Songoftheday 5/8/17 - Wake up in the morning and I raise my weary head, I've got an old coat for a pillow and the earth was last night's bed...
from the album Blaze Of Glory (1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 14
Today's song of the day come from hard rock singer Jon Bon Jovi, whose namesake band had closed the 1980's out with their massive New Jersey album, scoring five top ten hits with "Living In Sin", "Lay Your Hands On Me", "Born To Be My Baby", and two #1 singles in "Bad Medicine" and "I'll Be There For You". After a lengthy tour, the band took a needed break, which eventually found Jon recording his own solo album to accompany the "Brat Pack Western" film Young Guns II starring friend Emilio Estevez. Riffing on his own band's country-tinged song "Wanted Dead Or Alive", Bon Jovi created the Blaze Of Glory album, with the similar-sounding title track as the first single, which he produced with Danny Kortchmar (Don Henley's frequent collaborator), while guitar legend Jeff Beck filled in where Richie Sambora normally would've played. Jon even made a cameo in the movie as a prisoner in town...
"Blaze Of Glory" became Jon's fifth #1 pop hit (and his first solo) in September of 1990. The song also spent a week atop Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the single was huge, helped by the movie's success overseas; it topped the chart in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and reached the top ten in Austria (#2), Finland (#2), Sweden (#3), Ireland (#3), Norway (#3), and Switzerland (#5), and peaked at #13 in the UK and #16 in Germany. The song won an American Music Award for Pop/Rock single in 1991, and also landed a Golden Globe the year before, but lost out on an Oscar for Best Song to Madonna's "Sooner Or Later" from Dick Tracy.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the alternate version of the video which cuts out the movie pieces...
Jon performed "Blaze Of Glory" at the Academy Awards ceremony, a first for a hard rock act, bringing the whole Bon Jovi clan with him..
...and finally, on tour with Bon Jovi in 1995 in England...
Up tomorrow: the king of Latin freestyle dance music requires some romance.
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