eight A.M., be out of there at noon, go back to bed and then return to the clubs."

Jon was in a ten-piece R&B outfit called the Rest when it played the last dance permitted at Sayreville High. He and his girlfriend skipped the senior prom to spend the night sipping beer in Southside Johnny's dressing room during a concert at the Great Adventure amusement park. The next week, he and the Rest had their first 8000-seat date at Freehold Raceway, on a bill with Hall & Oates.

Jon had other groups--the Wild Ones, Johnny and the Lechers, the Raze--the best being a Motown-minded combo, the Atlantic City Expressway. They opened for Springsteen, for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, for Squeeze, and then they broke up.

"I was a high school graduate, and in Sayreville that meant I was either gonna go to Middlesex County College, join the Service, get a job at the Sunshine plant or the Hercules chemical factory or be a rock-'n'-roll star."

Jon wound up with a day job sweeping up in a New York City recording studio owned by his second cousin. "When no one was in the studio, I could go in with whoever was the working assistant engineer and he would learn the board in the control room while I was learning to make records."

When Runaway, a demo by Jon that included E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, got chosen for a regional compilation LP of newcomers by WAAP d.j. Chip Hobart, Bongiovi became Bon Jovi, enlisting Dave Bryan and the oversexed saloon stalwarts Jon had been bumping into: Tico, Alec and their chum Richie, who had a combo called the Message.

If Jon had ever peeked in on the Sayreville High-Woodbridge High basketball games, he might have encountered Richie much earlier.

"I was in a bar band, like Jon, but I was committed to the team," recalls Sambora. "I brought my massive tape deck onto the court to play Mountain's Mississippi Queen for warm-ups. The coach kicked me off the varsity squad for partying too hard after we lost a game and mooning the cheerleaders' bus. For the time being, I get paid very well for similar behavior."

Since 1984, they've made three LPs together: Bon Jovi, 7800° Fahrenheit ("I thought," says Jon, "the title was the temperature where solid rock melted, but-- aw, it's not important") and Slippery When Wet. Appropriately, Bon Jovi also put one song on the sound track to Light of Day, the Joan Jett-Michael J. Fox movie about a broken-down "van band" raging against life's bleak returns.

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Weeks after Fort Lauderdale, Jon is stretched out in a Chicago hotel room, getting ready for another concert, ruminating about the forthcoming product.

"You know, during a layover in New York, we cut a few tracks with Cher, one of them called"--he chuckles--" We All Sleep Alone. I'm reproducing her new album! Man, I can remember being a little jerk watching The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, trying to convince my folks that Elton John, who was a guest, was John Lennon! Can you imagine? What a stoopid punk I was! Jeez!"

But he's gaining more deep background at each stop as Bon Jovi continues its Tour Without End, coming to your town sometime between now and Christmas. At each sports arena, Richie asks the management to set up the facility's pro basketball hoops so he can practice his dunk ("The other day, the Houston Rockets let me use their courts, gave me a uniform"); Tico mulls over the ifs and buts of Tico's Fire-house ("It would definitely be cool to do--maybe one room of dancin' girls, one room of dancin' guys; somethin' for everyone"); and Jon, sometimes wearing his souvenir No. 5 Orange staff shirt, fantasizes about the cowgirls in Canada ("We still keep in touch").

The hardest part for the members of Bon Jovi will be staying in sync with their outré appetites and ordinary aspirations as the record-company machinery lifts them toward a prime tax bracket and classier patronage. Bon Jovi's idea of a good time may be its sole link, however tenuous, to a voracious but vanishing rock-'n'-roll ethos in which you follow your flawed heart wherever it leads, never apologizing, never compromising, never needing to explain anything beyond the bare-wires candor of the music itself.

Whether it's Springsteen, The Who or Joan Jett, they all have flourished in the past or the present because they became themselves, for better or worse. And Jimi Hendrix wasn't a victim of rock 'n' roll; he died from being Jimi Hendrix. It's Ok to be who you are in rock, as long as you're more comfortable with the fact than with the image. Otherwise, the truth is quickly airbrushed over, deleted from bios and press releases, and in the future is addressed, if at all, far beyond the purview of popular tastes and judgments.

If rock 'n' roll means anything, it means that nobody should ever be afraid of his hopes and hungers, that you can get a special thrill out of the fact that there's only one you and you're never gonna come again, and that there's nothing more important than at least trying to get what you want in life, from the riveting woman across the room to the sold-out coliseum where you can re-create the big beat that pounds in your chest. It's all a matter of personal agenda. Someday, when these guys grow up, there will be more to this story.

The band is due for a sound check at greater Chicago's Rosemont Horizon entertainment complex. Bon Jovi has a lot of collective details to attend to before hitting the stage, including a stop to pick tip a band friend, Seka.

Seka? The most prepossessingly seductive blonde doxy in modern cinema porn? The supersiren who has headlined such classic cinema sex romps as Between the Sheets, Lacy Affair Pts. I & II and the 1980 scorcher Rockin' with Seka (featuring, according to ads, "the hard pulse-pounding action that Seka fans have come to expect")--that Seka?

"Oh, sure," she confirms. "I'm a very big fan."

And so it goes: another town, another show, another canny, thoroughly professional cowgirl along for the ride.

•

As Eric Poison put it back at the strip pub's special goodbye bash, trying to characterize the Slippery When Wet band's last night in British Columbia, "Our club, our girls, are exactly like Bon Jovi--a high-energy party with a lot of friendliness and a great desire to please."

"While the guys see themselves in Jon's good fortune, the girls envision him in a linen envelope."

"The girls would turn around and flash the band, because they couldn't show it all to the audience.

"The point of view in so many Bon Jovi songs is 'Whew, man, growing up is tough.