Bruce Foster confirms Hugh's ghost playing
 

There's a REALLY cool interview with Bruce Foster I read on Kissfaq.com. Bruce has had a lot of involvement with Richie over the years. I guess he co-wrote World? That's news to me. Anyway I copied and pasted the Bon Jovi part of the the interview:

KF: That would have been your "After The Show" album in 1977?



BF: Yes. So this was now '78, and Neil Bogart at that time I guess was already having his cancer problems. And the word I was getting, was squandering a lot of the money instead of putting it into promoting the artists. I guess he knew he was dying and he was going and spending his money in Las Vegas, gambling and stuff. It was a whole crash-and-burn thing that I unfortunately became a part of. The album and the label kind of went down in flames so I was back in the clubs trying to regroup and that's where we met Richie. And we put together Shark Frenzy, which is finally available on the Internet at this point. There's two albums, like 30 songs that we recorded in that year and a half. It's the very first things Richie ever wrote, played on in a studio and certainly sang lead on. So it's wonderful archival stuff and you can really hear how brilliant Richie was as a young player, you know he was 19 or 20 years old by that point. I think that his first work with Bon Jovi happened around '80 or '81. That's why Shark Frenzy really had such a short run because he had had one foot in Bon Jovi anyway and all of the sudden they started you know... (laughs) They got the album deal, they got everything happening. And Hugh McDonald, interestingly by the way, was playing bass on all of the Bon Jovi albums.

KF: That's right. Like we were talking earlier with KISS, he was playing in a ghost capacity.

BF: Right. He was always really the Bon Jovi bassist. And Alec [Jon Such] was the live bassist and the buddy that went to high school or whatever with Jon, and grew up in the neighborhood. Which was wonderful of Jon to keep it together like that. Alec was quite capable of playing all of the parts live but when it came down to creating in the studio, let's face it, at that point Hugh McDonald probably had six years of real studio playing under his belt. I think the second Bon Jovi album is the only one that Hugh does not play on. That's the only one where you'll hear Alec.

KF: "7800° Fahrenheit."



BF: Yeah. So Richie Sambora and I remained dear dear friends, went through a lot of projects together through the years. And 20 years ago, on his first [solo] album, we wrote a slew of songs, two of which ended up on the album, "One Light Burning" and "The Answer." On his new album, which comes out literally in a day or two, called "Aftermath Of The Lowdown," I co-wrote the final song on the album, which is called "World."

KF: Very cool. Is that an older song or a fresh composition?



BF: We started it when he was still with Heather [Locklear] about eight years ago. I remember we stayed up one night writing that until dawn. So that was the beginning of it. And he had been planning on making a solo album for all of this time but you know the resurrection of Bon Jovi was so powerful that there was no time for him to finish anything. So he had to put any solo career on hold. And let's face it, when he's with Bon Jovi at this point, who needs a solo career? (laughs) It really just took that long to come around to finally having the break to put out the album and go on a mini tour -- he's got a couple of months now to do that to promote everything, which he did not have with [his last solo album, 1998's] "Undiscovered Soul." I think he may have a really good shot on this. We continued about three or four months ago, kind of tweaked the song. I went out to L.A. and stayed a couple of days at Richie's and we just wrote and wrote, and worked on "World" and a couple of tunes that fell through the cracks. (laughs) You know, you're always hoping you're going to have like three things on [an album] but Richie was in good company. Bernie Taupin worked with him on one of the songs, I can't wait to hear that because Bernie Taupin is just one of the greatest lyricists of all time. So it's an exciting project. [The song] was our love letter to the world.

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Interesting stuff.

Aloha !

Yeah, it was pretty well known already anyway, but I'm still surprised he confirms it like that, so out of the blue, considering Jon's been very strict on keeping this a secret.

Actually, he had plenty of time to promote Undiscovered Soul, but never really managed to get a good deal touring wise. Certainly not in America, where a full blown club tour was planned and then cancelled. Hence the reason why there's only 2 dates in America as of yet.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

Thanks for posting this. Very interesting indeed.

Yeah, mostly common knowledge but I guess this is as close to an official confirmation as we are ever going to get.

What I find the most interesting is that it apparently took 8 years, of and on, to right all 2min24sec of 'World'. And it's still nothing too exciting, and is nowhere even close to the perfection that was 'The Answer'.


Andi

Actually he only said they started to write the song in 2004 and just continued like a few months before the album's production. So they certainly didn't work on it for 8 years but rather ressurected it after 8 years of lying in the vault.

I didn't know about this but thank you for the insight. very interesting indeed

It's still pretty crap, lets be honest. Its no 'The Answer'.


andi

World is too over produced for my liking! Would be much more effective if the song was simply recorded with Richie and his acoustic guitar with a gd bit of reverb :) maybe we will get to hear Richie do it this way? :D

So the album actually contains stuff from all the previous "I've done some writing for my solo record, it'll be out soon!"-sessions that came after numerous Bon Jovi albums? Maybe it wasn't so rushed after all, and thus neither was the new BJ album. Here's hoping.

Aloha !

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. He claimed that all songs were songs written after the last tour, which obviously isn't true. As for to the new Bon Jovi record, I very much doubt they've taken their time with this one. The tour's been planned already anyway so it needs to be finished in time.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan