Bon Jovi – ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’

• Writers: Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Desmond Child
• Producer: Bruce Fairbairn
• Recorded: Spring 1986 at Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia
• Released: Fall 1986
• Players:
  Jon Bon Jovi — vocals, guitar
  Richie Sambora — guitar, vocals
  Alec John Such — bass, vocals
  David Bryan — keyboards
  Tico Torres — drums
• Album: Slippery When Wet (Mercury, 1986)
• Also On:
  Cross Road (Mercury, 1994)
  One Wild Night: Live 1985-2001 (Mercury, 2001)
  This Left Feels Right (Island, 2003)
• The first single from Bon Jovi‘s third album, “You Give Love A Bad Name” was a breakthrough success, reaching Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 and Number 14 on the U.K. pop chart.
• The song was one of the first co-written by group leader Jon Bon Jovi and singer-guitarist Richie Sambora with song doctor Desmond Child, who said he initially “got a lot of resistance. Jon didn’t want to try those new rhythms. He thought it sounded too Michael Jackson. It took a tremendous leap of faith for him to let that in.”
• Sambora remembered that “Jon, Desmond Child, and I were sitting there talking, and the title was the first thing that came up. Jon said something like, ‘How about “You Give Love A Bad Name?”‘ and I said, ‘Ah-hah!’ I think the riff came in next. We wrote the chorus first with the riff, put in the verses and that was it. It took one day.”
• Producer Bruce Fairbairn recalled that Bon Jovi knew the song would be a hit from the time the trio wrote it: “I remember Jon picking me up at the hotel. (He) said, ‘Man, last night we nailed this song that I think is a smash.’ The title sounded great right off the bat. When the band learned it and we listened to it, it had a real good feeling because of the changes and the chorus. It had that accessible (feel) to it. We worked it from there, building up the big vocal parts that made the song special.”
• The Slippery When Wet album was similarly successful, spending a total of 15 weeks at Number One on the Billboard 200 and reaching Number Six in the U.K.
• The video for “You Give Love A Bad Name” won the best stage performance trophy at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards.

FAST FORWARD:

• The band parted company with bassist Alec John Such in 1994.
• All of the members of Bon Jovi have carved out careers outside the band, including solo albums and, in Jon Bon Jovi’s case, acting in films such as Moonlight And Valentino and U-571.
• Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora have an ownership position with the Philadelphia Soul, a team in the Arena Football League.
• In 2006 the group earned a country Number One hit with “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” with singer Jennifer Nettles from the country group Sugarland.

The band’s most recent album, Lost Highway, landed at the top of the charts, with over 291,000 units sold in its first week. It includes a duet with country star LeAnn Rimes, “Til We Ain’t Strangers Anymore.”