Bon Jovi: New Jersey (1988) Review

Bon Jovi were sitting on top of the world by 1988.

Powered on by the success of third LP Slippery When Wet, they seemed indestructable.

And, keen to keep the good times rolling, it made perfect sense – at least from a financial perspective – to use a similar formula on the follow-up record.

Unfortunately for them, however, the lacklustre New Jersey simply doesn’t have the songs.

Mission Impossible?

We’re not saying New Jersey is a bad album.

Indeed, it features some top tier guitar work from axeman Richie Sambora.

There’s also no fewer than three timeless classics in the mix here (Lay Your Hands On Me, Bad Medicine, and I’ll Be There For You), which is more than most bands muster in a career.

Finally, it’s mighty impressive that New Jersey remains the last rock album to have had FIVE singles reach the top ten of the coveted Billboard Hot 100 chart – a record it continues to hold today, almost 40 years later!

So when we consider all of the above, the fact that it still somehow disappoints only confirms how impossibly high the bar had been set by it’s predecessor.

The Singles Steal The Show

If there’s one band who know how to write a killer hit single, it’s Bon Jovi.

New Jersey is locked and loaded in this regard, with three huge tracks which went on to crack the top 20 in countries all over the world.

The gospel-inspired Lay Your Hands On Me is perhaps the pick of the bunch.

It’s followed by party rock anthem Bad Medicine (a track which is made even better by the music video) and I’ll Be There For You, which features some very effective dual-vocals from Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, and might just be the best ballad of their career so far.

This trifecta capture the essence of the late-80s hard rock scene, and go a long way in cementing Bon Jovi’s status as a nicer, more polite version of Motley Crue; a group who you could introduce to your Grandma without worrying whether they’d snort coke off her favourite china.

“Born To Be My Baby was originally recorded acoustically, but Bruce persuaded us to change it to the version that’s on the record. I believe it could’ve been an even bigger hit for us had we kept it in it’s original format.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

“Born To Be My Baby was originally recorded acoustically, but Bruce persuaded us to change it to the version that’s on the record.

I believe it could’ve been an even bigger hit for us had we kept it in it’s original format.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

Uneven And Unbalanced

New Jersey’s real problems start once we get outside of those hits.

A number of tracks trip over themselves due to poor pairings of verse/chorus structures which simply don’t match.

This is most notable on the likes of Wild Is The Wind and Love Is War, where the band’s insistence on trying to jam together incompatible jigsaw pieces leads to awkward key changes which really disrupt the flow of what are otherwise good songs.

Furthermore, we can all agree that the outstanding chorus of Living In Sin deserved a better support structure.

“I really wanted to make a hit record again – not for monetary reasons, but because it was such an amazing feeling.

We had a genuine fear that we wouldn’t be able to write another song as good as You Give Love A Bad Name again, in fact we wanted it so desperately that when Richie and I wrote Love Is War it came out with exactly the same chord progression, so we had to change it up!”

– Jon Bon Jovi

“I really wanted to make a hit record again – not for monetary reasons, but because it was such an amazing feeling.

We had a genuine fear that we wouldn’t be able to write another song as good as You Give Love A Bad Name again.

In fact we wanted it so desperately that when Richie and I wrote Love Is War it came out with exactly the same chord progression, so we had to change it up!”

– Jon Bon Jovi

Wait… Cowboys?

Wanted Dead Or Alive appears to have lit a fire within the band, who now seem to identify as fucking cowboys.

There’s no less that FIVE tracks on this disc – seven if you include the bonus tracks – which take on a Wild West them.

There are times when this works nicely, such as the booming Stick To Your Guns and friendship anthem Blood On Blood – a track which Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora consider their finest piece of work to date – but their over-use of these “cowboy-isms” mostly falls flat on it’s face due to a lack of ideas, as demonstrated on the throwaway Ride Cowboy Ride, a lacklustre rendition of Homebound Train, and the cringey bar room chit-chat of Love For Sale.

“We feel like modern day cowboys. The cowboys of the old days would be bank robbers; they ‘d ride into town, rob the bank, go to a bar, drink the booze, steal the women, take the money and run. We kinda do the same thing!”

– Richie Sambora

“We feel like modern day cowboys.

The cowboys of the old days would be bank robbers; they ‘d ride into town, rob the bank, go to a bar, drink the booze, steal the women, take the money and run.

We kinda do the same thing!”

– Richie Sambora

Fool Me Once…

Sadly, New Jersey’s lack of consistency is the band’s own fault.

Back in 1985, they suffered severe burnout when they decided to try and follow their debut album with a rushed second effort whilst in the throes of an arduous world tour where they’d play six nights per week, ever week, all year round.

Their exhaustion showed on the album, and when they eventually took a much-needed rest they returned with that landmark third album.

Unfortunately they have made the same mistake here.

Perhaps caught off guard by the worldwide success of Slippery When Wet, the band set out on another extensive tour and drugs became a factor as some members – most notably bassist Alec Jon Such and guitarist Richie Sambora – struggled to adapt to their superstardom.

But, once again, they bowed to record company pressure about “striking while the iron is hot” and made a follow-up record when they weren’t in a position to do so.

“Yeah, that’s on us.

We needed a rest so bad, but we extended the Slippery tour and the label wanted us to cut a new record because things were going so well, you know?

We were young, and we were scared of it ending, because we’d seen how our industry can chew bands up and spit them out, so we decided to stay out on the road and do another album.

The record nearly broke us.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

“Yeah, that’s on us.

We needed a rest so bad, but we extended the Slippery tour and the label wanted us to cut a new record because things were going so well, you know?

We were young, and we were scared of it ending, because we’d seen how our industry can chew bands up and spit them out, so we decided to stay out on the road and do another album.

The record nearly broke us.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

Going Out In Style

In some ways, New Jersey represents a last hoorah for the 1980s hair metal scene.

It was the final hair metal record to achieve #1 on the coveted Billboard 200 chart before the entire genre was challenged by Guns N’ Roses’ grittier Appetite For Destruction, which was actually released prior to New Jersey but didn’t catch fire until 1989.

And by the time Bon Jovi returned with their next LP in 1992, Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind had stamped out any remaining mainstream interest in hair metal for good.

These cataclysmic shifts forced the band to adapt their sound in order to survive.

Bon Jovi: New Jersey

It may never escape the shadow of it’s predecessor, but New Jersey is still a solid record.

Bon Jovi’s huge riffs and relatable lyrics serve as a good indicator as to how they were able to survive the volatile rock landscape of the time, while most of their contemporaries faded into obscurity.

Such was their innate ability to pen hits, a handful of the songs here may have been considered “career highlights” for their Sunset Strip rivals, yet in the case of Bon Jovi they merely represented the latest in a long line of mega-selling singles which would eventually comprise one of the greatest “Greatest Hits” of them all.