Slippery When Wet

After two albums that sold only moderately, Bon Jovi hired Desmond Child, who had co-written the 1984 Kiss hit Heaven's on Fire. Child, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote in the basement of Sambora's mother's house in New Jersey. Child co-wrote You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer, Without Love and I'd Die for You. Jon and Sambora wrote most of the rest, and Jon wrote Wild in the Streets alone. The band wrote 30 songs and played them for teenagers from New Jersey and New York, building the running order from their opinions. Sambora described it as a marketing test.

Jon had heard Black 'n Blue's 1985 album Without Love, produced by Bruce Fairbairn, and was struck by how much better it sounded than his own band's records, so he called the producer. Fairbairn had previously made hits with Loverboy and Honeymoon Suite. Bob Rock engineered and mixed. The sessions took place at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, and the title came from the Vancouver strip clubs the band visited. Sambora said a woman descended from the ceiling on a pole and showered, and that the sight energized them for the whole project. The cover, a wet black garbage bag with the title traced in the water, replaced a photograph of a woman in a wet yellow T-shirt before release, because executives feared American stores would refuse to stock it. Most Japanese releases kept the original art.

The cut song Edge of a Broken Heart was written during the sessions but left off. Jon's note in a later box set said it "coulda, shoulda, woulda been on Slippery" and that he was sorry it was not.

Reception

The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed for eight weeks, Bon Jovi's first number one album in the United States. It spent 38 weeks in the top five and was Billboard's top-selling album of 1987. The RIAA certified it 15 times platinum and the BPI three times platinum in the United Kingdom. Three singles reached the Hot 100 top 10, and two of them reached number one.

Writing in The Village Voice in September 1987, Robert Christgau said that seven million teenagers could be wrong but their assent was not without a certain documentary satisfaction. Rolling Stone's Jimmy Guterman, in 1990, dismissed the band as bad fourth-generation metal. The Rock Hall ranks the album 44th in its Definitive 200.