THE VIDEO Bon Jovi, "In and Out of Love," 7800 ° Fahrenheit, 1985, Mercury/Polygram
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SAMPLE LYRIC "[In and out of love!] / Hear what I'm sayin' / [In and out of love] / it's the way we're playin' / [In and out of love] / too much is never enoooouuuuuugh / she's gonna get ya"
THE VERDICT School's out for summer! Even if I'm going to be in school for ever! (Sing it!) School's out for summer, and I'm celebrating for the next couple of weeks with some summertime metal favorites. I didn't set out to begin with Bon Jovi's arguably least well-known single "In and Out of Love," but it only took a few seconds of this video for the entire thing to come back to me.
This is really the last gasp of the unaldulterated, un-self-conscious Bon Jovi, before they become super famous and start shooting all their videos in LA. Yes people, you heard right, this video takes place in New Jersey. And not just anywhere in New Jersey, but on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights -- no longer merely part of the Jersey Shore, but now immortalized as THE Jersey Shore by MTV's Jersey Shore.
But this is 1985. The only guido roaming around in this video is Richie Sambora. Let's back up though, because the video -- a look at the ostensibly whirlwind touring lifestyle of Bon Jovi -- actually begins in England. We know this from a montage showing Big Ben and double-decker buses interspersed with Jon Bon Jovi showing off his multicolored Chuck Taylors and a marquee advertising a Bon Jovi concert. Plus in the original version of this video, you get some text at the bottom that says (and I quote leaving capitalization and punctuation intact) "tuesday...must be England."
We then see a plane, and the text changes to "wednesday... N.J., USA!" It literally appears across the bottom of the screen as if someone's typing it. It's hard to say if that effect is on purpose, or if that's just where the technology was in 1985.
Next thing, boom! Jon, Richie, and Alec John Such jump off a platform and immediately begin making the first in a series of goofy faces (seriously, the band are pulling faces so hard throughout this whole video it's ridiculous). Jon is wearing a long coat with pink satiny accents, leopard print blue jeans, a pile of bracelets, and a pile of scarves (actually for JBJ this is a pretty good outfit). Richie's got on black leather pants, white sneakers, a gold chain, and a loose black tank top. Eww. I think technically Tico Torres has more product in his hair though, so its hard to say who in the band wins the Jersey Shore award. No, it's easy, it's Richie.
They're playing on a stage set up on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey -- you can see a lot of businesses across the street behind the crowd, some of which are still there (notably Sand Tropez, which despite its cheesiness I think is such a cute name). The stage itself is wooden, with a string of lightbulbs hanging over the front. I'm assuming the ocean is behind the boys.
The camera pans down past Steaks Unlimited, and an attractive blond in a white dress striding past. She appears to be the main extra they've hired for this video, as she's in a whole other class of attractiveness compared to most of the women we see, and she reappears in three different segments of the video. She passes the band's limo as it pulls up, and all of the boys are staggered by her appearance, as well as that of another woman walking past wearing a hat (she looks like the 80s idea of how a "fashion model" would dress). Some craggy older dude (a manager?) leans over the door of the limo and intones, "24 hours, boys." (Weirdly this part of the video is preserved even when the titles at the bottom have been removed.)
So what do the boys spend their 24 hours doing, besides holding a concert on the boardwalk for a whole lot of screaming Bon Jovi fans? Well, they enjoy the many pleasures Seaside Heights has to offer. I haven't even seen a single episode of Jersey Shore, and I know that this means styling products, hot tubs, drinking, and getting in fights. This is twenty-plus years earlier though, so styling products are all we see here.
The band walks down the boardwalk, getting greeted by male fans in tiny 80s shorts. Jon seems like he isn't interested (or maybe he's just pissed that they all want to talk to Richie), but if he doesn't want to talk to fans, why is he wearing an outfit that's the fashion equivalent of saying "BON JOVI IS OVER HERE." He's wearing a sort of duster-length fringed blazer, a low-cut purple shirt, tight jeans, sunglasses, and the piece de resistance, a pilot's hat. Way to be inconspicuous.
And speaking of inconspicuous, once the male fans walk away, we can see what Richie's wearing -- white overalls with nothing underneath! Way to show off the tan, Richie. The Situation would be proud.
A bunch of very excited female fans then accost the boys. Jon pretends to run away, even though again, they've all run straight up to Richie (possibly thinking he's Eddie Van Halen, who also likes this sort of look). We see the band members talk with a couple more fans before we move on.
Next comes the most comic segment of the video. We see a bench with five people reading newspapers, holding them so their faces are obscured. A horde of kids run by holding 7800 ° Fahrenheit records. They all pause and look around in front of the bench, then keep running. Newspapers are dropped -- obviously, it's the band. But they quickly put them back up again as a priest holding a copy of their album walks by. Well, I think it's a priest. Weird hat, black jacket, maybe a white collar (though maybe I'm just seeing the shirt underneath? He is wearing jeans).
Then we get a non-band shot, sort of just a "look how cool these 80s teens are" segment. A guy and a girl are laying on the hood of a car driving down the street kissing (while the girl is holding a beach ball for some reason). A guy on a skateboard comes along next to them and slaps hands with the kissing guy. No one -- I repeat, no one -- from Bon Jovi gets involved with this.
This is followed by another humorous segment with Jon Bon Jovi. Jon is sitting on the beach strumming his guitar in a little beach chair, with a bag, a beach ball, and a jam box arrayed about him. A little girl comes and kicks sand on him, which he responds to by kicking sand back on her. The same sequence is repeated with a woman wearing yellow, and then with the blond from the beginning of the video. She's wearing a polka-dotted bikini, white sneakers, and big white scrunch socks, in case you forgot it's the 80s. She proceeds to not just kick sand, but to turn around and dig in the sand like a dog, spraying it all over Jon. He jumps up and chases her.
Finally, the rest of the band get some love. Or well, not that much, but they get their own segments in the video. Richie lays in a boat that says "Seaside Heights" on the side, strumming his guitar. It rocks gently back and forth -- and as the camera pulls out, we see this is because a girl is sitting next to it on the beach rocking it, he's not out to sea or anything.
We get another sequence with Jon, of him standing by a building and shooting women who walk by with a tiny squirt gun (wow, he must be feeling pretty confident). He squirts two and finds it funny, but then the hot blonde walks by, and Jon is overwhelmed. He squirts himself in the head.
Tico Torres gets the shortest segment. He's just lying on a pool float fully clothed, while a woman dives into the pool and swims beneath him. But that's more screentime than Alec, so I guess he should consider himself lucky.
Keyboardist David Bryan has just picked up a big load of food on the boardwalk when he is approached by what has to be the most average-looking woman I've ever seen in a metal video. She just walks up to him with an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and somehow this initiates an interaction. I guess things were different back when everyone smoked. After a moment's deliberation, he drops all his food on the ground to dig out a lighter and light her smoke. Poor choice, Dave. I know you're just the keyboard player, but you could do better. I mean, at the least you can believably tell girls you can introduce them to Jon. You probably should have eaten that food.
By the way, all of these segments are interspersed with segments of the band performing on the boardwalk. Richie and Alec strut around, Jon makes crazy poodle faces, and Tico and David pretty much stay behind their instruments. The crowd goes ballistic, and Jon leans over them a lot.
At the end, the boardwalk performance gets intercut with shots of a Japan Air Lines plane taking off. If you've got a version with the text at the bottom, you see "thursday... Tokyo Road!" If you don't, you still see footage of Richie playing outside for an Asian audience, and Jon singing holding up a Japanese flag with some writing on it. So they made it from London to Jersey to Tokyo in 48 hours. Whew!
It's weird because the whole video is them being rejected by or otherwise having difficult interactions with "hot" women, but the song itself is about groupies being rejected by or otherwise having difficult interactions with the band! I mean really -- "she's here to make my night complete / then I'm long gone I got another show." Doesn't exactly sound like they're getting sand kicked on them!
And what about all the weird little interjections and chatter in the background during the second half of the song, where it's just the title being repeated ad nauseam? A sampling: "Hey baby, wanna take a ride on the bus?" "Hey, how old are you anyway?" And who can forget the immortal capper: "With your mom!"
This song is so weird. Then again, so is this album -- you can really see how they haven't honed their sort of Bon Jovi-ness yet. It's like the title, 7800 ° Fahrenheit. You hear it, and you're like "WTF is that?" But, and this is a big but, if you actually see the marketing campaign, you get the tagline "The melting point of rock." It's actually kind of clever, no? But it's not just all there for you in the first place, and not everyone reads Circus, so in the end for 99% of the populace it's just a really weird album title.
Same thing with this video. It's adorable that they are actually in New Jersey instead of Los Angeles (as is clearly evidenced by all the KNAC paraphanelia clearly visible in all the videos from Slippery When Wet onward, not to mention the slight uptick in the hotness of the female fans featured in said videos), and all the humor is very Y&T of them. But on the other hand, pairing a cutesy video about them running around with their fans with a song about the fleeting pleasures of groupie sex... I've said it before to those latter-day Jersey boys Trixter: Either go all-out sleazy or keep it clean!
