FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Bon Jovi – Slippery When Wet
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BECAUSE the frontman…
of Bon Jovi, Jon Bon Jovi, is sixty on 2nd March, I wanted to take an opportunity to spotlight the band’s greatest studio album. You need to get Slippery When Wet on vinyl. The third studio album from the New Jersey band, their standout album was released in 1986. With most of the songs written by Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora, this is an album that ranks alongside the best of the 1980s. Bon Jovi are one of these bands that divide people. They have a lot of ardent fans, yet some feel the band are a bit cheesy or overrated. I am not a massive fan, though I really love Slippery When Wet, and I wanted to mark the upcoming sixtieth birthday of Bon Jovi – who, to me, is one of the great bands leads of all time. I am going to work my way to a review of the epic album. Before I come to that, there are a couple of features that go into more detail about the making of the album and its impact. Udiscovermusic.com published a feature last year. We discover Slippery When Wet was the album that changed Bon Jovi’s career. Guitarist Richie Sambora recounted how it was the visuals and videos released that helped make it an iconic and hugely popular release:
“From their formation in 1983, Bon Jovi‘s climb to international superstardom was by no means meteoric, at least not for their first three years. Their self-titled debut album of 1984 reached No.43 in the US, producing two modest Hot 100 entries in “Runaway” and “She Don’t Know Me.” The second, 7800° Fahrenheit, peaked only six places higher than its predecessor, and generated two even more minor US chart singles in “Only Lonely” and “In And Out Of Love.”
The album that changed everything for the New Jersey rockers, however, was Slippery When Wet, which made its debut in record stores on August 18, 1986. Fuelled by a series of huge, anthemic singles, it became the record that made Bon Jovi’s name both at home and around the world.
The band had started the month of August on a yacht sailing around Manhattan. They were attending the wedding of their manager Doc McGhee along with members of his other charges, Motley Crüe, and bands such as Ratt. Then in the week leading up to the album’s release, there was great news for Bon Jovi from the all-powerful MTV, who added the video for the irresistible flagship single “You Give Love A Bad Name.”
The song entered Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart a week later, then the UK Top 40, and by early September was climbing the Hot 100. “Hard rock, raspy and aggressive,” was the sum total of the magazine’s pithy review. But its critique of Slippery When Wet was much more effusive. “An exceptionally strong album that should take the band all the way,” they wrote, and how right they were.
As Bon Jovi played European shows to big audiences on the Monsters of Rock tour with Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne, and Def Leppard, the single and album raced up the charts simultaneously. The album began a non-consecutive eight weeks atop the US chart in October, eventually hitting 12-times platinum certification in that country alone. “You Give Love…” hit No.1 in November, the follow-up “Livin’ On A Prayer” did the same in February 1987 (for four weeks), and “Wanted Dead Or Alive” became another substantial Top 10 hit.
Talking to NME about the Slippery success a couple of years later, guitarist Richie Sambora didn‘t underestimate the power of the visuals. “I think it was largely to do with the videos,” says Richie. “At that point, we’d made five videos that didn’t capture who we were as people. People who saw us live knew what we were about, that we were an American rock band, but we had to project that in our videos. We simplified things to get our identity across, wrote some strong hooks, and took control of our own videos”.
A number one album in the U.S. that has been certified twelve-time Platinum, there is no doubting the importance and enduring brilliance of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. The Observer noted in their 2016 feature how there was dichotomy and contrast in Rock in 1986:
“During the Decade of Decadence, mainstream hard rock, fueled by power chords, sex, and a fair amount of booze, weed, and cocaine, fanned the cult of youth and espoused a party hearty world where teens refused to get old or bow down to authority. Many of these ’80s bands may have been legitimate bad boys offstage, but most of their tunes served up rebellion in a seemingly dangerous but ultimately safe package.
While Sunset Strip glam rockers like Ratt and Mötley Crüe had charged out of the gate with hard-rocking records, they soon softened their looks and hooks to seduce growing legions of female followers. Other than Def Leppard with the guitar-heavy Pyromania, no one had achieved monster success with the formula.
1986 was a year of dichotomy in the rock world. The first wave of debauched hair bands was colliding with the thrash metal ascension, which countered decadent bliss with an antidote of reality during the politically callous era of the Reagan-Bush administration. Bands like Metallica and Anthrax delved into darker realms and broached topics like the ugliness of social inequality and the looming specter of nuclear war. It was the unsexy antithesis to the late Robbin Crosby’s “Pussy Party Paycheck” ethos espoused by his band Ratt and their peers.
The keyboard-laced Bon Jovi found the perfect way to circumvent those two camps. Adored by legions of teen girls for their good looks and infectious hooks, the Jersey Syndicate (as they later came to be known) knew how to sell the fantasy of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle and tell stories of both romantic love and sexual hijinks without the overt crassness of some of their hair-band counterparts. They made it look endearing. Bon Jovi’s two albums were filled with such anthems and ballads: “In And Out Of Love,” “Shot Through The Heart,” “Only Lonely,” “Silent Night,” “Roulette”…
There was one problem. The quintet needed a smash single to rocket them into the stratosphere. The only bonafide hit on their first two albums (Bon Jovi and 7800° Fahrenheit) was the keyboard-propelled rocker “Runaway,” the opening track of their debut album, co-written by George Karak and frontman Jon Bon Jovi. While they had some catchy tracks, the band needed an injection in the songwriting department.
Jon and guitarist Richie Sambora hooked up with songwriter Desmond Child, former member of ’70s pop-rock ensemble Desmond Child & Rouge, through members of KISS, who had achieved renewed success with him on post-makeup albums like Animalize and Asylum.
An initial songwriting session at Richie’s childhood home with Jon, Richie, and Desmond immediately produced “You Give Love A Bad Name,” which Child secretly reworked from a recent flop he had written for Bonnie Tyler called “If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man)”.
Jon and Richie’s partnership with Desmond would prove to be incredibly fruitful. The man knew how to conjure relatable stories about the common man, an approach that Bon Jovi had always taken. Four songs from their Slippery When Wet writing sessions made the album: “You Give Love A Bad Name,” “Without Love,” “I’d Die For You,” and the monster hit “Livin’ On A Prayer,” the stirring anthem about overcoming adversity that will forever be associated with the band.
All four collaborations were about the bonds of love (in the first case, lust), and “Prayer,” Child’s everyman tale of Tommy and Gina, inspired by himself and an ex-girlfriend struggling to make it as artists, struck a serious chord with working-class rock fans across the country. The chorus has become the band’s ultimate sing-along melody live. Another track, the beloved B-side “Edge Of A Broken Heart,” appeared on the soundtrack to the 1987 Fat Boys movie Disorderlies.
Buoying the rich song selection was the sparkling, booming production work of producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock (who would later become a successful producer for Mötley Crüe and Metallica). Working at Vancouver-based Little Mountain Sound Studios with the band, Fairbairn and Rock imbued the tunes with the right amount of reverb, sonic gloss and a thick drum sound that would make the pop-rock tunes feel heavier than they were.
David Bryan’s grinding, Jon Lord-like organ intro to the anthemic “Let It Rock” sounded like it was descending from the heavens. Richie Sambora’s charging riffs and six-string squeals were placed front and center on the super catchy “Raise Your Hands,” the closest thing the album had to a rousing metal anthem. On the flip side, the lust-fueled “Wild In The Streets” served up deliciously infectious power pop, and “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” with its moody intro and crystalline acoustic guitar sound, offered a stirring mock cowboy anthem striving for mythical rock significance. It has become a classic of their canon”.
Before wrapping up, there is a review that I want to bring in. One of the best-regarded albums of the 1980s, it is a hit-packed classic that everyone needs to get. This is what AllMusic said in their review of Slippery When Wet:
“Slippery When Wet wasn't just a breakthrough album for Bon Jovi; it was a breakthrough for hair metal in general, marking the point where the genre officially entered the mainstream. Released in 1986, it presented a streamlined combination of pop, hard rock, and metal that appealed to everyone -- especially girls, whom traditional heavy metal often ignored. Slippery When Wet was more indebted to pop than metal, though, and the band made no attempt to hide its commercial ambition, even hiring an outside songwriter to co-write two of the album's biggest singles. The trick paid off as Slippery When Wet became the best-selling album of 1987, beating out contenders like Appetite for Destruction, The Joshua Tree, and Michael Jackson's Bad.
Part of the album's success could be attributed to Desmond Child, a behind-the-scenes songwriter who went on to write hits for Aerosmith, Michael Bolton, and Ricky Martin. With Child's help, Bon Jovi penned a pair of songs that would eventually define their career -- “Living on a Prayer” and “You Give Love a Bad Name” -- two teenage anthems that mixed Springsteen's blue-collar narratives with straightforward, guitar-driven hooks. The band's characters may have been down on their luck -- they worked dead-end jobs, pined for dangerous women, and occasionally rode steel horses -- but Bon Jovi never presented a problem that couldn’t be cured by a good chorus, every one of which seemed to celebrate a glass-half-full mentality.
Elsewhere, the group turned to nostalgia, using songs like “Never Say Goodbye” and “Wild in the Streets” to re-create (or fabricate) an untamed, sex-filled youth that undoubtedly appealed to the band’s teen audience. Bon Jovi wasn't nearly as hard-edged as Mötley Crüe or technically proficient as Van Halen, but the guys smartly played to their strengths, shunning the extremes for an accessible, middle-of-the-road approach that wound up appealing to more fans than most of their peers. “It’s alright if you have a good time,” Jon Bon Jovi sang on Slippery When Wet’s first track, “Let It Rock,” and those words essentially served as a mantra for the entire hair metal genre, whose carefree, party-heavy attitude became the soundtrack for the rest of the ‘80s”.
Because the legend Jon Bon Jovi is sixty on 2nd March, I wanted to go away from doing a playlist and instead look at one of his band’s greatest achievements. Their most-celebrated album, Slippery When Wet still stands up today. Maybe some of the production and songs are a bit dated, but songs like Livin’ on a Prayer and Wanted Dead or Alive are iconic. A very happy upcoming sixtieth birthday to…
THE superb Jon Bon Jovi.