The hit-filled record remains a defining moment in rock music
On this day 40 years ago, Bon Jovi released their masterpiece ‘Slippery When Wet.’
The band’s third studio album was the record that transformed the New Jersey rockers from a promising young band into international superstars. After 1985’s ‘7800° Fahrenheit’ produced only modest results, Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora approached the next album knowing the band needed stronger songs and a more distinctive sound. The pair began writing in early 1986, working at the Sambora family home and later rehearsing at Century Studios in Sayreville, New Jersey.
They also collaborated with songwriter Desmond Child, whose contributions helped produce two of the album’s defining songs, “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Famously, the band invited local teenagers into the rehearsal space to help judge potential songs, providing an informal test audience for the material. Bon Jovi then traveled to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, where producer Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock helped give the record its enormous, radio-ready sound. The combination of Sambora’s muscular guitar work and talk box, David Bryan’s keyboards, Tico Torres’ powerful drums and Jon Bon Jovi’s soaring vocals created a polished blend of hard rock, pop hooks and arena-sized choruses that was ideally suited to the mid-1980s.
The reaction was extraordinary, even if critics were initially far less enthusiastic than fans. Some contemporary rock critics dismissed Bon Jovi as overly commercial and lightweight—an October 1986 Los Angeles Times report noted the disconnect between hostile reviews and the band’s rapidly growing audience—but listeners embraced ‘Slippery When Wet’ on a massive scale. “You Give Love a Bad Name” became Bon Jovi’s first No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, followed by the even bigger “Livin’ on a Prayer,” while “Wanted Dead or Alive” reached No. 7. The album itself spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was Billboard’s top album of 1987.
Its success was international as well, reaching No. 1 in countries including Canada and Australia, and No. 6 in the United Kingdom. Bon Jovi’s official retrospective credits the album with approximately 28 million copies sold worldwide, making it the biggest-selling album of the band’s career. Just as importantly, its success changed Bon Jovi’s status almost overnight: a group that had still been working as a support act around the album’s release soon became a major arena headliner, with its videos dominating MTV and its songs becoming fixtures of rock radio.
Forty years later, ‘Slippery When Wet’ remains one of the defining rock albums of the 1980s and one of the records most responsible for pushing melodic hard rock and so-called hair metal into the pop mainstream. Its formula—heavy guitars balanced by keyboards, enormous sing-along choruses, glossy production, relatable lyrics and charismatic music videos—became a commercial blueprint that countless hard-rock bands pursued during the remainder of the decade. The album was a breakthrough not only for Bon Jovi, but for hair metal as a whole, helping establish the genre as mainstream popular music rather than a niche branch of heavy rock.
More importantly, its biggest songs have survived far beyond the era that created them. “Wanted Dead or Alive” remains one of the band’s signature road anthems, “You Give Love a Bad Name” is an enduring rock-radio staple, and “Livin’ on a Prayer” has become a multigenerational anthem whose chorus can still inspire mass sing-alongs four decades later. ‘Slippery When Wet’ did more than make Bon Jovi famous—it helped define the sound, image and commercial possibilities of mainstream rock in the late 1980s, and 40 years after its release, its combination of hard-rock muscle and irresistible pop songwriting remains the standard against which much of the era’s arena rock is measured.
