Bon Jovi in the USSR: Bon Voyage
Forty-six years ago, the stunning frost of a Soviet winter helped turn back the German army as it approached Moscow. But Bon Jovi is made of sterner stuff than the Nazis. And the band’s plans to conquer the U.S.S.R. demonstrate a better sense of strategy than Hitler’s.
Other rock groups have visited the country just long enough to see the Kremlin and play a concert. A one-night stand won’t satisfy the boys in this band. To them, the Soviet Union represents the world’s largest unserviced pop market, a huge nation of kids who have been deprived of American rock & roll. Bon Jovi wants to be the first foreign group sanctioned by the Soviet government to regularly perform and release albums there.
So in early December, Bon Jovi interrupted the European leg of its eleven-month New Jersey world tour to spend three hectic days in Moscow. The five band members — singer Jon Bon Jovi, 26, guitarist Richie Sambora, 29, keyboardist David Bryan, 26, bassist Alec John Such, 36, and drummer Tico Torres, 34 — arrived with a large entourage, which included Doc McGhee, their legally embattled manager, video director Wayne Isham and his crew, a photographer and executives of PolyGram Records, the band’s label. Their official tasks were to arrange a July concert that would be the first rock show ever held in Lenin Stadium; to negotiate the release of New Jersey on Melodiya, the state-owned record company; and to offer a bit of soft-metal diplomacy as self-proclaimed “ambastards of good will.”
In this era of glasnost, the Soviet government has initiated a number of more liberal cultural programs. After a long tradition of censoring bands, which forced musicians underground, the Kremlin will now be able to both monitor rock music and profit from it. Given the Communist party’s long-standing suspicion of rock — in 1972, the government vetoed a tour by the Fifth Dimension, presumably because “Up, Up and Away” would corrupt communist youth — the Soviets must have thought long and hard about which band should have the lucrative honor of becoming their first foreign superstars. Why would they choose Bon Jovi?
Since Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now Tour presented ideological problems for the Soviets, they would be wary of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Sting. Van Halen and Guns n’ Roses would probably be disqualified for national-security reasons. So would Michael Jackson, whom the Kremlin once denounced as a puppet of the Reagan administration.
But Bon Jovi is a benign band with no professional interest in politics. Its members support antidrug and profamily causes. They will not make any inflammatory statements about refuseniks. They will play and leave. If Bon Jovi isn’t the best rock band in the world, it is — for Soviet purposes — the ideal band.
“We’re safe,” says Richie Sambora. “We’re not heavy metal, but we’re certainly not pussy rock, either.” Which means the band could succeed in the Soviet Union for the very reasons it has succeeded in the United States.
This place isn’t much like Edison, New Jersey,” says David Bryan, after arriving in Moscow on a Tuesday afternoon. The band members wait excitedly in a special holding room as Soviet officials check their passports and visas. They hug one another so often the scene looks like A Waltons’ Christmas Reunion. “This is heavy,” Jon Bon Jovi keeps saying.
Downstairs, to everyone’s surprise, a few thousand kids are racing around the terminal, hoping to find the band. Kids gather wherever the band goes, but Bon Jovi hasn’t even released an album in the Soviet Union. Copies of New Jersey reportedly sell for 150 rubles (about $200) on the black market, a staggering sum compared with a typical monthly salary of 200 rubles.
The band members are led through a back entrance, where a police escort is waiting to lead their two limousines. (“Man, Billy Joel didn’t get limos,” says Wayne Isham, who filmed Joel’s Soviet concerts.) But when the motorcade arrives at the band’s hotel, a few hundred kids are clogging the entrance to the hotel, so the limos turn around and head for Gorky Park, and Stas Namin’s music center.
Namin, the grandson of a prominent Soviet politician, was instrumental in bringing Bon Jovi to the U.S.S.R. As the leader of the Stas Namin Group, the party-sanctioned Soviet rock superstars, Namin has sold 40 million records in his own country. Now he manages Gorky Park, a Soviet metal band. When he was in New Jersey last April, Namin asked Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora to help Gorky Park write some English lyrics. Jon and Richie, the creative axis of Bon Jovi, are nothing if not helpful — they’ve produced Cher, given songs to Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Loverboy and introduced Cinderella to PolyGram execs. They agreed to help Gorky Park.
And how did a simple meeting with a prominent Soviet musician result in Bon Jovi’s plans to conquer the U.S.S.R.? “Doc,” answers Jon Bon Jovi, grinning at his manager’s storied audacity. “Doc.”
McGhee, 38, spends an unusual amount of time traveling with the band, and his crass good cheer masks the strategic savvy that has guided the band’s international campaign. “Life is like a sleigh ride,” he says, as shots of vodka vanish in the music center’s dining room. “Unless you’re the lead dog, you’re always looking up someone else’s ass.”
Wayne Isham and his crew are filming the music-center party, as they do nearly every minute of the Soviet trip. “Maybe it’s history, maybe it’s not,” says Richie Sambora. Bon Jovi has discussed making a documentary film similar to U2’s Rattle and Hum but with a closer focus on the band’s daily life.
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