One of MTV’s most loved faces of the 1980s was Jon Bon Jovi, with a fluff of light-brown hair. Members of Bon Jovi, his band, had the look of metal dudes, but they were fantastic at writing power ballads like I’ll Be There for You. The line-up was killer: keeping Bon Jovi company were Richie Sambora on guitar, David Bryan on keyboards, Tico Torres on drums, and Alec John Such on bass. Cut to 2025. The frontman still has his mop intact, though it’s all salt and pepper… and the voice remains. Also remaining is the mystery behind the names Tommy and Gina from their 1986 song, Livin’ on a Prayer.
“They’re fictional characters — because, unlike a number of our songs that I might write by myself, this one was co-written. When we walked into the room that day, no one had a lick, not a single idea. We started like we usually did — playing the guitar, banging on the piano, telling stories,” the 63-year-old singer said at the release of Bon Jovi’s official book Bon Jovi: Forever (Genesis Publications), the band’s first-ever authored autobiography.
During the Q&A event at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles, he opened up to US radio industry veteran Bob Buchmann. “‘What am I thinking of? What are you thinking of?’ And it just evolved from there. I had this common thread in mind—the old Shakespearean story: boy meets girl, boy struggles to make ends meet for girl, and they live happily ever after. But when you make it more blue-collar, more contemporary, more New Jersey — more us — we settled on these names: Tommy and Gina. I think they just rolled off the tongue.”
Richie and Des, too, came up with names, but it was Tommy and Gina who stole the show. The singer met his future wife — Dorothea Bongiovi — when they were both students at Sayreville War Memorial High School in New Jersey. It took them nine years to get married and elope in Las Vegas in 1989 at the height of Bon Jovi’s career.
He also touched upon the moment that defines the band’s identity. “I don’t want to say that it’s Slippery in New Jersey because I feel like that was an incredible moment in time. But we’ve grown many more times throughout the process. And whether that period in the late ’80s shaped Keep the Faith, which was happening with whether it was the LA riots or the wall coming down in Eastern Europe, and then in 2000 coming back with It’s My Life, when the genre should have been gone a second time and I refused, and then coming back with Lost Highway and going down to Nashville and reinventing the band yet again.”
The man is still writing songs but with a far more mature “palette”. “[Today] I wouldn’t want to rewrite You Give Love a Bad Name. That was an incredible time in our lives, but you wouldn’t want to do it again. You write who you are and what you are at the time you’re living it. These are just chapters in an artiste’s life — in any artist’s life. I saw Taylor Swift defending her new record, saying, ‘I’m 35 now, I’m writing from this perspective — I’m not 16.’ And I totally got that. I was talking to my TV this morning, going, ‘Go on, Tay Tay!’”
