Few bands in the melodic hard rock genre saw more success towards the end of the 1980s than Bon Jovi. After they broke through with their third album Slippery When Wet (released 18 August 1986) they embarked on gigantic world tour for the rest of the decade, only pausing to record follow-up album New Jersey (released 19 September 1988). The tour for that album was even larger than the previous one. It lasted 16 months, passed through over 22 countries, and counted nearly 250 shows. That does not count promotional appearances which were also numerous. Between 1986 and 1990, they basically lived in suitcases, not having much of a home life.
While their albums and tours were smashing successes, there was a human cost. As the New Jersey tour drew to a close, the band members were exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. Relationships within the band had also become strained. They needed a break from each other.
The latter point was particularly illustrated in a 1990 photo shoot that photographer Ross Halfin had set up involving the group’s two frontmen, vocalist Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora. The session lasted a few hours, during which the two never exchanged a word. They posed in silence with sunglasses on and blank expressions, mostly looking in different directions. Halfin was shocked by the tension between them, and it was easy to read a lot into how the resulting pictures reflected their lives at the time – tired of each other, tired of the band, burnt out, and looking in different directions both professionally and personally.
Following the last tour date in Mexico in February 1990, the band members just dispersed and went home individually. There was no tour wrap party or celebrations of any kind, and hardly any goodbyes were exchanged. They did not even have any plans for their future. They just desperately needed to get away, and even to consider a future at that point was too much.
This was the start of what turned out to be a 17-month hiatus. The itch to create more music came back earlier than that, but nobody was in a rush to bring the band back together yet. Instead, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora both started working on solo projects.
It speaks volumes that whereas Jon Bon Jovi totally separated himself from his band (and even management) when he made his album, Sambora went the opposite way. He invited his Bon Jovi bandmates Tico Torres (drums) and David Bryan (keyboards) to play on the album, and they were more than happy to join him. Who knows if he also intended to ask bass player Alec John Such to help out, but Such was recovering from a serious motorcycle accident and unable to play. Instead, Tony Levin was recruited on bass. This would form Sambora’s core band for the album. This could make it appear as if the divide within the band had left the singer on one side and the rest on the other, but this could be an oversimplification. It is possible that Torres and Bryan would have been happy to work with Jon as well if he’d only asked.
In any case, with three Bon Jovi members on board, people would be justified in wondering how different this project would sound from the mothership. As it turned out, when the Stranger In This Town album was released on 3 September 1991, it was very clearly not a Bon Jovi album. It showed a lot more musical diversity, featuring songs that displayed different styles and moods. The typical Bon Jovi stadium anthems with singalong choruses is not what this album is about. It features more inward-looking, retrospective, emotional (often sad) material, and very personal lyrical content. Sambora would later describe the album as 90% autobiographical.
“The songs on this record were written out of different emotions,” Sambora said on an interview CD included with the deluxe version of the album. “And when I write, I write from an emotion. It comes from something deep in here, and then I can colour that emption with music and lyrics.”
Over the course of the disc, we get to meet several versions of Sambora, including Sambora the bluesman. He has definitely embraced the blues on this album, although rarely in its purest form. We’re talking about blues-infused rock’n’roll, anthemic blues ballads, or blues mixed with soul. The title track is a good example of the latter.
Co-written with keyboard player David Bryan, Stranger In This Town is the album’s longest track at 6 minutes 15 seconds. It is tempting to think of Sambora as the one bringing the blues influences to the track, with Bryan bringing in the soul with his classic organ sound and the vocal arrangements that come in towards the end of the song in particular, but they both collaborated on all aspects of it. In any case, the song is as strong on the soul as it is on the blues, marrying the two styles very naturally.
Perhaps it is most correct to regard Stranger In This Town as a modern, urban blues track. It mixes Sambora’s natural penchant for a strong vocal melody with tasteful guitarwork and several layers going on in the background. The vocal delivery is strong and emotional, adapting to the song as needed as it moves through different stages. Sambora sings solidly, at times wailing, whispering, pleading, snarling, or just enticing the listener on.
The guitar solo halfway through the song is nothing less than exceptional, adding some musical storytelling to proceedings as well. He is clearly inspired by classic players like Eric Clapton, who actually agreed to appear on the album, providing the guitar solo to the song Mr. Bluesman.
Lyrically, the title track takes a lot of inspiration from Sambora’s almost continual life on the road over the years prior, where he would see towns come and go on an ongoing basis, never getting the time to see them or settle in. He was continually a stranger wherever he went – hardly getting a chance to know anywhere (or anyone) before it was time to move on.
Hey mister can you tell me what this world’s about
It might just help me out
I used to be a dreamer but my dreams have burned
You know how luck can turn
Sometimes it’s hard to find a friendly face
Feel like a stranger to the human race
It’s such a lonely, lonely place
I walk alone in the darkness of the city
Got no place to call home
I might be dyin’ but you can’t hear a sound
‘Cause midnight rain is comin’ down
I’m just a stranger, a stranger in this town
“It’s really hard to pick a favourite song from the album as it is very autobiographical,” Sambora said on MTV’s Rockline with Martha Quinn in 1991. ”I think about 90% of it was written out of my life experiences. Stranger In This Town definitely has to be one of my favourites. I always had a dream to play the blues on my own record. It came out of the feeling that I almost feel like a stranger in almost every town. I also think I am a stranger to many fans, because people know me as the guitar player in Bon Jovi, but they don’t know me as the complete artist.”
As Sambora alludes to in the final part of that comment, it was important for him to present a more personal musical statement with this album. He elaborated on this in a YouTube interview with Ina.fr: “In Bon Jovi, Jon is the focal point. When I would write with Jon for Bon Jovi, I had to write from his point of view. I couldn’t say anything lyrically within the song that Jon didn’t want to communicate, or he didn’t want to sing. […] When you’re working with five people in a band, everybody has input. It’s a very important thing. It’s a democracy. But when you’re doing a solo album, it’s all you. If people want to get to know me, they can listen to this record and they can know Richie Sambora. They can pick up a Bon Jovi record and see what I’m like in Bon Jovi, but if they want to know me musically – and also my reflections on my life after 32 years – they can listen to this record, and they will get to know me as a person.”
While the song contains autobiographical elements about feeling like a stranger everywhere, never finding home, there is another side to this. After coming home from the tour, Sambora noticed the boom in homelessness in his home area. This started weighing on his mind as he wrote the song, feeling that despite everything, he was the lucky one. Did he have the right to feel the way he did when he at least had a home and the means to settle where he wanted? As he wrote the song, the idea of how the city could treat some of its own people like a stranger became another side to it.
“Stranger In This Town is a song about myself,” Sambora said on the Deluxe CD interview, “because I’m being a stranger in almost every town every time I’m on the road. But also there’s an element of the homeless situation in there, which is something that almost is kind of a guilt thing that was happening with me. I wake up in the morning and I do have a nice home, and… well, I’m never there, but I do have a nice house! And being in New York and seeing the homeless situation and stuff like that… That was kind of the blues that I was singing about. Just a little bit of confusion, you know. And then I started to realise that everybody get the blues, and it has nothing to do with economics or money. It’s just… people have the blues. Robert Johnson said it with two sentences: “I love my baby. My baby she don’t love me.” That’s the blues. It has nothing to do with money, you know. So I found the blues, and that’s where it comes from.”
Everybody loves a winner ‘till the winners lose
And then it’s front page news
Nobody loves a loser when you’re down and out
You know there ain’t no doubt
I’m just a victim of circumstance
Please mister give me a helping hand
Brother won’t you understand
The album would chart at #36 on the Billboard 200, and #20 on the UK albums chart. The lead single Ballad of Youth reached a high of #63 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and #59 in the UK. The second single One Light Burning did not chart, while third single Stranger In This Town went to #38 on the US Mainstream rock charts.
Having the album hit the Top 20 in the UK and Top 40 in the US is obviously not bad, but compared to Sambora’s main band (and the performance of bandmate Jon Bon Jovi’s solo album – UK #2/US #3) it is definitely a more modest result. It should be kept in mind that the album wasn’t a high profile release, and depending on your view you could equally argue that it was a failure (as an album from a member of one of the world’s most popular bands) or a success (a low-profile release of introspective songs created with no thought of getting hits).
Sambora certainly regarded the album as a success. “The success of this project does not rely on units sold, I don’t think” he told Ina.fr. “What I tried to do here was not to follow a formula. It was an artistic endeavour where I diversified. It took me a little while to record this record because I was trying to grow as a writer, artist, and performer. There’s different facets of this record that I had to become accustomed to. I played many different and new styles with new guitars, and it took me a little while to become good at that, to progress, but it was a progression. I don’t think there’s anything detrimental about [not living up to Bon Jovi’s success]. I think the album was a needed growth, actually. That’s how I see it.”
Sambora did manage to fit in a short US tour of the album with all the album’s main players, including his Bon Jovi bandmates. The shows obviously attracted lots of Bon Jovi fans, who were happy to get some songs from that band as well, but crucially it gave the songs on the Stranger In This Town album a chance to show that they worked really well in a live setting as well.
When Bon Jovi eventually reunited for more albums and tours, the track Stranger in This Town would occasionally be performed by the band with Sambora as the frontman. Depending on the tour and night, sometimes Jon would be backing on guitar. There always seemed to be a fondness for the song within the band, with their audiences taking to it as well.
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