A young Jersey kid had a dream of making it big on the stage. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Bon Jovi – self-titled

Released January 23, 1984 via Mercury Records

To sum up a long story in a few words – young Jon Bongiovi got his musical start in the ’70’s in a variety of bands. By 1980 he was looking to take the next step and record music. As luck would have it, Jon’s cousin Tony Bongiovi owned the Power Station studio in New York. Tony had worked extensively as producer and engineer on Motown recordings and was also the night engineer on the grueling Electric Ladyland sessions with Jimi Hendrix. Jon worked at the studio and also used it in off-time to work on his own demos.

The album was eventually assembled from a series of demos recorded with a variety of musicians. Jon did put together a band before tracking the actual record – he brought in his old friend David Rashbaum (later to go by David Bryan) on keyboards, Tico Torres on drums and Alec John Such on bass. The guitar spot was initially occupied by Dave Sabo, who wasn’t looking to be a full-time member of the band. He was replaced by Richie Sambora. Sabo would form Skid Row years later, a band Jon helped get going.

This band would comprise the group Bon Jovi for the next several years and through the band’s first wave of massive popularity. But they were not the only musicians involved on this recording. The song Runaway was recorded a few years prior with a different group of players. I won’t run down the whole history of the song because that would take forever, but one person involved was Hugh McDonald, who would eventually wind up as a full-fledged member of Bon Jovi.

But wait, there’s more – there were other people also in on the album recording beyond Runaway. Among those was Aldo Nova, noteworthy for his solo career and continued relationship with Jon Bon Jovi beyond the session work on this debut record.

With all that out of the way, the album was recorded at the Power Station with Tony Bongiovi and Lance Quinn producing. JBJ and various band members have the writing credits, with a few additional people here and there. One song in particular had a totally different writer, which we’ll get to.

The album clocks in with nine songs at a 38:33 runtime. Several deluxe reissues exist, including a 40^th anniversary edition released earlier in the year. Bonus tracks abound on those releases and only most of them are different versions of Runaway.

Runaway

Up first is the song that had already been recorded with other musicians and made the rounds through radio stations and promo copies. It wound up as the lead single from the album and cracked the Top 40, the first of many for Bon Jovi.

It’s easy to hear why this one wound up getting some play – it’s a perfectly crafted rock song. The keyboard runs the song and all the other instruments join in to move this sleek vehicle forward. It’s all smooth, polished and on the rails and very few could hook up a song like this. Bon Jovi and this album are off to a kick ass start. Grade: S

Roulette

We get a fairly heavy track here on this one of many co-writes between JBJ and Sambora. Even with the riffing, Bon Jovi retains the very melodic frills that keep their stuff in the pop-rock realm. A pretty nice jam here. Grade: A-

She Don’t Know Me

This is, as I understand it, the only song in the Bon Jovi catalog that is totally attributed to an outside writer. As far as stuff that made an album, anyway. And it’s a bit of a story – the song was composed by Mark Avsec, who was writing for a disco group called LaFlavour. Disco was out, so the band changed their name and Avsec got to work crafting more rock-based stuff for them. Sadly, the band chose the name Fair Warning and the record label got rid of the band when Van Halen released an album of the same name. Bon Jovi was on the same label so they wound up with the song.

This one is a bit too saccharine for my tastes, but it’s not a horrible song or anything. I think it could use a bit more power behind it, but it’s not out of Bon Jovi’s wheelhouse either. Grade: C+

Shot Through The Heart

Here we have the song that gets confused with the band’s later hit You Give Love A Bad Name, as this song bears the first part of that song’s chorus. And while this song isn’t the mega-hit the later one would be, this is a quality rock track by any measure. Very nice tempo and melody here, it indicates that Bon Jovi was perhaps a bit further along in development than the early material gets credit for. Grade: B+

Love Lies

This song is absolute ’80’s here, with some higher register vocals that Bon Jovi didn’t do a ton of. It’s a pretty good song and something a hair outside the Bon Jovi lexicon. Grade: B

Breakout

The keyboard melody might pierce your eardrums in the open, but the song itself is a pretty basic mid-paced rocker. It does have a nice bit of force behind it to push it a bit over the edge. Grade: B-

Burning For Love

Here the keyboard offers up a rhythm that sounds like it came from an old racing video game, though the game would have come long after the song. A fairly heavy guitar riff through this recount of being taken by desire. Nothing leaps out here but still a quality composition. Grade: B

Come Back

This runs right on the rails with a pretty nice tempo and riff. It’s doesn’t venture out of its box but it’s a pretty nice box so the cat will keep playing in it. Grade: B

Get Ready

The closer gets aggressive in a way Bon Jovi wouldn’t do a ton of, though there is a fair bit of melody and boogie thrown in to keep things a bit lighter. The song is all about a gal getting ready for JBJ to take her on a night on the town, but it could just as easily be interpreted as “get ready, this band is on the way.” They most certainly were. Grade: B

For first albums, bands could do a whole lot worse than Bon Jovi. The album hit the Billboard charts at 43 and offered up a handful of decently performing singles, with Runaway being the signature track. This record would earn two US platinum certifications and several international gold records, though in fairness a lot of that may have piled up after the band hit superstardom a few years later.

The album offers up a nice collection of songs, very strong for a debut. While it’s very “on the rails” and perhaps pales in some form to the stuff to come from Bon Jovi, it’s overall a nice listening experience with one song to rule them all and a strong collection of stuff to back that.

Album Grade: B+

Bon Jovi is an album that even Bon Jovi themselves have left behind, but this debut is worth more than dismissal in the wake of music that would follow it. This is a quality offering that showcases more of what would make Bon Jovi than perhaps JBJ would like to admit. And while this album was not a world-conquering beast like the two that would come in the later ’80’s, this one is certainly a worthy entry on the list of 1984 music.