Bon Jovi wanted its third album to be massive. The band sought help from songwriter Desmond Child, producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock.
Then band members went to a New Jersey pizza parlor and got input from teenagers.
“The kids would hang out there. We were right around the block, rehearsing and writing…” Jon Bon Jovi said in the band’s official archive. “Finally, we went over there and invited them all back into the studio with us. So, there were 30 kids who really picked the material for this album.”
Guitarist Richie Sambora compared it to a marketing test.
“They came in and said, ‘Yeah, we like this one. This one gets through and that one doesn’t,’” Sambora said as quoted by Destroyer of Harmony.
The result was Slippery When Wet, which became Bon Jovi’s first No. 1 album on Oct. 25, 1986, and spent eight nonconsecutive weeks on top of the Billboard 200.
“That was our Thriller,” Jon told the Arizona Republic in 2013 as quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock. “That was our Born in the U.S.A. That was our defining record, the one that they’ll write about when we’re dead.”
But before it was released, the album’s cover needed work.
The band was recording in Vancouver when Jon was sent the proposed artwork from the band’s label. It was a picture of a woman wearing a wet yellow tank top, cropped from her belly button to her lips, and surrounded by a pink border.
Jon was “appalled,” according to an interview with Absolute Radio as quoted Ultimate Classic Rock.
“It’s career suicide if you put this album cover out. And they said, ‘Well, we’ve printed up half a million of them,’” he said.
Jon grabbed photographer Mark Weiss, sprayed water on a garbage bag and wrote the album’s title with his fingers.
“There’s your album cover!” he told the label, though the original cover was released in Japan and other territories, according to Ultimate Classic Rock.
No matter the packaging, Slippery When Wet turned Bon Jovi into megastars. It spawned three top 10 singles including two that topped the Billboard Hot 100: “You Give Love a Bad Name”, the first song they wrote with Child, and “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
Slippery When Wet was the top-selling album of 1987 and has been certified platinum 15 times in the U.S.
“And it’s very hard to live up to that success, no matter who you are. But I have no problem looking back on ‘Livin’ on a Prayer,’ ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ and ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and saying, “Yeah, they’re still a part of the set. They’re still a part of the patchwork of pop culture,”’ Jon told the Arizona Republic.
