Jon Bon Jovi Responds to Death Rumors

Heaven looks a lot like New Jersey.

David Bergman/DavidBergman.net

Well, now Jon Bon Jovi knows for certain: he's wanted dead or alive.

Yesterday, rumors abounded on Twitter and Facebook about the Bon Jovi frontman's sudden death from cardiac arrest, apparently sourced from a blog post that reappropriated text from the Los Angeles Times' 2009 obituary of Michael Jackson. Bon Jovi debunked the false news with good humor, posting a merry photo on his official Facebook that read: "Heaven looks a lot like New Jersey" with the day's date. The photo was captioned, "Rest assured that Jon is alive and well! This photo was just taken."

Bon Jovi was clearly amused by the morbid gossip, referencing it often during his band's Monday night concert in New Jersey and pretending to take calls from concerned friends to verify his quite-alive status.

The singer's death hoax rounds out a year full of false celebrity death rumors. In February, Mick Jagger found himself the target of similar Twitter hysteria, with #RIPMickJagger trending for a day. Charlie Sheen faced several rounds of death reports this year, and Justin Beiber was rumored to have been killed in a car accident during the summer.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter