Wherever you’ve come from, Camden, New Jersey, probably isn’t an improvement. Even on a sunny October day, it’s a grim place, recently described as America’s most dangerous city. A man whose day job is performing in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans in stadiums around the world should have no business here. He should be tucked up in bed with a groupie, or whatever rock stars do in their downtime.

But Jon Bon Jovi is not your average rock star. When you tell people you are meeting him, you get two reactions: disdain or “Phwoar”. Both are usually followed by a rousing rendition of Livin’ on a Prayer. So for the conflicted out there, let’s start by getting a few things straight: he is not tiny; he’s a very respectable 5ft 10in or 11in. His hair, while by no means a No 1 all over, is no longer so big that it need dominate our thoughts. He’s a handsome and successful rock star who gets a reliably sneering press (too commercial, too soft-rock, too cheesily uplifting); a stratospherically rich man who nonetheless keeps plugging away with the CDs, the tours, the long absences from his family. And today, he is in a rubbish part of America listening to local dignitaries drone on at a tree-planting ceremony. Why, for the love of God? Is he, as rumour has it, planning to follow in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood, and swap showbiz for politics?

“F*** no!” he says, grinning good-naturedly. “Fifty per cent of people hate you before you walk out the door. You can get much more done philanthropically than you can ever do shaking hands. I probably could run, because celebrity would win you office, and what a shame that would be. The difference between me and the President is that I get to keep the house and the plane.”

It turns out that philanthropy, through his Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, and not politics, is what gets JBJ out of bed. And it is his foundation that has helped to fund today’s tree-planting. But he could just write a cheque, and not bother hacking down here on the train (quicker than the chopper, apparently). “My going there gets the community involved. If you go there, and you speak to people, and look them in the eye and say, ‘You do this, I’ll do that…’ It’s the power of ‘we’.”

Of course, plenty of famous people give money to charity, or support charitable foundations. Bon Jovi is different. He set up his own foundation because he wants to know exactly where his money’s going. He also does most of it when the cameras are categorically not rolling, refusing to do photogenic things more than once during the day because, “This is not a photo opportunity.” Finally, he’s different because he isn’t preachy – he just gets on with it. He could spend his life sitting on a beach; he chooses not to. “What a selfish, miserable, s*** life that would be. It’s a terrible existence! What good are you doing? What purpose are you serving? What legacy are you leaving?”

But then, he’s as successful as he is precisely because, unlike most of us, he never aspired to make enough money to sit on a beach. While his contemporaries wanted to be on the cover of some local magazine, he wanted to be on the cover of Time. He’s an entertainer whose job is to make people love him, and he does it very well. Although low-key in behaviour and appearance (black leather jacket, dark jeans, Chelsea boots that need reheeling and wraparound rock-star Prada shades), he’s in his element, earlier, over the state line in a deprived Philadelphia neighbourhood, where his foundation has pumped in millions of dollars. People cross the street to shake his hand and high-five him. “Yo,” mutters a disbelieving hoody. “Is that Jon Bon Jovi on my block?”

John Bongiovi was born in 1962, in Sayreville, New Jersey. His mother was a Playboy Bunny turned florist, his father a hairdresser; both were former US Marines. He thinks his showbiz gene comes from both of them, but that the Reagan era in which he grew up was inevitably formative too, in all its flag-waving, gung-ho glory. “Coming of age when Reagan was telling the world there’d be a chicken in every pot and God bless America, you’re very easily influenced… Sayreville was a real Polish/Irish/Italian little town. We didn’t have black kids. No one went to college… Bono had Northern Ireland outside his window; we had a white picket fence.”

He didn’t pay any attention in school, and at 16 was playing in clubs before going to work as a gofer at a recording studio in New York. At 21, he got a record deal – after he hand-delivered the single Runaway to New York radio stations – and he had met Richie Sambora, his bandmate and fellow songwriter ever since. The secret to the band’s success, Bon Jovi thinks, is that the songs have universal appeal. “The themes were uplifting and optimistic, but they weren’t specific. You can relate to Livin’ on a Prayer whether you live in London or Wisconsin.”

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In 1986, when he was 25, Slippery When Wet, the album that contained that anthem, exploded on to the scene, and Bon Jovi had arrived. Sure, the good looks helped, he concedes, but, without the songs, many of which are now classics (whatever the critics say), “I’d have been the next Terence Trent D’Arby or Milli Vanilli.” He tried to break the pretty-boy mould on the cover of the Slippery album, which was slated to be called Wanted Dead or Alive. The whole band grew thick beards and looked stern for the cover shoot. The publicist took one look and said: “No. No, no, no. And smile.” That was the end of that.

But keeping the show on the road hasn’t always been plain sailing. The band nearly imploded in 1990, burnt out after four years of solid touring. They turned things around, seemingly by Bon Jovi’s sheer force of will. But up until then, they were wild times: Slippery was named in honour of Vancouver’s strippers. Does he feel any nostalgia?

“F*** no! I wouldn’t want to be 25 years old and bouncing off the walls and doing all the great kids’ stuff that we did. But it’s not like [these days] I’m reading a book and going to bed, trust me.” Oh? So what is he doing? “I’ll be uncorking a bottle of wine and sitting in some restaurant and eating and going home. It’s a progression. I grew up in public.”

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