Don't let anybody tell you any
different: Johnny Bon Jovi is one smart dude.
He called me in to add a few
keyboard parts but mainly get better
sounds for his excellent keyboardist,
the glamorous David R..,
oops, David Bryan that is.
I dunno, I never liked those 'fuzzy' ('buzzy?')
synth sounds, I guess itís because
I grew up on the Rascals, and they made
the Hammond B-3 almost a religion.
The B-3 has a rounded pipey kind of
sound, very grandiose if you
play it right and expecially if you bathe it in
reverb or echo, and when Rush
and Styx, and other 4 letter groups came out
with their Moogs and Oberheims,
I just missed the point of all that fuzz on
the keyboard sounds. David R..
had this Memory Moog which was
a cool synth, but gifted as
he was on classical piano (VERY, and he never let me
forget it,) he'd come upwith
these cheezy sounds on his synth; not good enough
for Johnny Who Would One Day
Be King.
INSERT: David B went on to write a hit Broadway play, MEMPHIS (go DB!)
and rumor is there's a new one in the works...>
It was back in
'85 or '86, a good year for me either way. Lance Quinn, the
guitar heavy, he played on Every
Disco Record Ever Made, AND flies a plane,
AND cooks on Rockabilly
(his
late set with Danny Gatton at the LoneStar
Cafe when it was down on 13th
Street and 5th Ave. rates with Steve
Winwood at Hammersmith in 1983
as my GuitarEnvyEpiphanies....I saw
Hendrix in Lewiston Me. in '67
and Cream at the Backbay Theater in Boston
the same year, but neither show
melted me that same way....) ANYWAY
Getting back to the subject!
(oh Lysergus, you fragmentor of consciousness &
continuity)...So Lance Quinn,
also a computer hacker, now had his own
studio in Philly, the Warehouse,
he and his partner Obie, the Junk Food
Obie, not Obie who used to work
for Spruce Spudstein. And in '85 or '86,
Lance was producing Bon Jovi's
2nd album and hired me to come down and
help. Then he did 's FLIP album, and I got to work with the
amazing T Lavitz, of the Dixie
Dregs....T is the perfect blend of incredible
fingers, devastating sense of
humor, and self abnegating neurosis, a true
charmer, and probably a mystic
knight of the roundtable or something. He
played his PPG, this advanced
German Wavetable Synthesizer, and I played
my Casio. I forget who played
Hammond, and who piano, though it probably
was Nils himself. Lofgren
is no slouch on the keys, having played all the
piano on Neil Young's After
the Goldrush masterpiece of 69 or 70. I know it
was that year, because I used
to f* a beautiful lithe Libyan artist to it, and
when I wasn't lost gazing into
her Egyptian charm on a necklace swinging
over my eyes as she straddled
me, I was wondering "Who is this Nils
Lofgren guy?"
At Lance Quinnís Warehouse Studio
in Philly in '85 or '86 I found out:
He's one of the nicest gymnasts
I'll know. Sincere. His voice has that rough
velvety quality that I find
so compelling; if a woman talks like that, I'll do
anything to keep her talking
so that I can just listen to her. "Oh, you say
you want a divorce, and I should
sign over the kids and all our property,
and agree to pay 110% of my
future earnings forever to your new lover?
Could you please repeat that,
just a little bit slower, I just LOVED the way
you got that husky oooooooo
into 'future'"...y'know what I mean?
Nils had that kinda voice, and
he was very generous creatively. He writes
great songs and sings fabulously.
SSOOOOO, I played a bit of stuff
on the 2nd Bon Jovi record, not that much,
to be honest I don't exactly
remember any of it. I'm sure if you tally it,
my man David Bryan played far more
parts than I did. And they were happy. And
then it was time to do the NEXT
album, and David B. calls me up and sez,
"Hey, can I come over and Sample
your sounds and share ideas for our next
record?" I said "No."I was very
protective of my sounds in those days,
when the custom programmed bell
that you could produce on your $2k
synthesizer meant the difference
between working on an album project for
2 or 3 weeks with a big name,
and WISHING you were working on an album
project for 2 or 3 weeks with
a big name. So then Johnny called, and we
made a deal for me to come out
to their hometown rehearsal studio where
they were putting it all together
for the album that was to become their
breakthrough, Slippery When
Wet, for $350 a day, ( a lot back then) to contribute ideas and help
with sounds. Cool. I remember
driving in muscle cars, eating pizza, getting
cruised by strange NJ babes;
I never knew their significance. Finally after
2 days of dingy rehearsing,
Johnny said to me, "Do you have any other
ideas for the tunes?î" I had
to say NO, because I wasn't that into the tunes
I heard, and I wasn't
big on coffee or stroking in those days either. He
surprised me by saying, "Well
then we won't be needing you any more." OK.*
The other thing I remember about
my Bon Jovi experience, other than the
incredible basso profundo of
their drummer Tico, and Richie Sambora's*
love of new age artist Liz Story,
was that when the record company took
us out to dinner, no one looked
at the menu: everyone just asked the waiter
to bring the most expensive
thing on the menu.
Later on, when we were
about to kick off the 3 year Bryan Adams Waking
Up the Neighbors tour, we did
a gig at 86 Street in Vancouver, a club
owned by Bruce Allen, Adam's
manager, (the Colonel Parker of The Great White.)
Johnny and David R&B. came
up onstage and we did Born To Be Wild. It was
really fun.