“He said, ‘No man that’s like Michael Jackson, man – we’re a rock band.’ I said, ‘Play it on the guitar and chug it.'”

At this point, it’s really difficult to know how songwriting for massively successful hit songs really works. You usually have several songwriting credits for one track and, in a lot of cases, you’ll have Max Martin’s name pop up. However, guys like Desmond Child still seemed to have done all of the heavy lifting themselves, creating some of the most successful songs in rock music. Of course, the one band that’s most often associated with his name is Bon Jovi. But there’s also Kiss, Ratt, Cher, and even some of Ricky Martin’s biggest hits.But in a recent interview on the Produce Like a Pro podcast, Desmond looked back on writing one of Bon Jovi’s biggest hits “You Give Love a Bad Name.” In fact, the song actually kind of existed before Bon Jovi set out to make massive success with it. Although released in July of 1986, it was actually that the world got an early taste of it in March of that same year. As he recalls, it all goes back to him getting in touch with songwriter colleague Jim Steinman about the upcoming Bonnie Tyler album (via Music Radar):

“He had heard a song of mine called ‘Lovers Again.’ It was just a piano/vocal demo and he decided to cut it on that record.”

But they needed more:

“He asked me to write a song, he said, ‘Write me a song that has the verse like Tina Turner, the b section like The Police and the chorus like Bruce Springsteen. Can you do that?’ I said, ‘Yes I can.’ And [he said], ‘One more thing – it has to have something to do with androgeny.’ That’s all he said.”

Well, that’s a lot of big names in one sentence. Desmond continued:

“I wrote this song called ‘If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man).'”

“She cut it and it was a big hit in Europe and I think it went all the way to the top in certain territories, but nobody did anything with that here in the United States. And so two years went by and I was kind of disappointed because I knew that was a hit chorus.”

Yeah, it was a bummer that the song didn’t really get more attention. Fortunately, Desmond brought the song to Richie Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi and they kind of reinvented it:

“So then my very first day that I met Bon Jovi, I had a title in my back pocket; ‘You Give Love A Bad Name.’ Then that’s when Jon looked up at me [and smiled]… he had a song he had written because called ‘Shot Through The Heart,’ so he threw that. So I said, ‘Ok, shot through the heart and you’re to blame, darling you give love a bad name’… so that was our first triple high-five with Richie Sambora.

“Then I said, ‘Look I have this song that I wrote for Bonnie Tyler, and I really think the chorus is a hit song.’ Bonnie Tyler kind of had that same [hums synth part from the Bonnie Tyler song] and it was a little bit like Billie Jean, or Eurythmics [‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This’] so I said, ‘Richie, play this’ [Child hums the guitar riff that would feature on ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’] and he said, ‘No man that’s like Michael Jackson, man – we’re a rock band.’ I said, ‘Play it on the guitar and chug it.'”

And we all know what happened after that, right? Well, the song still had some juice left in it. In the midst of the worldwide pandemic, Ava Max needed a new hit song. So her team of nine songwriters contacted Desmond to be the tenth songwriter:

“Cut to present day and Ava Max and her team of nine writers came up with a song called ‘Kings & Queens.’ So then they came to me and they asked for an interpolation license for ‘You Give Love a Bad Name.’ Because they thought they were different enough.

“I said, ‘No, you’ve got to listen to the original song – ‘If You Were a Woman And I Was a Man.’

“I don’t know if they’d ever heard the original, but that melody pulled them back to the original and that’s the song that was interpolated in Kings & Queens. And my name is on the song as a co-writer.”