Released in 2008, Accelerate was R.E.M.’s most aggressive album in years, and it was nice to hear one of the best rock bands of all-time so furious and amped-up again, but not a ton of its songs stuck beyond the rush of the sound itself.
And someone better call Dashboard Confessional about the bridge: “Your clothes are still scattered all over our room / This whole place still smells like your cheap perfume.” “Baby I want you, like the roses want the rain!” Jon Bon Jovi shrieks, for what won’t be the last instance of rose imagery on 1992’s Keep the Faith, and he follows it with an even more emo killer: “You know I need you / Like a poet needs the pain!” And if you thought it couldn’t get even more skyward from there, in crashes the chorus built on the same chord progression as “Don’t Stop Believin’” (to which Bon Jovi winks, maybe unknowingly, “I still believe” at one point).
Here’s an expensive-sounding ode to celebrating one’s haggardness, and, of course, it comes with a hook. Fittingly, Jon compares himself to a pair of torn blue jeans, even if the kind his band conjures up is a pre-ripped $100 pair from Urban Outfitters. So “I like the bed I’m sleeping in / It’s just like me, it’s broken in” implores fans to relate to the perception that their idols grow up with them. Crush was the perfect definition of a comeback album, and Bon Jovi’s world-weary, Springsteen-esque self-consciousness couldn’t allow him to avoid including a track defending why they’re still here. It starts at 100 miles an hour and works up from there.In which Jon Bon Jovi beats Jay-Z to “30 Something” by six years or so. “It’s not your typical opening act where they go up there and you don’t really know or care who they are. And Jon is definitely up for the occasion. I knew I finally had the band.”īon Jovi may believe he has the band, but that didn’t stop him from recruiting guest musicians such as Aldo Nova (synthesizer programming and background vocals} and ex- Rainbow drummer Chuck Burgi (drums on “Runaway”).īefore the release of Bon Jovi the band toured with Eddie Money and opened for ZZ Top at Madison Square Garden, but their current tour with Germany’s Scorpions–which will have them opening this Wednesday’s (May 2) concert at the Coliseum–is undoubtedly their most important yet. “I was playing one night at a big radio concert,” recalls Jon, “and this guy in the audience says to me as I walk off the stage, ‘I’m gonna be your guitar player.’ At first I just laughed at him, but once I heard him play that was it. The last member to join, lead guitarist Richie Sambora, had the strangest introduction to the band.
Not bad for a debut by a kid from New Jersey.īefore forming Bon Jovi in March of last year, Jon (his real last name is Bongiovi he’s second cousin to producer Tony Bongiovi) gigged on the New York/Philly/Jersey club circuit, playing in everything from a 10-piece horn band to a four-piece Knack-like pop band.īon Jovi’s keyboardist David Rushbaum had played with Jon in clubs before the two were even legally old enough to get into such places and was followed in the band by bassist Alec John Such and drummer Tico “The Hit Man” Torres, formerly of Frankie & the Knockouts. At press time, the album Bon Jovi was #43 with a bullet on Billboard‘s Top 200, and the single “Runaway” #37 with a bullet.
But now that we’re out in support of a hit record it’s a lot nicer–and a lot more luxurious than six guys in a station wagon.” “Before the album came out we’d play anywhere with anyone at any time,” says Jon Bon Jovi. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, APRIL 27, 1984