Bon Jovi Best Songs

New Jersey has produced its share of rock and roll A-listers over the years. With its odd cultural mish-mash of ethnic Rust Belt neighborhoods flanked by wide swaths of WASPy suburbia, Jersey has always been a fertile breeding ground for loud and proud rockers. Other than Bruce Springsteen, the recording artist that's perhaps most directly associated with the Garden State is Bon Jovi.

Like Van Halen, Bon Jovi is named after its bandleader -- guitarist and lead vocalist John Bongiovi. As a teenager, the young musician had made a name for himself in New Jersey's ever-burgeoning rock club scene in the late 1970s. By the early '80s, Bongiovi had parlayed his local music industry connections into a presence at prominent Manhattan recording studio Power Station. It was there that he recorded "Runaway" with a troupe of session players. The song's driving power, fueled by a bright keyboard riff common to that era of album rock radio, served to propel "Runaway" to victory in an important regional radio station contest in 1983. That event exposed Bongiovi to a large audience and spurred the frontman to put together a top-flight band lineup en route to an eventual recording contract with Mercury Records.

After briefly deploying lead guitarist Dave Sabo (founder of another famous Jersey heavy rock band, Skid Row, later in the 1980s) in his new band, Bongiovi had an equally talented axeman fall into his lap in Richie Sambora. Sambora was a charismatic stage presence that mildly evoked images of Aerosmith's Joe Perry. Bongiovi also enlisted long-time friend David Bryan on keyboards and industry veteran Tico Torres on drums, alongside bassist Alec John Such, and a Mercury Records executive dubbed the new group Bon Jovi. As of 2011, all of those players except for Such were still active with the band.

Bon Jovi's first two albums, 1984's Bon Jovi and 1985's 7800 Degrees Fahrenheit, are generally lost in time among the deluge of pretty-boy pop-metal acts that had exploded in popularity in America during those years. Outside of "Runaway" itself, which had been included on Bon Jovi, the material on both LPs gained little traction outside of the band's home turf in the American Northeast region. However, Fahrenheit and its singles -- particularly "In And Out Of Love" and "Only Lonely" -- proved a watershed in the important Japanese market.

Both of those efforts, it turned out, were simply laying the groundwork for the tidal wave of success that would accompany Bon Jovi's third release.

1986 was a rather mediocre year for pop music, with one notable exception. Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, released that summer, became an international smash hit. It sported two Number One songs, "You Give Love A Bad Name" and "Livin' On A Prayer" -- both of which are still immensely popular today. A third Top Ten song, "Wanted Dead Or Alive", is perhaps even more popular today than its higher-charting brothers. And Slippery is particularly unusual in that it is one of the only top-selling hard rock albums in history whose ballad ("Never Say Goodbye") was the lowest-charting of its singles.

In retrospect, what Slippery managed to accomplish for the rock and roll genre was no small feat. It bridged the juvenile -- at times, even comic -- pop metal scene of the early 1980s with the polished, corporate juggernaut that pop metal became in the late 1980s. Slippery established the formula by which the Whitesnakes, Warrants and Poisons of the world would sell millions of albums to a more mainstream audience.

The band, of course, did not take their foot off the gas upon reaching superstardom. 1988's New Jersey solidifed the recipe laid down by its predecessor, spawning two more Number Ones ("Bad Medicine" and "I'll Be There For You") alongside three more Top Tens ("Born To Be My Baby", Lay Your Hands On Me" and "Living In Sin"). The album itself was noticeably heavier in both songwriting style and production, but neither radio nor the record-buying public seemed to care. The accompanying tour lasted nearly two years and, at its conclusion, left no doubt that Bon Jovi was one of the top five live concert draws on the planet.

Firmly entrenched for the 1990s, Bon Jovi largely escaped the strong backlash against pop metal and its ilk in the wake of the emergence of the grunge era. Jon Bon Jovi's 1990 solo sequel to "...Dead Or Alive", "Blaze Of Glory", was a chart-topper, and the rest of the band reconvened for Keep The Faith in 1992. Both the title track and "Bed Of Roses" got major rock radio airplay; the fanbase content to receive more of the same glossy rock following the band's two year hiatus. Bon Jovi then released a new single, "Always", included in the band's 1994 greatest hits release (Cross Road), and that tune went Top Five as well, despite grunge's mastery over FM radio that year.

The group released a sixth studio album in 1995, These Days, which again played to AOR formula and replaced Such with Hugh McDonald on bass. Despite their continuing massive popularity overseas, Bon Jovi saw this album chart only one US Top Twenty tune ("This Ain't A Love Song"). Clearly lacking new and innovative musical direction, the band took the rest of the decade off.

Bon Jovi reemerged in the 2000s as somewhat of a legacy band, albeit one with much greater stature than most of its 1980s contemporaries. It has produced a handful of albums, from which only three songs have cracked the US Top Forty (the most memorable of which probably being "It's My Life" from the 2000 album Crush). The band has chosen to focus on touring, and continues to be a huge draw throughout the world -- moreso abroad than in the US -- and routinely tops annual concert draw listings.

With both its original lineup and its reputation still mostly intact, Bon Jovi continues to keep the fire of 1980s pop metal alive for a new generation of rock and roll fans, well into the new millenium.