Bon Jovi will interrupt its tour for the album "New Jersey" to headline a "heavy metal summit" in Moscow.
The first Moscow Music Peace Festival will be held Aug. 12 and 13 at the 140,000-seat Lenin Stadium."We've been out since Halloween," leader Jon Bon Jovi said by telephone from Atlanta, where the group was performing. "We're 150 shows into the tour. We plan on being out till March of next year. We're the hardest working band in show business, self-proclaimed. We typically do 225 shows a year.
"We come back from Moscow and do the States for a month, New Zealand, Thailand, South America, Mexico. Anywhere they have electricity, we'll play. If they don't have electricity, just tell us in advance. We'll bring a real long extension cord."
Also on the Lenin Stadium bill are Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Scorpions, Cinderella and Skid Row and, from the Soviet Union, Gorky Park, CCCP and Nuance. The shows will be broadcast in 50 countries.
The shows are benefits, not for peace as its name implies, but for an educational approach to fighting drug and alcohol abuse in the United States and Soviet Union. Ticket sale profits will be divided among the Make a Difference Foundation of Raleigh, N.C., and similar organizations in the Soviet Union. The foundation uses music and sports figures as role models to get its anti-substance abuse message across.
In America, the concert will be on pay-per-view TV for four hours the evening of Sunday, Aug. 13. Those in the 11.5 million U.S. households equipped for pay-per-view can contact their cable operator to find out how to order it. Westwood One will simulcast the music.
Make a Difference Foundation receives money from that TV presentation - the concert won't be broadcast on any other channel for at least four months - and from a Polygram recording.
The record won't be live. Each group will record a song by a star who died of substance abuse. Bon Jovi recorded "The Boys Are Back in Town," written by singer-songwriter-bassist Phil Lynnot of Thin Lizzy, an Irish band.
"He was a big influence on my career," Bon Jovi said. "That was a wonderful band. That song was its only hit, in the mid-1970s. The guy had problems with drugs and it killed him. They broke up before he died.
"It's our first show for drug abuse. What started as a snowflake has turned into an avalanche."
The band decided to do a concert somewhere for Make a Difference Foundation. The somewhere came to be Moscow and the concert became an East-West festival.
"A lot of people I've grown up with died of drugs or had problems," Bon Jovi said. "I was never seriously addicted. I experimented and have since quit."
But he won't speak an anti-drug message. For one thing, he doesn't know Russian. For another, "I'm going there to offer entertainment and an introduction to rock 'n' roll, not to be the preacher.
"If my opinion is asked enough times, I'll give it. If I get up in the morning and do a big line of cocaine I don't think it is going to help me sing and write songs. I do not do drugs.
"I did those commercials `Rockers Against Drugs.' I was among the first guys who ever did one," he said.
"They wanted me to be a poster child. It is difficult for me to be a role model. I'm not vain enough to think I'm perfect. All I want to do is be a singer in a rock band."
Bon Jovi said the group will play "The Boys Are Back in Town" in Moscow but couldn't predict what else.
"Everybody is doing 45 minutes," he said. "I figure each concert will go on eight hours." He also has been asked to put together a jam session with the other groups.
"Elvis isn't covered on the album and neither are the Rolling Stones. I'll pull a couple of their songs everyone knows."
"We're the last ones to go on," Bon Jovi said. "I'll introduce everyone and bring them on for the jam."