It was 1988 and MTV was chugging along strongly with bands like Bon Jovi and the album New Jersey, the follow-up to the massively successful Slippery When Wet. This album, featuring such seminal hits as “Lay Your Hands On Me,” “Bad Medicine,” “Born To Be My Baby” and “I’ll Be There For You.” Like its predecessor, New Jersey was produced by Bruce Fairbairn, went to Number One and sold 10 million copies. For 2014, New Jersey has been reissued as a double-CD Deluxe Edition, which includes the remastered original album, three bonus B-sides, a 32-page booklet, and a second CD filled with 13 Sons Of Beaches demos, remixed exclusively for this project. A Super Deluxe Edition includes a DVD of a 1988 documentary made about the album and tour.
Richie Sambora explores his fretboard with Torres’ doubling bass drum feed behind him on “Blood On Blood,” possibly the best tune. Sambora also manages some solid acoustic moments on “Ride Cowboy Ride” and “Stick To You Guns.” Yes, we get the insipid cowboy imagery the band never could let go of, plus you can just feel the double harmonies and big bombastic coming on the horizon of almost every tune of the original twelve, but the formula displayed across the first disc is perfect and had been perfected by the time this band came off its extremely popular Slippery When Wet album and tour.
Extras on the first disc include a mediocre cover of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town,” plus demos for “Homebound Train” (with a cool elongated slide and harmonica opening), “Wild Is The Wind,” and “Stick To Your Guns.” We get a false start into a David Bryan organ assault on “Full Moon High,” and Sambora cooking around “Love Hurts” with a more “growly” vocal. According to the set’s booklet, Bon Jovi presented Mercury records with a double album’s worth of stuff for what would become New Jersey. It wasn’t until after a listening party where Bon Jovi invited 50 fans in to help them narrow down the selection to the final 12 songs that the double album idea was jettisoned.
It’s very cool to hear some of these extra songs, some unreleased, some redone, and some recorded by others, like “Does Anybody Really Fall In Love Anymore,” which Cher cut. There is something to be said for an album that sold so many copies, spawned so many hits and sounds fresh a quarter of a century later. If you love hard rock from the 80s, Bon Jovi’s New Jersey is a classic with plenty of extras for music fans and completists, alike.
~ Ralph Greco, Jr.
