This is a 10 page interview of which i will be posting only the first page. if you would like to read more click on this link: http://www.totalguitar.co.uk/article...=3363&type=ART

Bon Jovi

They're back and better than ever - but what keeps the Bon Jovi juggernaught rolling?
There were doubts whether they'd ever return. After a phenomenally successful Greatest Hits package and subsequent album, These Days, all seemed disturbingly quiet on the Bon Jovi front. Jon seemed content carving out a niche as an actor, Richie busied himself with his bluesy solo forays, keysman David Bryan worked on his solo album, while drummer Tico Torres switched drumsticks and cymbals for a paintbrush and oils. But this was all an outsider's view.

To a band member it was an entirely different story as affable bassist Hugh McDonald confirms: "It's very interesting. The public, or the press, sees the band finishing up and going its separate ways. Then all of sudden the band's broken up and Richie hates Jon, Jon's gonna be a movie star... All this stuff comes out and none of it's true."

As it turned out, getting back together and turning on the patented Sambora/Bon Jovi songwriting machine was as easy as putting on a pair of torn blue jeans. Richie Sambora, the man behind Bon Jovi's infectious riffs and searing solos explains: "I finished my solo tour and we had a meeting in Dallas and Jon came in with 30 songs he'd written. A lot of which weren't in the band style - not saying they weren't good material, because they were very good - but they weren't songs that were going to creep into the band consciousness."

So there was only one solution, the path the Jovi boys ended up taking, "We could have made a record out of those 30 songs right then and there, and Jon said: 'Do you wanna do that?' If we needed to get a record out there quickly I would have had no qualms whatsoever about making a record out of them. But I said: 'Why don't we sit down and try and write together?'" And that's exactly what they did, although neither party knew quite what to expect. "We started to write and the good stuff started coming and we wrote another 30 songs together and so we came up with this record. We walked into the studio feeling pretty damn good because we had basically covered everything we had to say."