Bon Jovi (3 page)

New Jersey
tour, band huddle, Japan, 1989.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, U.S.S.R., August 1989.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

Bon Jovi: (from left) Richie Sambora, Alec John Such, Jon Bon Jovi, Tico Torres, and David Bryan backstage,
New Jersey
tour, 1989.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

THE BIG TIME

Lost Highway
tour, Punchestown Racecourse, Dublin, Ireland, June 7, 2008.
Phil Griffin

DAVID:
The first time our tour bus pulled up, I was still living with my mom and dad. Richie and Jon were still living with their parents too. The bus pulled up and the neighbors came out with curlers in their hair going, “That’s a tour bus?”

The first album went gold in Japan. That was huge! Then I came home sixty grand in debt because I had borrowed money for keyboards. That’s when I learned the word “recoupable,” which is worse than “fuck.” In my house, my kids can say “fuck.” If they say “recoupable,” I wash their mouths out with soap.

So we had a gold record yet nothing. Then the second record didn’t go platinum; we only sold 800,000 records …

JON:
We were babies on the first record and the second one was done nine months later.

DAVID:
At that point it was do or die. The third album, if it didn’t break big, we were done. We were actually luckier than today where you have to have a hit on the first record or you’re over. At least we had a shot to try to develop into something.

TICO:
I think every band goes through that in the beginning. It was nice to have the chance to find our voice.

JON:
You can talk to people who were in positions of power and they’ll say, “We gave you that third album.” It was a different era. You could break out of Philly or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Asbury Park, like Southside Johnny. There were regional bands in America and one DJ could influence things.
If
he played your record, you could break regionally. In today’s world, it would be very hard.

DAVID:
The powers that be saw that we were a hardworking band. We played every one of our shows; we went to the radio stations; we did all the interviews; we didn’t fuck off. We really worked. We were dedicated.

TICO:
I’ve been a musician for forty years. Before Bon Jovi there were fifteen years I played with just as much heart and love. But we got lucky. There is a certain magic that works, and being in the right place at the right time made us the biggest band in the world.

JON:
We made a bunch of videos and we hated them all. Our early videos sucked. I didn’t understand the medium whatsoever. We were twenty-one years old. We didn’t know any better. We were really uneducated. So first album, first video, second album, third video … we started having a little more fun by the fourth or fifth video. And by
Slippery
, we figured it out.

DAVID:
What really worked best for us? Live. When we played live, we kicked ass. Our records had to have the energy of a live show, and our videos had to have the energy of a live show to work.

Slippery When Wet
came together and all the planets and moons and stars lined up.

Jon and Richie,
New Jersey
tour, 1989.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

Bon Jovi: (from left) David Bryan, Alec John Such, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Tico Torres in a promotional photo shoot for the
Slippery When Wet
tour, Rumson, NJ, 1986.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

DAVID:
You have to bring it to the world. So we toured and toured and toured. We were never in the same place—always moving, always moving. As soon as we finished the huge
Slippery
tour, we recorded
New Jersey
, released it, and hit the road again. We worked ourselves to death. Between 1984 and 1990, I was home for six months. Six months in six years!

Original slave/work reel for
New Jersey
album tracks, photographed at New Jersey archives, April 2009.
Phil Griffin (2009)

JON:
We had nowhere else to go! What can be better than that? Compounded by the fact that you’re young, you want to see the world, you’re making money. And talk about everything being at your fingertips … you name it. It was at our fingertips.

TICO:
There was no family or kids. We were pretty much free. It made sense.

Jon Bon Jovi,
These Days
tour, 1995.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com

JON:
With the
New Jersey
record, I refused to have anyone think all this was luck. We wanted to show that with the first two records there was something there, and even though the third one did pay off—big time—I was going to keep fighting to make sure you knew I could do this again and again and again. We weren’t going to be a one-hit wonder.

There was a moment in time when we could have done anything, anywhere and gotten away with it.

DAVID:
It wasn’t as if we’d changed. It felt like one week nobody gave a shit about us and the next week we’re the biggest thing on the planet. We looked the same. We played the same songs. We had the same intensity. But the world all of a sudden viewed us differently.

RICHIE:
I think I definitely understood the success. It was massive. You know that you’ve made a dent, a big one, as an artist. Jon and I really came into our own as songwriters during the
Slippery When Wet
and
New Jersey
period.

Richie Sambora,
One Wild Night
tour, The Schott, Columbus, OH, May 4, 2001.
Sam Erickson

David Bryan,
These Days
tour, 1995.
Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss/www.markweiss.com