I wasn’t expecting to be rocked by this documentary. Not in the emotional sense, anyway. It turns out that too often these days rockumentaries like this get me right in the feels. I remember watching The Story of Anvil once on a long haul flight and blubbing like a baby. This long-form documentary charting the rise, fall, and sort-of rise again of New Jersey’s second favourite son (plus bandmates) manages to be both nostalgic and life-affirming, following two timelines concurrently in order to present the contrast between Jon Bon Jovi in his eighties heyday and the tired, jaded 60-something version with tired eyes and a bad throat singing to an audience of none in his living room. At times, it’s a tough watch. To be fair, I don’t think it’s supposed to be this tragic. It just is. That said, it is redeemed by a thread of positivity running through the whole thing; it’s a story of a bunch of working class kids from modest backgrounds who overcame adversity and made it big back when that still happened. It’s every teenager’s dream.
Over the course of four episodes, Jon Bon Jovi reveals himself to be a control freak, a perfectionist, a narcissist, and a chronic workaholic. He’s also a very good businessman, something he proved when he jetisoned the decidedly shady Doc McGhee and made himself manager of his own band midway through their career. He often refers to Bon Jovi (the band) as an organisation, an organisation he clearly sees himself at the top of. And rightly so. It’s even named after him. He’s very raw and real about the business side of the industry, and the sense of responsibility he feels as a performer. It’s not just about fast cars and late nights. Not any more, anyway. It must be an insane amount of pressure, and this doc paints him as a somewhat frustrated, busted up figure at times. Apparently he has some really interesting drives with Bruce Springsteen where they talk about mortality. The departure of lead guitarist Richie Sambora is covered in depth, and very diplomatically with both sides having their say, and the death of original bassist Alec Jon Such is handled with the requisite sensitivity.
You get a sense that instead of enjoying the fruits of his labour, These Days Jon Bon spends a lot of time sitting around going ‘What About Now?’ A lot of the time he looks a bit dazed by it all. As if he’s remembering some awesome moment in his life when his band was top of the charts and he was playing to 90,000 people at a festival somewhere and thinking WTF was that? Did that really happen? The dashing smile is gone. You get the sense that he knows it’s coming to an end, and he’s doing his best to make ‘it’ last as long as he can. One especially moving scene shows him revisiting his archives and sifting through hundreds of old-school cassettes. He has them all carefully labelled and sequenced, and he picks them up one at a time, caressing them lovingly before putting them back. In order. These cassettes represent a record of his life in a different medium. Relics of a forgotten age. There’s a lot of pretty interesting stuff about his writing process. For example, he talks about how he could never write Livin’ on a Prayer again because he’s not in that place, or headspace, any more. As you grow older, you change, and the things you write about, or the things that are meaningful to you, change accordingly. “I love that I’m still full of piss and vinegar at 61,” he says at one point. “That’s what makes me who I am. It’s my story and I work at it every day.”
This doc also shows Jon Bon’s social conscience. I’d forgotten that he volunteers in local soup kitchens and does a lot for charities. Not to diss the guy, but it does come across as a bit contrived at times. Like a politician doing a hospital visit. Roll those cameras! Even so, he seems like a genuinely nice bloke. He just wants to make a positive difference, and he wants people to like and respect him. He wants to be a role model and set an example, which is admirable in itself. His heart’s in the right place. That said, you can see he might be a bit of an egomaniac sometimes. If you were mates and he wasn’t rich and famous, he’d be that dude you’re only able to handle in small doses before they do your head in and you run to the hills. Your mum would probably love him, though. But why shouldn’t he be a bit full of himself? He’s a fucking rock star.
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