Music history – History of Sorts

I know Bon Jovi has become more of a Country and Western band as of late, but when they started off, or rather when he started off, it was a proper Hard Rock band.

“Runaway” is the debut single by Bon Jovi. It was originally recorded in 1981 for the so-called “Power Station Demos” at the beginning of singer Jon Bon Jovi’s career, featuring the vocalist backed by session musicians.

Indeed, Bon Jovi wasn’t yet a band when Jon wrote “Runaway” with a little help from early collaborator George Karak. John Francis Bongiovi Jr. was already involved in the industry, though. He was a janitor at New York studio, The Power Station, where his cousin, Tony Bongiovi, had produced and/or engineered by artists such as Gloria Gaynor and Talking Heads. Tony was instrumental in assembling an all-star band, including bassist Hugh McDonald, drummer Frankie LaRocka, and Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band’s keyboardist Roy Bittan to back Jon on “Runaway.”

In 1983, local radio station WAPP 103.5FM “The Apple” had a contest, held in conjunction with St. John’s University, to search for the best unsigned band. After the song won the contest, it became a radio hit in the summer of 1983.

Its success had a domino effect. It led to the creation of Bon Jovi (the band) and to A&R man Derek Shulman (formerly of prog-rock legends Gentle Giant) brokering a deal to sign them to Mercury Records – who chose “Runaway” as the first single from Bon Jovi’s acclaimed self-titled debut album. Fittingly, this pivotal song also became the band’s first bona fide U.S. Top 40 hit.

SOURCE

‘Runaway’: The Story Behind Bon Jovi’s Pivotal Debut Hit

On this day, 30 years ago, June 27, 1994, Geffen Records and Aerosmith made history when “Head First” became the first major-label song made available for exclusive digital download. An unused cut from the Get a Grip session, it was part of a week-long promotion by CompuServe during which fans could download Aerosmith music from the net.

Download speeds were so slow at the time that it took between 60 and 90 minutes to download the track, but ten thousand CompuServe subscribers still made the effort to get the tune.

“If our fans are out there driving down that information superhighway,” said Steven Tyler at the time, “then we want to be playing at the truck stop. This is the future – so let’s get it going.

Offering a song for digital download was a tech experiment carried out both for its industry-altering potential and for the hell of it. It was the brainchild of three relatively new Geffen employees: Jim Griffin, Robert von Goeben, and Luke Wood. It was a marketing ploy, a flash of the future, an iceberg for a titanic industry, and 4.3 megabyte “Head First” was earlier used as the B-side for “Eat the Rich”.tes of riffs and double entendres, available as a WAV file.