By Joshua Rotter
Bon Jovi‘s iconic “Livin’ on a Prayer” video, showcasing the band’s fresh faces and glossy personas, did much in the way of packaging the so-called metal band for pop consumption in the late ’80s. Clearly, no group encapsulates the poppy side of the sound like Bon Jovi, making their greatest hits and latest hits “Lost Highway” and “(You Want to) Make a Memory,” off their number one disc, Lost Highway (Mercury Nashville, 2007), popular among both the day-care and home-health-care sets.
Last week, however, things appeared a lot lighter on the pop and heavier on the metal when Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was arrested on a DUI charge, while driving his 10-year-old daughter, Ava. Due in court in May, he is also expected to face child endangerment charges.
This is only Sambora’s latest setback over the last couple years following a high-profile divorce from actress Heather Locklear – over alleged infidelity with friend Denise Richards – in addition to a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse, and the death of his dad from lung cancer.
Last month, as the band prepared to launch the 36-city North American leg of their Lost Highway tour, a sober Sambora discussed how he overcame some of these difficulties by starting work on the Lost Highway LP and planning one of the biggest tours of 2008. Bon Jovi appears April 2 and 8 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.
SFBG: Bon Jovi is known for massive stage shows. What can fans expect this time around?
Richie Sambora: We’ve got a bunch of HD screens that are just morphing into different things. It’s going to be a spectacle that people have never seen before. From what we know after 25 years of experience in these stages and stuff like that, it looks like a holy-cow moment. People are going to walk away going, “Wow, this is really cool.”