“It was amazing for me, because Elton was my first concert ever when I was 14. “Right before the guest artists would leave, Jon wanted to make sure I’d get shots of him with them,” Weiss told Rolling Stone in September during a conversation about his book The Decade That Rocked. Photographer Mark Weiss was there to document it all. Jeff Beck plays guitar on a bunch of tracks, including the searing solo on “Blaze of Glory.” Even Little Richard got involved, duetting with Bon Jovi on the barroom-piano romp “You Really Got Me Now.” Elton John sings and plays piano on “Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Livin’,” inspired by a line in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. Instead, he petitioned the album-cover heroes of his youth to guest on the sessions, held at A&M Studios in Los Angeles during the spring of 1990. Or at least without any core members of his band. You get a record deal, you achieve some sort of success, and you get to that crossroad of ‘What is this? What does it mean?’ And you either go forward like we did or you fall apart,” he says.īlaze of Glory then was Jon Bon Jovi working through that existential crossroads alone. “It was a crossroads in the band’s career, which is a stepping stone for any band. At the end of their two-year Jersey Syndicate Tour, which took the group across the U.S., the U.K., South America, and even the former Soviet Union for the infamous Moscow Music Peace Festival, Bon Jovi were exhausted and introspective. Jon Bon Jovi had become a globally recognized face, and his bandmates were gingerly navigating fame, both his and their own. While Bon Jovi the band had monumental success with 1986’s Slippery When Wet and its follow-up New Jersey two years later, the group wasn’t entirely certain of its future at the end of the Eighties. “I was pretending that it was Billy the Kid, but it was my pain and distrust and things that I wasn’t brave enough to write in the first person,” Bon Jovi told Rolling Stone earlier this year during an interview for his new album 2020. “It was questioning the celebrity and now you’re the big boy in the room - all that stuff.” Ostensibly a record about the betrayal of Billy the Kid by his onetime friend, the lawman Pat Garrett, Blaze of Glory - which turned 30 this summer - was more autobiographical and cathartic for Bon Jovi than it may suggest. Originally tapped to simply write the film’s theme song, “Blaze of Glory,” Bon Jovi was inspired by the chance to work outside of the confines of his band, and soon a whole album took shape. He and Sambora even wore cowboy hats onstage.īut nowhere did Jon Bon Jovi embrace his inner gunslinger more than on Blaze of Glory, his 1990 solo debut that doubled as the soundtrack to that year’s box-office shoot-’em-up Young Guns II.
He returned to the Wild West theme, with cowriters Richie Sambora and Holly Knight, for a pair of songs (“Ride Cowboy Ride,” “Stick to Your Guns”) on 1988’s New Jersey too. And it cemented singer Jon Bon Jovi as a rock-star cowboy in the process. Bon Jovi rode their 1987 single “Wanted Dead or Alive” - with its power-ballad metaphor about a wandering outlaw, his steel horse, and a loaded six-string - into Eighties jukebox history.
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