SLIPPERY WHEN WET

(VERTIGO VERH 38, RELEASED SEPTEMBER 1986)

It was make or break time. Their credibility with the - mostly male, mostly gig-going - rock crowd had been nicely solidified with the release of the '7800 Degrees Fahrenheit' album. But as far as the stern-faced suits and number-crunchers at the record company were concerned, Bon Jovi still wasn't selling enough records to make further long-term investment in the band add up the way the big-wigs argued it should on the balance sheets. There had been a great deal of money invested in the first two Bon Jovi albums, neither of which was a hit. The figures didn't look good and in early 1986 at the New York offices of PolyGram (which owns Vertigo) there was hushed talk of letting the band go.

At which point. British hit-maker and all­-round music business Svengali Jonathan King - then employed on a consultancy basis by the company's London office - claims he stopped things taking a further downturn by circulating a memo to all the relevant heads of departments in London and New York urging them to stop trying to market Bon Jovi as a hardline heavy metal band and to start exploiting the more obvious, photogenic charm of the band's singer and frontman.

"I told them that they'd got it all wrong with Bon Jovi." King later recalled. "I suggested they stop thinking in terms of trying to make them the next led Zeppelin or whatever and start thinking about them as they would any other normal pop group on the label. Which, for me, is what Bon Jovi have always been. Jon is like this generation's Rod Stewart. I told the company that what they had in Bon Jovi was a pop group dressed in heavy metal clothing.“

Indeed, once the marketing men appeared to grasp that simple truth, they began to work far more judiciously and creatively towards making the dream come true for everybody, suits included. PolyGram had needed some­one they trusted to point out what was obvious to them and King was the man for the job.

From now on, Bon Jovi would be promot­ed as a full-on pop group (with a heavy metal 'following'). To make the strategy work prop­erly, however, the record company boyos would require from the band the one thing they had thus far abjectly failed to provide them with - a bona fide chart-topping hit single. 'Runaway' had come close: it barely scraped the charts but at least it got played on main­stream daytime US radio. None of the three singles they had subsequently released had managed to do even that.

Calculators to one side for the moment and thinking caps on, some of the head hon­chos at PolyGram in New York suggested to Jon that he 'experiment' and have a go at coming up with new material by collaborating with some proven outside writers. Up until then, Jon had written either alone, with friends (usually Aldo Nova) or members of the band (usually David Bryan, though by now Jon had begun to forge a new creative relationship with Richie Sambora) and he wasn't convinced that he needed to work with outsiders. In particular, he pointed to some of the material he and Richie had already penned for the next album (’Let It Rock' and 'Never Say Goodbye', which Jon and Richie had already roughed out were good enough, he felt, to be hits in their own rights).