Livin’ on a Prayer Turns 40: The Song Jon Bon Jovi Didn’t Like

Bon Jovi formed in 1983 in Sayreville, New Jersey. In early 1986, with two albums under their belt, the band headed to Vancouver, Canada, to make the third one at Little Mountain Sound studios with producer Bruce Fairbairn. They were there from January to July.

The album was called Slippery When Wet. The band wrote about 30 songs and, before making any decisions, played them for teenagers in New Jersey and New York. The final track list came together based on what those kids thought.

One of those songs was credited to Jon Bon Jovi, guitarist Richie Sambora and songwriter Desmond Child. It was called “Livin’ on a Prayer.” And Jon didn’t like it.

The first recording didn’t win him over. Sambora insisted the song was good and talked him into redoing it. They changed the bass line and the drum fills, and added a talk box: a device that sends the guitar’s sound through a tube into the player’s mouth, so the guitar sounds like it’s talking.

The main riff is Sambora playing through that talk box. And the new bass line was laid down by Hugh McDonald, a session player who didn’t show up in the credits: those went to Alec John Such, the band’s official bassist. McDonald didn’t become an official member of Bon Jovi until 2016.

Tommy and Gina

The song tells the story of Tommy and Gina, a working-class couple. He’s lost his job on the docks because of a strike; she waits tables at a diner. Jon has said he wrote it as a response to the Ronald Reagan years.

There’s some truth to Gina: she was partly inspired by Maria Vidal, Desmond Child’s girlfriend at the time, who was working as a waitress. Her coworkers called her Gina because she looked like Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida. The couple turned up again in other Bon Jovi songs: “99 in the Shade” (1988) and “It’s My Life,” the band’s big hit of 2000.

The song saves one trick for the end: on the last chorus the song moves up to a higher key, from E minor to G minor. That leap is what makes the finale sound even bigger.

No. 1 for four weeks

“Livin’ on a Prayer” came out as a single in October 1986, the second from Slippery When Wet after “You Give Love a Bad Name.” The video was directed by Wayne Isham and shot on September 17, 1986, at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles: it opens in black and white with the band rehearsing, switches to color for the concert and, on the final chorus, Jon flies over the crowd strapped into a harness.

The album went all the way to the top too: Slippery When Wet spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and Billboard named it the best-selling album of 1987 in the US. The song, for its part, is certified Diamond there, and on February 1, 2023, its video passed 1 billion views on YouTube.

Forty years on, it’s a different band. Sambora left Bon Jovi in 2013, and in 2022 Jon had surgery on his vocal cords, which kept them off the road. They came back on July 7, 2026, with the Forever Tour, which kicked off at Madison Square Garden in New York and moved on to Edinburgh, Dublin and London. It was their first tour since the surgery.

Bon Jovi is part of Leveling Radio’s playlist. And this song, the one the band’s own singer wanted to leave off the album, is still one of the most recognizable rock songs of the ’80s.