Mercury 836345
Producer: Bruce Fairbairn
Track listing: Lay Your Hands on Me / Bad Medicine / Born to Be My Baby / Living in Sin / Blood on Blood / Homebound Train / Wild Is the Wind / Ride Cowboy Ride / Stick to Your Guns / I’ll Be There for You / 99 in the Shade / Love for Sale
October 15, 1988
4 weeks
“I don’t think there was pressure,” Jon Bon Jovi says of following up Slippery When Wet, which sold more than 13.5 million copies worldwide. “Because there wasn’t anything calculated going into Slippery. With New Jersey, it was like, ‘This is an amazing high, how do we continue it?’ After the constant thrills we had with the Slippery project, we all said, ‘Wow, let’s do again.’ Six weeks later we were doing demos of the songs for New Jersey.”
Bon Jovi stayed with the same team — producer Bruce Fairbairn, engineer Bob Rock, and contributing songwriter Desmond Child — and the group once again returned to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It was an extended family, going back to Bruce and Bob was logical,” says Bon Jovi. “Plus, selling 13 million records wasn’t too fucking shabby.”
The success of Slippery When Wet gave Bon Jovi a jolt of confidence, as the New Jersey sessions went fairly smoothly. “It took about the same time period to record and mix the whole thing,” he says. “We certainly came up with the songs.”
One track, “Living in Sin,” was written by Jon Bon Jovi alone at his New Jersey home. “I called [guitarist] Richie [Sambora] up, because I had this idea, but by the time he got there, it was finished. He was bummed he didn’t have a piece of it.”
When Bon Jovi penned “I’ll Be There for You,” Sambora did make it in time to contribute. “When we finished that one off, I remember going to bed with a Walkman on so I wouldn’t wake up my girlfriend and listening to it with us on two acoustic guitars and our voices. I was very pleased with that. It reminded me of sort of a Lennon-type of attitude,” he says.
The track “Bad Medicine” was written with help from Child. “He didn’t like the ‘B’ section, so he said, ‘Why don’t you put this other part in from another song.’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t want to give you a piece of a Number One song.’ We made light of it, put it in, and pushed all egos aside.”
Bon Jovi’s prediction was on the mark, as “Bad Medicine” became the band’s third Number One single on November 19, 1988. By that time, New Jersey had already topped the album chart, becoming Bon Jovi’s second consecutive Number One album. It also spawned four more top 10 singles: “I’ll Be There for You” (another Number One), “Born to Be My Baby,” “Lay Your Hands on Me,” and “Living in Sin.”
New Jersey was important to Bon Jovi for more than just its chart achievements. On August 11, 1989, it became the first new recording by an American act to be issued in the USSR by the government-run Melodiya label. The following day the group headlined the Moscow Music Peace Festival at Lenin Stadium.
“When you make a record and you tour, it’s not often that you can find something that no one else has done,” Bon Jovi says. “But when we released that record on Melodiya, that was a first. Elvis never did that.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of October 15, 1988
1 . New Jersey, Bon Jovi
2. Appetite for Destruction, Guns N’ Roses
3. Hysteria, Def Leppard
4. Cocktail, Soundtrack
5. Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman