And Sambora and Bon Jovi didn’t use just him this time, they also enlisted the help of LA songwriters Holly Knight (Aerosmith, Kiss, etc.) and Diane Warren (everybody), both of whom have a co-author credit on one song.Īdopting the methodology of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, recording for New Jersey took place in Vancouver from May 1 to July 31, 1988, and the band joined producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock there with nearly 30 brand new Bon Jovi/Sambora compositions. As a songwriting team they seemed to bring out the best in each other. While Slippery… had brought the talents of songwriter Desmond Child to the forefront, Bon Jovi and guitarist Sambora were quick to team up with him again, for four songs this time, notably the album’s first single, Bad Medicine. Not for the monetary reasons, but it was such an amazing feeling to have done what we’d done… I’m walking around the house yelling: ‘I gotta pay for this place, we’ve got to write some fucking hot songs!’.” “We demoed the first batch of songs, 17 in all… We really started to feel the pressure because we didn’t have the amazing song. Then the phone calls between Jon and Richie Sambora started to alter: “They changed from ‘What’re you doing today?’ to ‘I got this really neat hook!’.” But, as Jon confessed at the time, although their creativity was buzzing, there was still something missing. It was a scant amount of time to recover from such an exhausting tour. Once they returned home from the gruelling Slippery… trek, they took barely enough time off to come up for air before heading straight back to work: “We really didn’t do anything for three or four weeks,” said Jon. They needed a break from the road, and from each other. It was also getting to the point where the band had been living in each other’s pockets for far too long. He’d literally walk into your room and start shooting, it was that candid.” “He was on the road with us – and he actually had keys to all the rooms. The director, Wayne Isham, had free reign to film the band at his whim. “There was nothing contrived about it whatsoever,” drummer Tico Torres recalled. We got a glimpse into their on-the-road life via that video. By the time the band released the final single from the album, Wanted Dead Or Alive – complete with its atmospheric promo clip – there were hints that all wasn’t entirely rosy in Bon Jovi’s world. The Slippery… tour, for all its glory and fanfare, was also a tough one for the band, and cracks were already starting to appear before they even got off the road. I was determined that people wouldn’t be able to say that Slippery… was a fluke. We were determined to make that album work, too. Jon recalled at the time: “The turnaround was incredible. As a result of (and no doubt boosting the success of) Slippery…, Bon Jovi remained on the road for nearly 18 of those 24 months, finally bringing the tour to a close in January 1988. To the untrained eye a two-year gap had elapsed since the release of Slippery…, but really it wasn’t like that. Who knows how many people got their introduction to the harder side of the rock spectrum via bands like Jovi? I know I did.įast forward to summer of 1988 and the release of Bon Jovi’s New Jersey album. Bon Jovi were a long-haired rock’n’roll band that didn’t scare your parents, craftily bridging the gap between teenage pop and harder rock. No, Bon Jovi were, by their own admission, a glorified bar band who wanted to entertain, but in an honest, blue-collar way that had more in common with fellow New Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen than with the sex, drugs, then more sex ’n’ drugs and a little bit of rock’n’roll of the Mötley Crüe gang. Not for them the socio-political rhetoric of U2’s Bono or the wit and wisdom of Bob Dylan. Bon Jovi worked on the myth that they were buddies, a good-time band. The album had gone stratospheric, no doubt helped by the heavy MTV rotation of slick videos that accompanied Livin’ On A Prayer and You Give Love A Bad Name, and the frontman’s charismatic good looks – tailor-made for posters that would adorn the bedroom walls of countless teenage girls.
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