I met Jon Bon Jovi in 1984 — now he’s back and so is his voice

The kid in that photo had no idea what was coming.

I was working at WPST Trenton at our Princeton studios in March of 1984 when a young guy from Sayreville came in for an interview. Prior to this he was a Jersey “Unsigned Hero” playing rock bars up and down Route 1 and along the shore. He had a debut national album that had come out in January, a band behind him, and hair that filled the room and we were among the first in the nation to play the bands music. His name was Jon Bon Jovi, and he was 22 years old. So was I. My colleague Tom Cunningham and I spent time with him that afternoon, and PST’s marketing guy, Hal Stein — snapped a photo. We're standing in front of a WPST banner, Jon in the middle with that smile, looking like exactly what he was — a Jersey kid about to become one of the biggest rock acts in the world.

I have thought about that photo a lot over the years.

Later that year the band played a softball game against our radio station in Mercer County. After the game a group of us headed to Wildflowers in Pennington. Jon was just a guy at that point — same age as us, same zip code universe, from the same kind of town. He ordered food, he talked, he laughed. The album was starting to move. Nobody had any idea yet how far it was all going to go.

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From WPST to Madison Square Garden

Forty years later, Jon Bon Jovi is announcing the Forever Tour, a nine-show stand at Madison Square Garden beginning July 7, followed by dates in the U.K. and Ireland. It is the band's first real tour since 2022, when Jon underwent surgery after doctors discovered one of his vocal cords was atrophying.

He told People magazine this week that the recovery took longer than he ever expected. "I'm fully recovered. It was longer than I'd ever expected, but it had to be right. We never lost faith," he said. He described the surgery's discovery as genuinely confusing — he had spent his career taking care of his voice, never the rock and roll excesses, trained from the beginning. And then one day a doctor had to explain that a cord was simply dying on him. 

The band waited. His bandmates stood by him every step of the way, never looking for other work or talking about retirement. Jon told the magazine he was grateful for that in a way that went beyond the professional. "The sacrifices that each one of them have made to be there for me is on a whole 'nother level. They said, 'No, we're with you.' My love for them has only deepened," he said. 

Now he is calling the whole thing a rebirth. The joy is back. The voice
is back.

Still Jersey, all the way

What I have always loved about Jon — and I say this as someone who watched the whole arc from a WPST studio in 1984 — is that the superstardom never seemed to move him very far from who he was. He still turns up at Max's in Long Branch. He still stops at Jersey Freeze. He is still proud to be from here in a way that is not performance, not brand management. It is just who he is.

We play those songs every weekend on New Jersey 101.5 when the classic hits come out to play. "Livin' on a Prayer." "You Give Love a Bad Name." "Wanted Dead or Alive." Songs I first heard when they were new, when Jon was still stopping by radio stations in Princeton to say hello. They sound just as good now as they did then. Maybe better, because now I know what they became.

The Forever Tour starts July 7 at Madison Square Garden. If you can get there, go. The kid from Sayreville has his voice back, and he is ready to use it.