“Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi

"Bad Medicine" kicked the door open for New Jersey, Bon Jovi's fourth album, arriving on Mercury as its lead single in September 1988 and going all the way to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's third single to get there. Jon Bon Jovi wrote it with Richie Sambora and Desmond Child.

Bruce Fairbairn produced, Bob Rock engineered and mixed, and they build it huge: David Bryan's keyboards blaring, Sambora's electric guitar roaring, Alec John Such and Tico Torres pounding away, a gang of backing voices shouting the chorus back. Cash Box heard exactly that, harmonies stacked around a towering guitar sound. It also went top 10 in Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and it got two videos, the better-known one opening on a queue of kids waiting to get into the shoot.

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