The new four-part Hulu docuseries, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, traces the band’s meteoric rise
When Jon Bon Jovi calls Hemispheres from Los Angeles, the first thing he says is, “I can’t wait to leave.” In a way, this is the purest insight into the 62-year-old music legend: His very name is synonymous with rock ’n’ roll, he possesses an entire catalog of songs that remain arena staples, and yet there’s no air of Hollywood about him. He’s New Jersey to the core.
Bon Jovi has maintained this everyman quality throughout a career that traces back to the late 1970s. This year, he’s celebrating the 40th anniversary of his eponymous band’s first album, beginning with Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, a four-part documentary series now streaming on Hulu. The program details a teenage John Bongiovi, as his name was spelled then, playing gigs in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where none other than Bruce Springsteen once joined him on stage; the recording of his first big single, “Runaway,” while he was working as a gopher at a music studio in New York City; the meteoric rise that saw Slippery When Wet and New Jersey become iconic records chock-full of number-one hits such as “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and “Bad Medicine”; and the ups and downs of the band’s later period, including lead guitarist and co-songwriter Richie Sambora’s 2013 exit and Bon Jovi’s 2022 vocal cord surgery.
Thank You, Goodnight may look back, but Bon Jovi is also moving forward, with a new album, Forever, due out June 7. “The first 40 years have steadily gone well,” he says (an understatement on par with saying he and his bandmates might have used a blow dryer once in a while in the ’80s). “The life has been certainly lived, and I’m working on doing the best that I can every day.”
How did Thank You, Goodnight come together?
It’s our 40th anniversary of the first album, and a couple of years ago I started thinking about that milestone. We were going to archive everything that I had, and I thought about a documentary to accompany it. Having seen the work of [director and executive producer] Gotham Chopra, and then having met with him, I took a flier on it and said, let’s do this.
Was it fun for you to relive all that personal history?
It’s good. It was great that I was archiving everything simultaneously, so it gave the documentary maker that much more to pull from. It was incredible that we had access to so much, and then so many other things that we found as a result—there’s 30-plus songs from the [early] era that I had forgotten about. We go back and we look at the early stuff, especially the formation of the band and our childhoods, which is all well and good, but it’s anything but a puff piece. This is warts-and-all. This is the full 40 years, and we’re proud of it.
Yeah, when Richie Sambora first sits down on camera, he says, “So, are we telling the truth?” There were some hard feelings when he left the band—was it important to you for him to be in the film?
Of course. He was an integral part of the success of the band, and he was there for the first three chapters, let’s call it—the first 30 years. So God bless him for that.
As the documentary details, you toured relentlessly throughout the 1980s, even playing the first American rock concert in the Soviet Union. Are there any shows that stand out in your memory?
So many. Who was going to the Soviet Union? The wall was still up. We went everywhere, early, and that I really credit to our very first manager, Doc McGhee. He said, “Eventually, America will turn its back on any band. Then you have Europe. And then, if Europe turns its back, you still have Japan, Australia, South America…” So we were always cognizant that there was a big world out there. So many memories were made traveling to crazy places, like the Soviet Union, and we have recollections of playing in bars that were great. It didn’t matter that there were big venues—it was just the adventure that we were on as young men, all pursuing a dream.
In Thank You, Goodnight, you refer to some of those early songs as “guitars and babes” tunes. On the other hand, I was just listening to your last album, 2020, which is full of thoughtful, mature lyrics about topics such as COVID and gun violence. How have you grown as a songwriter?
Well, if in 40 years you could learn to be a baker or a candlestick maker, I would hope in 40 years you’re going to become better at this craft. But also, I realized, even from the beginning, to look around [and treat] every day as an opportunity to capture a memory and write it down. If you think about “Runaway,” it was a socially conscious song, because I was going to and from the Power Station recording studio, taking the bus into the city on a daily basis, and I got to witness all the kids that were my age that didn’t get off the bus to go to the recording studio; they got off the bus to sit in the bus station. So there was a social consciousness even in the earliest songs. Sure, the tongue-in-cheek of “You Give Love a Bad Name” is not material for the album 2020, but with the times and situations surrounding us, 2020, artistically, was incredibly fulfilling for me. I needed to express myself in that way for that record. That is not the attitude of this [upcoming] album. The overriding theme of this record is, I found joy again. And it gives me great pleasure to know just a simple joy.
The documentary also contrasts what it was like to be a rock star in your 20s with what it takes to perform in your 60s—two years after having surgery on your vocal cords, no less. What’s it like now?
There’s singing, and then there’s rehabbing from a major surgery. Singing is something that I’ve always done, and I’ve had great success as a vocalist— not a stylist. I know the craft. I’ve sung with Pavarotti. When this debilitating vocal cord [condition] happened, it caught me off guard. It wasn’t a result of anything that I had done, other than one of my cords was literally atrophying. Initially, doctors couldn’t even explain that to me. After a long search, I found the right guy, who explained to me what was happening and how we could attempt to fix it with an implant. And I’ve been working on that for the last couple of years. It’s not unlike an athlete that comes back to Super Bowl–caliber performance and questions, can he recover from this potentially career-ending injury? That’s sort of where I was, and am, I guess,
How do you feel about your ability to perform now?
Last Friday night was the first time in nearly two years that I performed in public, so the progress is steady, and it’s good. You know what I said the next morning? That Saturday morning, after that first performance, was the first time in a decade when I woke up and there were no other voices in my head of doubt or questioning: Was that good enough? Is this right? Is there something wrong? There was none of it. I woke up Saturday and went, “Yeah, sang last night. It was great.”
That’s amazing. Congratulations.
Thank you.
I have to say, you’re Jon Bon Jovi, a rock star’s rock star, but you seem like a totally relatable dude. How have you managed to stay so grounded?
We’re from Jersey! At the end of the day, we grew up in the shadow of the greatest city in the world, but not in the spotlight of it. That was a place where you could cut your teeth and learn your craft, and then you drove into the city to present it. There were no Joneses to keep up with in New Jersey. You were able to create who and what you are around people who were just like you, if that makes sense. So that’s who we are; that’s where we’re from. When we realized, early on in our career, to go home, stay home, be who you are, that solidified Bon Jovi as who and what we are.
In a perhaps-related fact, you married your high school girlfriend, Dorothea, and have stayed together—
Yeah, 35 years. Married 35 years.
What’s the secret to that success?
We grew together. That’s really, honest to God, it. We grew up together, so she didn’t come in when I was already having the successes of Slippery When Wet and New Jersey. She was there when there was no band at all. She just knew me as the kid next to her in history class.
Being kindhearted probably doesn’t hurt, either. In February, you were honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year for your charity work. What does your foundation do?
I founded the JBJ Soul Foundation 20 years ago, out of Philadelphia. Once upon a time, I owned an arena football team there, and I thought, How do I ingratiate myself to the community? And I thought, Be as philanthropic as the Big Four, or even more. So I started to be Robin Hood. Whatever you needed, we could support it, whether it was computers for an orphanage, food at a food bank, or creating affordable housing. When the economic downturn of 2008 happened, Dorothea came up with the concept of the Soul Kitchens, and now we have four of them in New Jersey. We feed people at our restaurants what we call a “pay it forward” menu. If you go in there and you want to directly affect change, leave the suggested donation. It covers your meal, a beautiful farm-to-table meal, and it also covers the meal of somebody that might be in there and can’t afford to pay anything. For those who can’t afford to pay anything, we ask them to volunteer, by washing dishes or washing a window or working in our gardens. It really empowers the individual, because it’s not a soup kitchen. When you volunteer, and you feel that you’ve earned that meal, you’re sitting straighter. There’s a great sense of pride, because it’s bringing the community together.
It sounds like a great project. On a lighter note, I can’t let you go without asking this: When you look back at your music videos and concerts from the ’80s, what do you think of those clothes?
[Laughs.] My baby pictures. I could absolutely look back and chuckle at some of those outfits—and the haircare products. I get to jokingly say now, “At least I still have my hair.”
