Bon Jovi 1992 Interview: “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”

In this 1992 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Jon Bon Jovi sits down alongside David Bryan and Alec John Such at the lowest point the band had ever hit. Fourteen million copies of Slippery When Wet and 230 shows in seventeen months were behind them, and Jon admits he was so burned out that he was not sure Bon Jovi would come back at all. They had taken two years off. This is the conversation from the other side of that, with Keep the Faith to explain.

The burnout is the honest centre of it. He describes what 230 shows does to a person, and how close the band came to simply not resuming — not as a crisis he has resolved, but as something he is still fairly close to. Thirty million records he waves off as “like a McDonald’s thing,” which is either modesty or exhaustion and is probably both.

Then it loosens into the origin stories, and they are good ones: throwing his first guitar down the basement stairs, faking a bass audition on a twenty-five dollar bass, and getting married at the Graceland Chapel by an Elvis impersonator. He explains where he found the line “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” — it came from Malcolm Forbes — and talks about Emilio Estevez, Young Guns and “Blaze of Glory,” before laying out what Keep the Faith was meant to say.

Beside him sits Alec John Such, the founding bassist who left in 1994 and died in 2022, on camera and cracking jokes throughout. Unseen since it first aired, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.