The Number Ones by Tom Breihan

Author:Tom Breihan [Breihan, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Bon Jovi—“You Give Love a Bad Name”

Released July 23, 1986

Hit #1 November 29, 1986

One-week reign

EVER SINCE THE LATE SIXTIES, HARD-ROCK BANDS HAVE BEEN using distortion-drenched guitar riffs and strangulated vocals to pack stadiums and sell millions of records. Until the mideighties, though, those bands only rarely made a dent in the pop charts. Heavy metal pioneers like Vanilla Fudge, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin all had top-10 hits in the late sixties and early seventies, when their swampy, bluesy riff-rock wasn’t terribly far removed from the psychedelic mainstream. Vanilla Fudge, for instance, got to #6 with their 1968 cover of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” a twist on a song that would’ve been familiar to radio listeners. But none of those groups ever reached #1. Led Zeppelin were one of the most popular bands in the world for a solid decade, but they only ever hit the top 10 once, when their early classic “Whole Lotta Love” climbed as high as #4 in 1970.

As heavy metal developed into its own genre, it moved away from the Hot 100. Acts like Black Sabbath and Ted Nugent could draw tens of thousands of fans in any American city, but they barely ever charted. The problem was the radio. Top-40 radio programmers, shooting for the widest-possible audiences, worried that power chords would chase away listeners. There was a huge audience for metal, but that audience, at least according to conventional wisdom, was overwhelmingly male and working class. Even on the fast-exploding album-oriented rock format, programmers leaned on relatively anonymous and inoffensive studio-rock acts like Boston and Kansas rather than heavier fare like Thin Lizzy or Blue Oyster Cult, neither of whom ever reached the top 10.

A few hard-rock singles reached #1 in the seventies, but those success stories were outliers. Michigan’s Grand Funk Railroad were already stadium-conquering commercial behemoths by the time they cleaned up their sound, hired producer Todd Rundgren, and landed a couple of chart-toppers with the 1973 party anthem “We’re an American Band” and with their 1974 cover of “The Loco-Motion,” the “Twist”-adjacent dance song that Carole King and Gerry Goffin had written for their babysitter a decade earlier. Canadian bands the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, neither of whom were ever especially heavy, made it to #1 with, respectively, 1970’s “American Woman” and 1974’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” two exceedingly catchy and horny tunes. In 1973, the Edgar Winter Group scored a freak chart-topper with their heavy blues-rock instrumental “Frankenstein.” These were the exceptions. Most of the seventies ragers that remain in classic-rock radio rotation today simply couldn’t get airplay when they were new. Since Billboard uses radio plays, as well as sales, to tabulate the Hot 100, the hesher heroes of the world were at a distinct disadvantage.

Even the most commercial hard-rock bands of the seventies and early eighties couldn’t crack the radio code. Aerosmith, shameless showmen who sold an Americanized version of Rolling Stones boogie-rock, had a couple of top-10 hits in their

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