“You ride into town with your gang, stealing money, drinking as much as you can and being gone before the law catches you”: How Bon Jovi hit the jackpot with Slippery When Wet, the album that turned them into the hottest hard rock band of the 80s

Bon Jovi posing for a photograph in 1986.

It’s July 1990 and hotter than hell in New York City. Jon Bon Jovi and I are perched on the first-floor veranda of his manager’s Manhattan offices, gazing out at the taxi cabs crisscrossing Central Park South. Jon explains this is the very spot he and the rest of Bon Jovi first met to plot the seeds of a success story none of them really believed possible. All except for Jon, of course.

“Back then we didn’t have the price of a cup of coffee between us,” he says. “You ask me has the success changed me since then, I say sure, man. It changes everybody.”