I get up at 7am, usually with a kick in the head from one of the kids. There’s Stephanie, 17, Jesse, 15, Jacob, 8, and Romeo, 6. I’ll stumble into the kitchen, turn on the TV to watch NBC, and make coffee with a little bit of milk, no sugar.
I’m a big morning-shower guy. I don’t like baths. For breakfast I don’t get past coffee, but then chances are I’ll be making the kids’ breakfasts and lunches while telling them to shut off their cartoons and video games, put their shoes on and comb their hair.
New York is the greatest city in the world; it’s got just about anything a man could want. We live in a condo in SoHo, which has got big high-rises and is a little bit more artistic than the suburbs. It’s not hoity-toity like Madison Avenue. There are a lot of cool, struggling artists selling their wares around the streets.
At 8am I’ll jump in the car and take the kids to school. Traffic is bad — man, it’s not good! The mayor here tried to implement a congestion charge like the one in London, but it didn’t even get off the ground. After that I’ll go to the gym and stink the place up for a while before coming home. There’s too many things to do to waste your day sitting around the TV set, so I’ll try to take a walk with Dorothea, my wife, before going to a junky lunch place: sandwiches, salads, burgers, pizza pie, that kind of thing.
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As a kid I wasn’t that different to anyone who picked up a broomstick or a tennis racket, looked in the mirror and said: “I’d like to be in a band.” I started to take it a little more seriously when I was 13 or 14. At my first talent show my parents basically wanted to crawl under their seats because it was so bad, but it was fun banging on guitars, singing and making loud noises, pretending you knew how to do it.
The whole point of success is that you can go back to strumming for the sake of strumming
We lived in New Jersey. The beauty of New Jersey was the drinking age was 18, so by the time you were 16 you could sneak into a bar and cut your teeth at a very early age when there weren’t any responsibilities: no rent, no job, no wife.
Bruce Springsteen was making records 30 minutes from where I was born and raised. At 17 I could go down to Asbury Park in the car with my buddies and see him hanging out in bars. It was surreal, but on the other hand it was more real than real gets: you saw bands there and they would talk to you, or Springsteen would jump up on stage and play with you. The idea that The E Street Band were down the street making records made the impossible seem suddenly possible.
My kids listen to all kinds of stuff. Stephanie loves music, but she clicks a button and doesn’t even remember she’s downloaded a song because she gets distracted by some website. And she doesn’t even listen to a whole album, it’s just a song. Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: “What happened?” Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.
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I’ll pick the kids up from school at 3pm, and we’ll be back in the house by 4pm. We’ll let them burn off some steam and then have some dinner around 6 or 6.30. I’m not good in the kitchen. I’m the great cleaner-upper, the guy you want to invite to dinner because I’ll bring a bottle of wine and will be great at cleaning up. I’m not a big huge steak guy, but I’m a pretty easy eater and Dorothea’s a good cook, so we’ll normally have chicken or fish. Then we’ll try to get the kids to read, before negotiating bed times, which takes three or four hours.
The ’80s was a great time and place to be at the age I was at — Slippery When Wet came out when I was around 24, and it was wonderful, but I wouldn’t trade who I am now for who I was then.
The whole point of success is that you can go back to strumming for the sake of strumming. We’re well past that stage of having to please, or keep our record deal. You don’t need anything more than a guitar and a voice. Like, there’s nothing wrong with a banana split, but at the core of it is just vanilla ice cream.
If I’m on tour I won’t go to bed until 3am, but at home I’m beat by 10.30. When the lights are out I try to think of nothing. Songs, ideas and album titles can come from dreams, and if I could only remember all that shit it would be great. There have been times when I’ve had a notebook by my bed, and once in a while the things I write are really good and other times when you read it you go: “What planet’s that from?”
Bon Jovi are touring Britain in June. For details and tickets, visit www.bonjovi.com