The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit Bon Jovi: Forever owes its existence, at least in part, to Jon Bon Jovi’s penchant for, uh, saving things.
The iconic band, on hand Saturday to mark the six-floor exhibit’s opening, outed the frontman as a hoarder of their musical memorabilia during a red-carpet-style media session. Bon Jovi confirmed the accusation, good-naturedly voiced by keyboardist David Bryan and backed by nodding heads and pointing fingers, with a smile and simple “Yes.” Follow-up questioning revealed he packrats in his basement.
"I do make a point of keeping all those lyrics and keeping all those scraps of paper and putting them all together, then putting them in an envelope, every album as it’s done, and then [sticking] every book in a box,” he told Rock Hall vice president of education and visitor engagement Jason Hanley during a subsequent Q&A in the museum’s Foster Theater. “They were important to me. I didn’t know that, eventually, they were going to be archived and in a museum. But they were important to me.”
The hour-long event, attended by160-plus fans in the theater and simulcast on the museum’s Union Home Mortgage Plaza, was the highlight of a weekend-long celebration of an exhibit that chronicles the band’s 40-year history.
Open to the public now through June 2025, the exhibit includes everything from spiral notebooks of handwritten lyrics to “some of the clothes that we had that I’m embarrassed by,” as Bon Jovi jokingly described them, to the 1988 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail motorcycle he rode in the 1990 video for the solo single “Miracle,” from the Young Guns II soundtrack. (Bon Jovi explained that the contents, along with much more, were archived during the making of the four-part docuseries Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story streaming on Hulu.)
There were two ticketed exhibit previews and a listening “experience” for the group’s just-released album “Forever” before Sunday’s public opening.
Bon Jovi — joined onstage by Bryan, percussionist Everett Bradley, bassist Hugh McDonald, guitarists Phil X and John Shanks, and drummer Tico Torres — made a number of references to Cleveland during the hour-long event. He reminisced about the days when fledgling acts could build local and regional followings by doing shows with the likes of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers and the Michael Stanley Band, remembered establishing a friendship with legendary WMMS-FM disc jockey Kid Leo after playing one of the station’s “lunchtime concerts” (WMMS’s Coffee Break Concerts) 40 years ago.
“You’d go out to lunch with Leo, and you’d either get the blessing or nod,” he recalled to audience laughter. “Tico and I went out to lunch with Leo because he liked guys from Jersey.”
The 2018 Rock Hall inductee also expressed his happiness at being inducted in Cleveland rather than New York City or Los Angeles.
“Everybody that came came for the couple of days,” he explained. “It was really special.”
Bon Jovi and his bandmates periodically mentioned former axman Richie Sambora, who abruptly left the band in the middle of a 2013 tour. (Sambora’s Ovation double-neck acoustic guitar, which he played in the1987 video for the hit “Dead or Alive,” is among the exhibit artifacts.) Phil X talked about the importance of remaining faithful to the licks Sambora laid down on so many hit tracks when playing them live.
“Everybody expects that — I mean, I would expect that every night,” he says. “So that’s what I put out there.”
One topic Hanley didn’t broach was when the band might tour — the group hasn’t hit the road since Bon Jovi’s June 2022 vocal-cord surgery. They just performed six songs at the opening of JBJ’s Nashville, a five-story restaurant and rooftop bar in Music City, on Friday. “Step by step, I’m getting back to it,” Bon Jovi told one reporter. The Rock Hall showcase and docuseries, he reassures, in no way suggest an end to the band’s 40-year musical journey.
“It continues thanks to you,” he told the Q&A audience.
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