I think the reason they maybe can get away with calling themselves the ‘top touring rock band in the world’ is because right now - that’s precisely what they are, or at least their last tour was I believe the most profitable rock tour of 2013, financially speaking.
This isn't something I would waste my money on, I've always liked his music, but JBJ is far too squeeky-clean for there to be any photos in it that are of any remote interest, the guy's even been married to the same woman for 25 years, which has to be almost unheard of in his line of work!
But Bon Jovi aren’t the first band to do this sort of thing with a big expensive coffee table book full of glossy photos, in fact they’re probably not even the hundred and first.
Actually one of my best books I own on any musician I think is something very similar to this, but on Tom Waits, which is 200 pages of black and white photos taken over a period of about 40 years by the great Dutch photographer/film maker Anton Corbijn, who has done similar projects with the likes of Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, U2, Bowie, Robert de Niro, though the Waits book is the total antithesis of this glammed-up looking Bon Jovi book - it mostly shows Tom sitting on his porch, wandering around in the dessert, or sitting by the piano in his local dive with a cigarette in one hand, and a bottle of bourbon in the other, looking wasted. .... Waits could hardly be a less glamorous musician, or any further away from Jon Bon Jovi, there are homeless old men living in cardboard boxes in the New York City subway system who look more like a rock star than Tom Waits does, but it’s actually a genuine work of art because it brilliantly and photographically taps into the psyche and the weirdly dark world of one of the most extraordinary men/musicians…
http://www.waits-corbijn.com/en/img/book/titel.jpg
It was also a special edition with fewer than 5,000 copies published, so I’m very lucky to own it.
