Photo by Koh Hasebe
Bon Jovi Reader Poll: Your Top 5
With Bon Jovi about to plant a flag at Madison Square Garden for nine nights on the Forever Tour — their first proper run since Jon's vocal-cord surgery and the recovery he laid bare in Thank You, Goodnight — we asked you to settle the only argument that matters: the essential Bon Jovi song. Forty years of arena anthems, power ballads, and buried epics were on the table, and you did not simply rubber-stamp the ones still in heavy rotation. Counting down to the one you crowned:
5. "Wild Is the Wind"
Opening the five is the New Jersey deep cut that starts on a flamenco guitar figure before easing into one of the more searching lyrics in the catalog, Jon owning up to a marriage he can't be present for while the road keeps calling. It sat buried on side two of a record stacked with top-ten singles, which is exactly why the people who love it love it this much.
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4. "Dry County"
The longest song Bon Jovi ever committed to a studio album at 9:52, "Dry County" is Jon's heartland epic about a boomtown gone bust once the wells run dry, written after a 1991 motorcycle trip through Texas where he sat in rural bars listening to people describe the money vanishing. It never got a U.S. single release, reached number nine in the UK in a trimmed-down edit, and carries what a lot of the faithful consider Sambora's finest recorded solo. A staple of these lists that would never sniff a greatest-hits set.
3. "Livin' on a Prayer"
The most famous song the band ever recorded, sitting here at number three. Sambora's talk box, the key change that lifts the final chorus into the stratosphere, Tommy and Gina hanging on to what they've got — it hit number one in 1987 and never really left the culture. Placing it this far down the list is the kind of call only a room full of diehards makes.
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2. "Runaway"
The one that started it, one spot shy of the top. Jon recorded "Runaway" before there was really a band, leaning on session players and Roy Bittan's synth line, then shopped it to a New York radio station that slotted it onto a local homegrown compilation. The response there is what got Mercury's attention. It peaked at number 39, modest on paper, and it's the origin point for everything that followed.
1. "Wanted Dead or Alive"
Your winner. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora built the Slippery When Wet standout around a 12-string acoustic and a cowboy conceit that could have curdled into camp in lesser hands, then let Sambora's solo do the heavy lifting on the back half. It climbed to number seven on the Hot 100 in 1987 and has outlasted its chart run to become the song the band reaches for when they want to strip everything down to two guitars and a spotlight.
