by Lonn Friend
There were times when I met RIP fans on the road and they fawned over my cool gig and great publication. “You have the dream life, Lonn,” they would say. “You get to hang out with rock stars. You’re famous!” But famous people get rich. Bon Jovi made more in T-shirt sales during that one Vienna show than I’d earned in the past ten years. For me, it wasn’t about amassing wealth necessarily but rather about acquiring an abundance of moments that touched me, that moved me. The Vienna show was one of those moments, and another came three nights later in Munich, Germany, at the final show of a massively successful European tour at the renowned and notorious Olympic Stadium.
I sat in the dressing room with keyboardist Dave Bryan, my Hebrew brother in the band, and we talked about what happened here in 1972 when the Israeli athletes were assassinated by Palestinian terrorists. Dave was warming up on his electric piano. There was a large bathroom attached to this room. “That’s probably where they showered,” he lamented. “On the day they died.” Then he played some Mozart as I sat cross-legged on the floor.
“Something incredible is going to happen tonight, buddy,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “I can feel it.”
Two hours into the set, the seventy thousand fans had congealed into one magnificent entity, united by the music and band they loved above all others. The skies were threatening bad weather as the air began to mist and a strong wind started to blow out of the west. Jon and Richie strummed the opening chords to “Wanted Dead or Alive” over the thunderous roar of 140,000 quivering tonsils, and it was as if the collective vocal vibration uncorked a celestial water balloon.
I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I’m wanted dead or alive.
The chorus leading into Richie’s timeless solo literally cracked the heavens. “Come on, rain, you don’t scare me none!” screamed Jon as his partner crept out from under the tent that was protecting him and his electric axe.
For me, the whole scene was nothing short of baptismal. I was sitting in the pit, on a lone folding chair—the masses behind me, the band above and in front of me—wearing a pair of shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt, and an Ernie Ball cap, soaked to the scrotum, and feeling nothing but high. A couple months later, my demo made the rounds at the music network, soliciting kudos from the production department but falling short of a green light from programming executives. I wasn’t surprised. And I didn’t really care. I was rejected and strapped, but I still carry the moments from that trip with me. And those will last me a lot longer than any paycheck could.
Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising hit stores on my forty-sixth birthday, July 29, 2002. And I was in Mantoloking, New Jersey, on the shore—half an hour from Asbury Park, where the Boss had grown up—hanging out at a seaside mansion owned by my friends Melanie Meyer and Tom Whalley I’d been to this special spot before and had written a couple Breath of Fire rants there. One visit, I sat on the back porch with Les Claypool from the funk-rock band Primus (whom Tom had signed at Interscope) and talked for hours about the deteriorating state of man. For the deteriorating state of Friend, Mantoloking served as both a sanctuary and an escape.
I called home and told Joyce and Megan I was having a good time; Melanie threw me a party and the house was alive with visiting well-wishers. It was a lie. I was completely confused—five minutes from checking myself into Bellevue Hospital’s mental ward or a split second from revelation. I missed my daughter but was afraid to go home.
And then who do I run into while walking through the Plaza Hotel en route to my friend Neal’s apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park South, five minutes from the legendary manor where the fictional Eloise once lived? You guessed it, Bon Jovi, en masse, having dinner. A collective smile of recognition and a wave to come join them led to a pleasant reunion. I was out of the loop and had no idea they were in town mastering the new LP Bounce and performing a private show for the marketing and promotion people of Island/Def Jam Records, their label. Another campaign was about to begin.
Jon invited me to visit his suite the following night for a private unveiling. I arrived around midnight. He had a bottle of Pinot Grigio chilling and the speakers to his portable stereo set up on either side of the living-room sofa. After some small talk and a glass of wine, he let the disc whirl. Track after track played, and I offered benign comments like “Cameron will love that,” after the song inspired by the line from Jerry Maguire, “You Had Me from Hello.” When the big ballad “Misunderstood” blasted from the boom box, I felt some authentic body movement. “That’s a great Bon Jovi song,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said softly.
I told him the title track sounded a bit narcissistic, like he was still pissed off at the critics for knocking him down, never giving him the props that his hero Springsteen always got. “No. Bounce is about America bouncing back after 9/11. About our strength as a nation, a people.” That sound bite didn’t resonate. Neither did the record. The world was bleeding and the artists were our only tourniquets. Rock ‘n’ roll in the light of 9/11 had to say something more than “I love you.” It had to say, “We’re a fucking mess but don’t lose hope—we can get through this together.” It had to say, “Keep the faith.”
That’s what Springsteen’s Rising said with courage and conviction. Jon, however, was playing it safe, relying on the big-hooks formula that had made Bon Jovi so successful. There was a chink in my old friend’s armor. The times they were a changin’, but he wasn’t. And I provided little comfort because I was completely falling apart inside and out. I left his room around 2 A.M. and wandered out onto Central Park South, feeling dead from the neck up, sad over the unfulfilling listening experience, and ashamed that I’d lacked the nerve to be as truthful with him as he’d been with me in Venice.
The next night, I was invited to dinner with the band.
My relationship with Jon and Richie had morphed. I realized that even though I was still welcome in their camp as “family,” something had changed. I had changed. I didn’t care about hanging out anymore. I had no assignment, no real purpose for being in New York or with the band. I was running away from home, from Joyce, who didn’t get why her husband was lost in space and wasn’t about to throw him a line as long as he was gallivanting around the globe without a job. The fly had smashed into the wall, and his guts were everywhere.
The next time I heard from Jon was in March 2003. The record was not resonating with the marketplace, and the Bon Jovi brain trust was spinning its wheels looking for new and original ways to put the spring back in Bounce. Jon said he had an idea for a marketing experiment and needed my involvement.
Jon’s concept was to perform a concert in San Jose and during the performance sell, live and on-air, a specially produced Bounce DVD over the massively successful QVC cable TV network. “Dude, QVC?” I queried. “That’s a shopping channel for women who watch soap operas and buy stuffed animals and designer dishes.”
“I’m just looking for new ways to sell our music,” he argued. This smelled more like “sell out,” but again I didn’t say those words, not then anyway.
He asked me to cohost the evening’s broadcast, “keep it real,” while the fast-talking TV mannequins pummeled the product down the gullets of music-loving couch potatoes across the U.S. My heart told me that this was a train wreck waiting to happen.
I was in bad financial straits. I told Jon I was really uncomfortable with this whole concept, but if the gig paid well, I’d do it. “I’ll make sure you’re taken care of, Lonn. Trust me. I need you. You’ll be great.”
It was two hours before show time, April 12, 2003, and no one at the HP Pavilion in San Jose seemed to know what was going on. Tech people from QVC were meeting the principals from Bon Jovi. In the satellite van outside, the two lady hosts were viewing the DVD for the first time. This is the product being pushed to a million viewers in one hour, and they’d just started their homework. Lisa Robertson—the Katie Couric of QVC—and some other girl whose name I can’t recall, who was brought in for her
“exceptional high energy,” introduced themselves to me. “So you’re the rock expert!” they bubbled in unison. Lisa wouldn’t know Bon Jovi from Bon Ami.
“I’m going to talk about the music,” I said emphatically. “That’s it. I will not sell anything.” Heads nodded in agreement. I felt nauseated.
This network represented everything I despised about corporate America. Buy this now because you need it. Don’t stop to grab a sandwich or take a dump, or you’ll miss the next special deal coming up in thirty seconds! We came out of a segment on collectable flatware when the lights went green and the mouths on the Stepford ladies started moving so quickly that I thought time and space had sped up. I was asked to make a quick comment about “what Bon Jovi was all about” and coughed up something about the band, their music, their commitment to their fans, whatever I could squeeze into the fifteen seconds I was allotted.
Lisa’s counterpart rattled off a light-speed pitch and threw to me, whereupon I responded, “Your enthusiasm is a bit intimidating.” They both froze for a split second. That may have been the first moment of dead air in the history of the network. My job was done before the concert began. The experiment got more bogus when I discovered that the viewers weren’t getting a complete concert but rather three or four brief partial-song breakins during the course of the show.
Just before the band took the stage to play their official sold-out gig for the fans of San Jose, I walked into Jon’s dressing room. I’d completed my task and was happy it was over. The inner voice of doom was screaming at me. All those years of journalist cred—up in smoke after one fleeting appearance on QVC. “Lonn, listen,” said the immortal blue-eyed rock-star-turned-home-shopping sellout, “I just got off the phone with Dorthea [Jon’s longtime wife]. She’s my harshest critic and said that you saved my ass. ‘You owe Lonn big time, she said.’ ”
Unfortunately, Dorthea wasn’t in charge of the budget for this fiasco. I wanted to get paid, get back on the private jet, and get home. Flying back with us, NFL pro Doug Flutie was a guest passenger, counseling Jon on how to finesse his multimillion-dollar dream to buy an Arena Football team. Another experiment? I didn’t care. I was huddled in the back of the plane with Richie and Heather, getting drunk and feeling sorry for myself. “Give me something for the pain!” I shouted, echoing the Bon Jovi song. I could hear the forced laughs from the guys. Tico came back and rubbed my shoulders as if to say, “It’s okay, buddy. You done good and we appreciate it.”
Bon Jovi grossed over $600,000 in DVD sales that night alone, and there were plans to rebroadcast the event in two months. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. It was still a fiasco in my book. A week had passed since returning from San Jose and I hadn’t been paid yet.
“I think you should be getting 5 percent of the gross,” opined my mother, a fan of QVC but a bigger fan of mine.
“Well, I should be getting a check this week,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “You should have had a contract,” she lectured. “Haven’t you learned yet? These rock stars are not your friends. They’ve always taken advantage of you.”
A week later, on April 19, 2003—the twenty-first anniversary of my hiring at Flynt Publications—Bon Jovi was doing a special concert for the Tiger Woods Foundation at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I’d flown in with the band from Los Angeles for the show. I had not been paid yet. Actor (now California governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger and wife, NBC broadcaster Maria Shriver, were in the crowd, as was TV’s Ray Romano, Latin singer Marc Anthony, and the golfing wunderkind host of the event himself. We were all hanging out upstairs in the Foundation Room of the House of Blues when Jon came up to me.
“Thanks again for the other night,” he said warmly.
“You didn’t need to do that QVC thing, Jon,” I replied, feeling the time was right for honesty. “You’re Bon Jovi. You rule the world. What the fuck were you thinking?”
He dipped his eyes south for a moment and responded, “I was just trying to find a new way to get the music to the people. Maybe it was a mistake. I don’t know. You stepped up and took a bullet for us. And that meant a lot to me.”
I pulled him close to me. “It’s cool. I love you, man. Just pay me. I’m hurtin’.”
He smiled and said that whatever amount QVC sent me, he would double it.
The check came three days later. I opened the envelope and stared in disbelief: $1,000.00. I thought at first a zero was missing, but no such luck. So this was the payment doubled by Jon Bon Jovi? I cursed myself and I cursed the band, the latter in an e-mail to every member, including the management team. Why couldn’t they cut a struggling brother a break? What was a few grand to the Bon Jovi empire of gold? I guess I should have had a contract. That’s the way professional businessmen do things. I didn’t see myself as a businessman, another characteristic I inherited from my pop, who struggled with debt most of his life.
“Your embedded journalist has left the tour.” That’s how I ended the e-mail that no one responded to. In the time it took to say “Shot through the heart,” Bon Jovi left the radar screen and I fell into deep depression. On October 15, 2003, I left my eternal home, Los Angeles, and relocated to Las Vegas, where I would face down my demons, confess to my wife, apologize to my daughter, and spend the next two years in deep personal de-construction. A bedouin in self-induced exile, I sat in silence every night and tried to figure out what force had brought me to where I was and why.
With time came clarity and the realization that I’d left home to find myself. I had family in Las Vegas, most significantly my father. I knew I’d need family to help me survive the separation and divorce. Most of all, I needed to spiritually forgive my dad for leaving so Megan could forgive me. When I finally stopped bleeding and began to let go of the past and the pain and started to forgive myself—that’s when the healing began.
Guru Singh would say, “Forgive but don’t forget, because if you forget, you lose the lesson.” I thought I’d been forgotten by the band with whom I’d roamed a good portion of Planet Rock until one night in April 2004, when the phone rang, interrupting the quiet desert night outside. It was Richie. He was wondering how I was, hadn’t heard from me in a while. I filled him in on the past challenging year. He claimed to know nothing about the embarrassing payment and never saw the e-mail I sent. Amazingly, none of the guys brought it to his attention.
For two hours on the phone, we talked like old mates who’d seen and shared wonderful times together and realized that our relationship transcended writer and rocker. “You finish that book, man!” he wailed. “You tell the truth, write your life, because it’s amazing. Your heart is immense. Write that book! Your karma is good, my brother. You are a very rich man in many ways.”
Being a writer can be a lonely gig. Sometimes the only way you get by is with a little help from … right.
Oh, and I forgave Jon for the thousand bucks. Next time, it’s five grand or I ain’t leaving the house.
14
Rock Your Children Well
AND WE SHALL TEACH ROCK N ROLL TO THE WORLD!
—Dewey Finn, School of Rock
“Uncle Lonn, Linkin Park is coming to town in February,” said my twelve-year-old nephew, Sam. “Do you think you could get us tickets?” It was obvious that this was not just another concert to him. This was an event. “They’re playing with P.O.D.,” he added. The younger of my brother’s two sons did not have to twist my arm. I’d been laying the rock experience on these kids since before they were potty trained. “Sure, Sam,” I said. “I’ll take you and Aaron and fly Megan into town for the concert as well. We’ll all go on a field trip in Uncle Lonn’s school of rock!” It was December 2003, a scant two months since I had left L.A. and relocated to Las Vegas, where not only my brother Rick, his wife Lynda, and their two boys lived, but also my dad, stepmom Sherry, baby sister Michelle, and her husband Travis. Family becomes life force when you’re going through a divorce.
I missed my daughter, Megan, immensely. Spending
time with Sam and Aaron was helping me survive the transition.
On October 22, 2003, I took my nephews to see a movie that had just opened called School of Rock, starring Jack Black, whom I’d previously loved in High Fidelity.
Every frame of School of Rock was perfect. With aching gut and watery eyes, I exited the theater feeling blessed for the two-hour respite from my personal tribulation. The film embodied the essence of rock ‘n’ roll: what it meant to love the riffs and the wail, and the importance of passing that passion on to the next generation. I’m not sure who dug the film more, the kids or me. It didn’t matter because it was meant for all of us.
On the drive home from the cineplex, Aaron popped Linkin Park’s Meteora disc in the deck and cranked it up. The car was throbbing and bouncing as we cruised through Summerlin on the west side of the Vegas valley. This was the new rock, the next generation of sound and fury. In 2000, while I was working at KNAC.com, we devoted much airplay to the Park’s single “One Step Closer.”
I had considerable history with the group supporting Linkin Park on their massive tour of America, P.O.D. In June 2000, nine months after the release of their major-label debut, Fundamental Elements of Southtown, I was in Germany with KNAC.com founder Rob Jones, on the assignment we called “Lonn and Rob’s Excellent European Adventure,” which took us to five countries in eighteen days as we gathered text and digital video content for the hard-rock Web community I had conversations with Iron Maiden, Slayer, Rage Against the Machine, Korn, and Slipknot, to name a few.
P.O.D. was on the Continent opening for Korn on the European tour and hitting one-off festivals. It was in Berlin, two days after the three-day, fifty-band Rock Im Park extravaganza in Nuremberg, that I spent an entire afternoon with the metal/hip-hop hybrid from the Latin quarter of San Diego. I found the boys refreshingly humble, thankful for the opportunity to play their spirit-driven songs for the fans of a band they deeply admired, Korn.
