Other glam metal bands were also into the idea of being cowboys, which, in retrospect, is one of the funniest and best things about the whole glam metal moment. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora also took to wearing cowboy hats onstage sometimes, and Sambora could pull that look off better than JBJ. It’s a 10.)īon Jovi continued to record songs about being cowboys there are a couple on their 1988 album New Jersey. The band’s fear of goofiness did not, however, prevent them from recording “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” a beautifully absurd song about walking these streets with a loaded six-string on your back and about playing for keeps because you might not make it back. And yet Bon Jovi were consumed with the idea that they should pretend to be cowboys.īon Jovi initially planned to use Wanted Dead Or Alive as the title for their 1986 breakout album Slippery When Wet, but an Old West photo shoot convinced them that they couldn’t pull off the look. “ Livin’ On A Prayer” would’ve been a very different song if Tommy used to work on the ranch. In any case, there are no cowboys in Bon Jovi. But Pilestown is in South Jersey, the other end of the state from Bon Jovi’s Sayreville. The Cowtown Rodeo in Pilestown, it says right on the website, is the oldest weekly running rodeo in the country. Random fact: "99 In The Shade" is the second Bon Jovi track to mention the fictional couple "Tommy and Gina" (formerly mentioned in "Livin' on a Prayer").My original line was that there are no cowboys in New Jersey. No wonder Bon Jovi had to take a two-year hiatus to recover.
While the Slippery When Wet hits are more recognizable to the casual fan, New Jersey is a better and more varied album overall, from the boyhood nostalgia of "Blood on Blood" to the indelible anti-marriage anthem "Living in Sin" and prom-ready classic "I'll Be There For You." Bon Jovi never made a perfect record (and there's some filler here too-see "Wild Is the Wind"), but this represents the band-and pop-metal in general-at its puffy-haired peak. Everything about this record is gloriously huge: the hooks, the solos, the goofy "Lay Your Hands on Me" intro, the overall haze of Springsteenian testosterone and state-of-the-art '80s cheese. New Jersey (the most on-the-nose album title since Dirty Mind) is Bon Jovi's first set of songs that sound as if they were recorded specifically for packed stadiums outfitted with pyrotechnics. If Bill and Ted produced a rock album, it would sound like this. Let the haggling begin!īon Jovi's fourth album, 'New Jersey,' was released in the fall of 1988 and went on to sell 7 million copies in the U.S. In honor of the band's current tour, we ranked all the studio albums, not counting Burning Bridges-technically a compilation-or the acoustic rehashes of This Left Feels Right. Sometimes derided as the poor man's Springsteen because of their shared Jersey roots, Bon Jovi deserves respect (no, really!) for combining the Boss's working-dude appeal with hard-rock sleaze and managing to evolve and endure after the '80s faded. Frontman Jon Bon Jovi's gravelly voice and knack for soaring, arena-ready hooks, coupled with the band's reliably bombastic pop-metal riffs, made Bon Jovi into an indelible hit machine. And if you hate Bon Jovi-well, you ought to give them some credit for pissing you off for this many years.īon Jovi's bottomless appetite for crunchy riffs and lovestruck ballads has been documented on 13 studio albums.
If you're a Bon Jovi fan, such astonishing longevity is a gift that makes its disciples happy and its singer very rich.
No other artifact from the hair-metal era has shown the same persistence. If the rock band from Sayreville, New Jersey, formed in 1983, were a person, it would be old enough to run for president. "It's about time," Jon Bon Jovi said as his band was inducted-finally-into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April.
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