“I wanted to document what had happened in my past with a vision on what is the future,” Jon Bon Jovi said about the decision to make Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story. The four-part series is now streaming on Hulu, a celebration of the band’s 40th anniversary. But this is rock and roll, and Jon Bon Jovi isn’t one to seek out a vanity piece. “This had to tell the truth and have all the warts to go with it,” Jon explained at the TCA Winter Press Tour last January.
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“I had seen Man in the Arena,” Jon Bon Jovi recalled about the moment he found his doc’s unlikely director. Gotham Chopra is famous for his sports documentaries, but Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story marks his first time covering a musician. “I always say that Bon Jovi is the power of we, and that it takes that team. If I am the quarterback, I know that I couldn’t complete anything without somebody blocking for me, somebody there to catch the ball. But he was the guy, based on Man in the Arena. And then, as we talked, I felt good. As we worked, I felt great.”
“I was a fan,” Gotham Chopra added. “My family is from India. Growing up, when I used to travel to India… Bon Jovi was what America was. Like, all of my cousins wanted to come to America to have crazy hair and sing Bon Jovi songs. So, there was also just something pretty iconic. I was grateful to get that call, but I knew from that first breakfast that this was going to be something special.”
“Gotham would shoot everybody independently,” Jon revealed about the interview process, which was sometimes uncomfortable. “We collectively would see a cut. And without arguing over editorial stuff and letting him do his thing, there were some punches in the nose. I was like, ‘Wow, that stung.’ And then, I got over it, or that Richie [Sambora] sat down, or that Alec [John Such], unfortunately, wasn’t interviewed, but his passing was dramatic and hard on all of us because it was the first time we faced mortality. One of us passed. It wasn’t your father, your grandfather, somebody you knew. It was one of the guys.”
Not only does Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story finds the band dealing with the loss of one of their own, but it also chronicles Jon Bon Jovi’s fight to get his voice back. “I pride myself on having been a true vocalist,” he said. “One of my cords was literally atrophying. Your vocal cords are supposed to look parallel and let’s pretend that they are as thick as a thumb. One of mine was as thick as the thumb, and the other one was as thick as a pinky. So, the strong one was pushing the weak one aside, and I wasn’t singing well. My craft is being taken from me.”
For Gotham Chopra, documenting Jon Bon Jovi’s fight to regain his voice felt reminiscent of being at TCA in 2015 with Kobe Bryant to promote the Showtime doc Kobe Bryant’s Muse. “He had ruptured his Achilles,” Gotham recalled. “He was working his way back. It was an uncertain future, etc. And so, a lot of the same threads kind of existed. And then ultimately, my background is as a journalist. I used to travel to war zones and conflicts. People are always at war and conflict over everything, politics, etc. Sports and music are the two things that cut through and that everyone had an opinion and everyone could talk about. There’s something sort of mythic about performance, about being onstage, about being at your best in a single moment. How do you get there physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Every shoot day, I was like, oh, yeah, this feels familiar.”
“What does the future hold for me and for my band?” When asked about the four-part series’ title, Jon Bon Jovi posed that question. It’s sourced from the way every Bon Jovi concert has ended throughout their forty years, but it’s also intentionally bleak because the future is truly unknown. “Although I’m making great strides, we faced something that I didn’t expect, which is this vocal cord surgery. And though I’m doing very well and sang for my first time in public just the other night, when we shot this, there was no definitive answer. If I can’t go out and do two and a half hours a night, four nights a week, ‘Thank you, goodnight.’” But to be clear, Jon Bon Jovi is looking at the future with optimism. “My hope is that I’m going to be the best version of me in 2024. That’s my goal.”
All four episodes of Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story are now streaming on Hulu.