It begins with a voice that sounds like it has already made up its mind. A lone acoustic guitar, a drumbeat like a horse at a gallop, and then Jon Bon Jovi singing in the first person as a man who knows the law is coming for him and has decided, anyway, to go down standing up. When “Blaze of Glory” reached number one in September 1990, it sounded like the biggest Bon Jovi song of the year — and it was, except for one thing that most listeners missed entirely. It was not a Bon Jovi song at all. It was Jon Bon Jovi on his own, without his band, singing as Billy the Kid for a Western sequel, on a record that started life as a favour for a friend and ended up winning a Golden Globe, earning an Oscar nomination, and giving its singer the only solo number one of his career. The story of “Blaze of Glory” is the story of a song written on a napkin at dinner, played on an acoustic guitar in the New Mexico desert, and turned into a full album by a rock star who had just spent two years on the road and was quietly wondering what fame had cost him.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Jon Bon Jovi stood in 1990. He was not a newcomer, and he was not in trouble. He was, by any measure, at the top of the world: his band Bon Jovi had spent the late 1980s becoming one of the biggest rock acts on the planet, with Slippery When Wet (1986) and New Jersey (1988) selling in the tens of millions, and the New Jersey tour had run for well over a year, leaving the band exhausted. Jon Bon Jovi, the frontman, was 28 years old, famous beyond anything he had imagined as a New Jersey kid, and — though he would not say so plainly for years — tired and uneasy about what that fame meant. Into that moment walked his friend Emilio Estevez, the actor, who was about to shoot Young Guns II, the sequel to the 1988 Western in which Estevez played the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid. Estevez wanted a Bon Jovi song for the film. Specifically, he wanted “Wanted Dead or Alive,” the band’s 1987 hit about life on the road, as its theme. Jon said no — not out of rudeness, but because he thought the lyrics did not fit. “Wanted Dead or Alive” was about a rock band touring America; Billy the Kid had never seen a million faces and rocked them all. So Jon offered something better: he would write a new song, one that actually belonged to the film’s world.
The song itself arrived the way the best ones often do: fast, almost embarrassingly fast, and in the least likely place. The famous version of the story, told by Kiefer Sutherland, who co-starred in the film, has Jon writing the song at dinner, scribbling lyrics on a napkin while the cast ate hamburgers, and finishing in about fifteen minutes — fast enough, Sutherland joked, to make a fellow songwriter feel stupid. Jon then played the rough song on an acoustic guitar for Estevez and the film’s screenwriter, John Fusco, on location in New Mexico — some accounts say in a trailer, some say sitting in the dirt — and Fusco took it to his co-producers on the spot. The decision was made then and there: “Blaze of Glory” would be the film’s theme song. What matters more than the exact furniture is what the song was. Jon wrote it in the voice of Billy the Kid, a young outlaw who knows he is hunted, who has done bad things and carries no regrets, and who wants only to meet his end on his feet. Years later, Jon admitted to Rolling Stone that the disguise was thinner than it looked: he was pretending it was Billy the Kid, he said, but it was really his own pain and distrust, and his own questions about celebrity — about being the big boy in the room now, and what that had cost. The outlaw and the rock star, it turned out, were singing about the same thing: a man who got famous young, who cannot go back, and who has decided to face whatever comes next without flinching.
The recording captures that double identity in sound, and it is worth describing carefully, because it does not sound like a Bon Jovi band record — and that is the point. “Blaze of Glory” was cut in the spring of 1990 at A&M Studios in Los Angeles, co-produced by Jon himself with Danny Kortchmar, the veteran producer and session man who had worked with Don Henley and Neil Young. There is no Richie Sambora, no Tico Torres, no David Bryan on the track. Instead, Jon assembled a cast of ringers: Jeff Beck, one of the greatest guitarists alive, playing the searing lead lines that give the song its edge; Kenny Aronoff on drums; Randy Jackson on bass; and Aldo Nova, who wrote the song’s main guitar riff. The track opens with that riff and with Jon’s voice over a galloping beat, then builds — slide guitar, jaw harp, a chorus that sounds like a whole posse singing along — into something bigger than a rock single and stranger than a movie theme. It is a power ballad, yes, but a dusty one: the arena-rock machinery of Bon Jovi the band, rebuilt with Western instruments and a Western story. The full album that grew out of it, also called Blaze of Glory and released on August 7, 1990, is best understood the same way. It is not quite a soundtrack — only the title track and “Billy Get Your Guns” are actually heard in the film, over the end credits — but a set of songs written for and inspired by Young Guns II, with guests including Elton John (duetting on “Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Livin'”) and Little Richard. Jon himself was emphatic that it was not, in his mind, a true solo album so much as ten songs written for a film. The charts, as it turned out, did not care about the distinction.
The single’s chart story was swift, and it is worth telling precisely, because the headline number hides a shorter run than most people remember. “Blaze of Glory” was released in July 1990 by Mercury Records (July 10 in the United States) as the lead single from the album, and it climbed fast. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated September 8, 1990, and stayed there for exactly one week — a single week at the top, but a week that made history for its singer, because it was, and remains, Jon Bon Jovi’s only number one single away from his band. It also topped Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart and the Cash Box Top 100, and it travelled: number one in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, number two in Austria, number three in Ireland, Norway and Sweden, number five in Switzerland, and number thirteen in Britain. On the year-end charts it finished at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 for 1990. The album around it did nearly as well, peaking at number three on the Billboard 200 and number two in Britain, and going double platinum in America; the single itself went platinum. A second single from the album, “Miracle,” reached the American Top 20. For a song that had started as a napkin at dinner, that is a remarkable return — and it is worth noting what the song did not do. It did not launch a solo career in the ordinary sense. Jon Bon Jovi went back to his band, and the song went with him, absorbed into the band’s live set and onto both of the band’s greatest-hits collections, 1994’s Cross Road and 2010’s Greatest Hits. It is a solo single that became, by adoption, a band classic.
The song’s afterlife began on the awards circuit, and it is there that its odd status — a rock song written for a Western — paid off most visibly. “Blaze of Glory” won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 1991, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 63rd Academy Awards, where Jon performed it live — the first time, by some accounts, he had ever performed the song publicly — losing to Stephen Sondheim’s “Sooner or Later” from Dick Tracy, performed by Madonna. It also won Favourite Pop/Rock Single at the American Music Awards and earned Grammy nominations for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance and for Best Song Written for Visual Media. The music video, directed by Wayne Isham and filmed at The Rectory near Moab, Utah, became part of the song’s legend in its own right: Jon, bare-chested in a leather vest, playing guitar on the edge of thousand-foot desert cliffs, with the crew and equipment flown in by helicopter, while a drive-in theatre screen behind him played clips from Young Guns II — and, at the end, caught fire. Jon even appears briefly in the film itself, in a cameo as a character who gets shot, a joke the song’s title makes almost too perfect. None of this made Young Guns II itself a classic — critics were lukewarm — but it made the song bigger than the film, which is the rarest fate for a movie theme: to outlive the movie entirely.
The song has kept travelling since, in ways that say something about how a solo detour becomes a permanent part of a band’s story. Bon Jovi the band have played “Blaze of Glory” in concert hundreds of times — one count puts it at over five hundred performances — and audiences treat it as theirs, not as a footnote to a film. It turns up on rock radio, on Western playlists, and in the strange afterlife of songs that everybody knows: covered, quoted, and recognised from its opening riff before a single word is sung. Part of that staying power is the double meaning Jon admitted to years later. Sung as Billy the Kid, it is a thrilling outlaw anthem. Sung as Jon Bon Jovi in 1990, it is something quieter and sadder: a young star, exhausted by a tour that never ended, looking at the price of being wanted, dead or alive, and deciding that if the end is coming, he will meet it standing. That is why the song works in rooms that have never seen Young Guns II. You do not need to know who Billy the Kid was to understand a man who knows he cannot outrun his reputation and chooses, anyway, not to run.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the napkin. Rock history is full of songs that took years, and full of songs that took an afternoon, and the afternoon ones are usually the ones people remember — because they sound like the moment they were written in, unpolished and certain. “Blaze of Glory” sounds like a man who had fifteen minutes, a guitar, and a story he understood better than he admitted. It sounds like the desert it was written in, and like the arena it was recorded for, at the same time. Jon Bon Jovi did not set out to make a solo record. He set out to do a friend a favour, said no to the obvious song, and wrote a better one instead — a song about an outlaw who would rather burn out bright than fade away quietly, sung by a rock star who was, at that exact moment, wondering whether fame was doing the same thing to him. The charts gave it one week at number one in America and number ones in three other countries. The Golden Globes gave it a trophy. The Oscars gave it a nomination and a live performance. And the napkin gave it the rest: proof that sometimes the fastest song you ever write is the one that tells the most truth, and that a solo flight, taken for the right reason, can carry you further than the band ever could — if only for one blaze of a week at the top.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment Jeff Beck’s guitar first cuts through the gallop and Jon’s voice rises to meet it. It is the sound of a rock star stepping out of his band’s shadow for one song — and of an outlaw, real or imagined, deciding that if he has to go, he will go in a blaze of glory.