KEEP THE FAITH

KEEP THE FAITH

(JAMBCO/MERCURY 514 917-2, RELEASED OCTOBER 1992)
There was a four-year gap between the release of 'New Jersey' and the next Bon Jovi album, 'Keep The Faith', Four years during which the fate of Bon Jovi as a long-term main­stream proposition was sealed one way or another forever.

It could easily have been longer. After all, during the interim, much had happened. Groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam had arrived to steal the spotlight and grunge had put paid to a great many of Bon Jovi's mid-Eighties rivals. Poison, Warrant, Winger, Motley Crue, David Lee Roth, Nelson, Little Angels ... all had perished in the rush to discover check shirts, DMs, short hair and sour expressions.

With immaculate timing, a year before Nirvana would change the way we watched MTV forever, Jon had enjoyed his first solo suc­cess with 'Blaze Of Glory'. At that point, in the summer of 1990, Jon said he wasn't sure if there would actually be another Bon Jovi album. '" hope so. But I don't know so." Blaming the media for much of the band's troubles, he claimed that rumours had been seized upon and blown out of all proportion. Particularly in the UK.

"Kerrang! magazine says Tico is leaving the band. Suddenly we got drummer tapes and pictures and everything comin' in. It was like, 'Hey Tico, are you quitting the band?' He was like, 'First I've heard of it. man'. That was amazing, but that's when it started, but we pushed it away. I threw the magazine out the window. I was upset 'cos I knew it wasn't true. I think the quotes were like the drummer's quitting and the band is breaking up. I thought. 'What the fuck's this?' So then the English papers, I think it was The Sun or one of those gossip rags, got hold of it. The headline ran 'All Ovi For Bon Jovi'.

"It said that Richie Sambora Was out and there were money problems, that he wasn't happy with his cut and he was leaving for Cher and all this shit. I'm reading it out of the fax thinking, 'What is all this shit?' Then the phone calls start coming in, people calling me saying they want the gig. I tell you, four months later I'm not entertained by it any more ... So now all of us are believing there are problems. I can't tell you what the problems are about. but we think we've got problems."

But was it true that he and Richie had grown apart? "In the state of things at this time, yeah. Right now in July 1990, yeah. Things are not happy in the Bon Jovi camp, that's for sure, they're not happy at all."

Not that Jon wanted the band to break up, he said, he just didn't know if he was able to hold it together any longer. He began to reminisce about the early days of the band and the reasons why they were irreplaceable. "You can only play your first time at Donington once. We were spitting in the eye of the fire and we didn't give a fuck about any­one. It was us and we were gonna make it. Regardless of money and stadiums, or who I played with, if that was the band tomorrow and Elton John [who had guested on 'Blaze Of Glory'] was my new keyboard player, it would never be the same. All of that would be lost and I don't want that to happen. I definite­ly do not want that to happen.

"I want to keep it together 'cos these are the guys who seven years ago were here ... when we didn't have enough money for a pretzel across the street and no-one knew whether Bon Jovi was jeans or what the fuck it was. We had to fight for everything we got and we had to fight even on the 'New Jersey' album to prove that we were gonna be around. "