Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi

Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi's third album, landed on August 18, 1986, on Mercury in North America and Vertigo everywhere else, and it's the record that took the big hair and the big guitars and made them fit snugly on pop radio. Bruce Fairbairn produced it at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, with sessions running from January to July 1986.

Jon Bon Jovi sings every chorus like it's the last one on earth, Richie Sambora's guitar squeals and wails, David Bryan's keyboards pad out the arena-sized sound, and Alec John Such and Tico Torres keep the engine pounding. "You Give Love a Bad Name" is a snarling stomp, "Livin' on a Prayer" is the fist-in-the-air singalong, and "Wanted Dead or Alive" trades the glitter for a darker, dustier strut. That trio made it the first glam metal album to put 3 singles in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.

It spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, finished as Billboard's top-selling album of 1987, and has been certified 15 times platinum, still the band's biggest seller. The Slippery When Wet Tour kept them on the road from July 1986 to October 1987.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.