How Bon Jovi lost his voice, and got it back thanks to a Philadelphia surgeon

Jon Bon Jovi didn’t like what he was hearing.

“It sounds raspy, and it’s not good,” the New Jersey rock star says, listening to his own voice in a recording studio in March of 2023 in a scene from Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, the four-part Hulu docuseries that premieres April 26. “I don’t even sound like me.”

“It was nine months postsurgery,” Bon Jovi said, referring to a voice-saving operation performed by Philadelphia otolaryngologist Robert Sataloff at Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood in the summer of 2022.

“I had hoped that what would come through the speakers would sound like me,” Bon Jovi said of the early session for Forever, his Sayreville, N.J., pop-metal band’s 16th album, due June 7. “And not only did it not, but it was hard to do,” he said, speaking via Zoom from California, joined by drummer Tico Torres in Florida. “The mechanism just didn’t work. So it was soul-crushing.”

Thank You, Goodnight details the 40-year career of the singer born John Bongiovi, who called his first band Atlantic City Expressway before forming Bon Jovi in 1983, the year of their first hit, “Runaway.”

In the documentary, Bruce Springsteen remembers hearing about Bon Jovi as “some young kid around here from New Jersey making some noise.” He says Bon Jovi is one of the world’s biggest bands because “Jon’s choruses demand to be sung by 20,000 people in an arena.”

7800° Fahrenheit, the band’s second album, which was recorded at engineer Obie O’Brien’s Philadelphia studio, the Warehouse, was a rare flop. But Thank You, Goodnight has plenty of hits to dwell on, from ‘80s smashes like “Livin’ On A Prayer” and “You Give Love A Bad Name,” to country-leaning cuts from the 2000s like “Who Says You Can’t Go Home.”

Originally planned for the band’s 40th anniversary, the series is directed by Gotham Chopra, whose resumé includes films about LeBron James, Tom Brady, and his father, Deepak Chopra. It gets gravitas from its transparent depiction of Bon Jovi’s vocal troubles and the question of whether the band will be able to go on.

“I always considered the band to be part professional sports team, and family,” the singer who co-owned the Arena Football League team Philadelphia Soul from 2004 to 2008, said. He gave Chopra complete creative control, but then an unplanned plot point arose: ”I had these health problems I never anticipated.”

With his voice ravaged from atrophied vocal cords, the reviews of a 2022 tour were damning. One that really hit home was from his wife, Dorothea, his high school sweetheart whom he married in 1989. She let him know his show in Nashville wasn’t up to standard. “I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was going wrong,” says the famously clean-living rock star who recently told the Independent: “The only thing that’s ever been up my nose is my finger.”

“I’ve always been in pretty good health. I take care of my vocal cords,” he said on the video call, wearing a copper colored leather jacket and a million-dollar smile. “I tried everything I could think of holistically to fix it. And it was just broken.”

Bon Jovi consulted Sataloff, chair of the department of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Drexel University College of Medicine, whose patients have included Teddy Pendergrass and Shania Twain. The doctor also founded the Thomas Jefferson University Choir in 1970.

Bon Jovi was thrilled to find a doctor “who understood singers. He is a saint. He was unbelievable for me.” Without surgery, Sataloff said, the best Bon Jovi could hope for was 80% of his former self.

“‘You’re 60 years old, isn’t that good enough?’ he said,” recalled Bon Jovi, now 62.

“I said, ‘No, then I’m going to retire.’ He said, ‘OK let’s talk about the surgery.’ He said if we do this medialization and put this implant in and you work hard, I can make you better than you are. And that’s all he promised.”

Thank You, Goodnight includes a Bon Jovi visit to Sataloff’s office and a post-op shot in a Lankenau hospital bed holding an “I’m Okay” sign.

The surgery was a success, Sataloff said, “in that he’s far better than we started and able to perform again. But he’s still improving.”

The rock star, as it turns out, is also a star patient.

“Even among the thousands of voice professionals I’ve cared for,” Sataloff said. “Jon was at the very top of people who worked harder than anybody else. Because he was committed to being as good as he could possibly be.”

Bon Jovi’s other Philly connections include his relationship with Sister Mary Scullion, the anti-homelessness activist and cofounder of nonprofit Project HOME, who’s on the board of his anti-poverty the JBJ Soul Foundation.

His friendship with recording engineer O’Brien, who’s featured prominently in Thank You, Goodnight, stretches back to 7800° Fahrenheit.

“So many memories,” Bon Jovi said. “The Warehouse on Spring Garden Street. Obie O’Brien is still our engineer. He’s my best friend. That was our first adventure away from home to make a record. We slept on mattresses on the floor of the studio. My father would come down and bring us a big pot of sauce that had to last us a week. It was like a scene from The Godfather.”

In the studio, “[Producer] Lance Quinn didn’t like patchouli, which I used to wear in those days,” Torres remembered. “So he wouldn’t let me in the control room to let me listen back to the music.”

Thank You, Goodnight features interviews with Bon Jovi, Torres, and keyboard player David Bryan as well as Richie Sambora, Bon Jovi’s longtime songwriting partner, who has not toured with the band since not showing up for a show in 2013.

Could Sambora rejoin for a future tour?

“Of course,” Bon Jovi said. “There never was any animosity. He just had a lot of emotional and substance issues and didn’t show up when we were in the midst of what was then the biggest-grossing tour in the world.

“We weren’t going to fold, and I wasn’t going to unemploy 120 people or let down the 3 million people who bought a ticket. And I came to the realization that being in a rock band is not a life sentence. ... It was heartbreaking. It was disappointing. But it was free will.”

The series also includes an apology from Sambora to fans and the band.

Before leaving the interview, Bon Jovi wants to be clear about the future of Bon Jovi.

“I can sing again,” he said. “It’s just that the bar for us is 2 1/2 hours a night, four nights a week, hitting high Cs. We rehearse monthly, doing two three-hour shows, just to see where my progress is. But I need to be doing that four nights a week.”

The title is Thank You, Goodnight, “because at the end of the night, I thank the audience for spending two or three hours of their lives with us. But now people have said to me, ‘Do you mean it’s the end?’ No, it’s not the end. There is uncertainty. But it’s not the end.”