Richie Sambora & Orianthi, aka RSO

How they overcame the odds to record their debut album.

There are three things Richie Sambora wants you to know. Firstly, he doesn’t regret leaving Bon Jovi. Secondly, he has no plans to rejoin Bon Jovi. And thirdly, there’s absolutely nothing weird about the fact that he’s recorded a version of Sonny & Cher’s cornball duet from 1968 I Got You Babe with his new musical partner and current paramour, Australian guitarist Orianthi – despite the fact that he and Cher had what is commonly known as a ‘thing’ in the late 80s.

“We’re talking about thirty years ago, you understand,” says Sambora, a man who can badabing with the best of ’em. “Old history. It came on the radio when were in the car and I was like: ‘Fuck, I love that song.’ So we just laid it down. I said to Ori: ‘You should put on a fuckin’ black wig and I’ll put on a little porn moustache, we’ll make a video.’”

The video never materialised, but the song appears on Sambora and Orianthi’s debut album, Radio Free America, released under the see-whatthey-did-there handle RSO. It’s a confidently scattershot album that tries on every hat it can find: hard rock, modern pop, blues, country, even a fair approximation of vintage soul.

What’s more interesting is the combination of people who made it. He’s the former guitarist with one of the world’s biggest hard rock bands. A man who walked out on a job he’d held down for 31 years, in the process dissolving one of the most successful songwriting partnerships ever. She’s a child prodigy turned superstar sidewoman, the go-to six-string hotshot for everyone from Alice Cooper to Michael Jackson. Maybe that I Got You Babe cover wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. Photoshop out the black wig and porn moustache and add in some bluesy, blazing guitar heroics and you’ve got Sonny & Cher all over again.

“We had a lot of mutual friends, so it was like our paths were going to cross at some point in our lives,” says Orianthi. “We’ve been together for four years, and writing pretty much as long. This was never not going to happen.”

RSO is the point where two different but equally eventful lives converge. As Sambora is the senior partner here – in terms of age, at least – we’ll cover his story first.

You probably already know the details, but just in case you don’t, here’s a recap. Sambora

Both were prodigies on the guitar from an early age, both have played with the biggest names in rock and both have survived tragedy. Richie Sambora and Orianthi – collectively known as

RSO – tell Classic Rock how they overcame the odds to record their debut album.

was born in working-class New Jersey in 1959, a school-age athlete until rock’n’roll got in the way. An early band he was in, Mercy, recorded an album for Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label that never saw the light of day (“It was already waning as a company. I didn’t take it personally”). He auditioned unsuccessfully for Kiss (he says he didn’t want the job anyway). Then he met the man who would change his life: Jon Bon Jovi.

“Success wasn’t an overnight thing, because we didn’t stop,” he says now. “Even once [1986’s multimillion selling] Slippery When Wet hit, we worked our nuts off to write the next record: ‘We gotta kick this one’s ass.’ We had three number ones on that record…” – meaning the follow-up, 1988’s only-slightly-less-successful New Jersey – “…so that worked out well.”

Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora were the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of hard rock – Jon the hard-nosed businessman calling the shots, Richie the amiable reprobate pouring them. Together they steered the band through the wide-open seas of the 1980s and the choppy waters of the 1990s and beyond. And then, suddenly and without warning, in 2013 Sambora quit.

“I did a lot of the jobs in that band,” he says. “Writing, playing, performing, songwriting, producing – basically, Jon and I did everything. We were there every step of the way, that’s why those records were so good. We followed through every step of the way. At the end I wasn’t following through all the way. So I went where I wanted to go and so did he. That’s what happened. And guess what? We’re grown-ups. It’s all good.”

If he sounds evasive, it’s probably just the

Jersey boy in him holding back. But there were other things going on in his life too. In 2007 he checked into rehab to deal with an alcohol problem. In 2011 he was back in again. In between, he was arrested for driving under the influence. And then there was an addiction to painkillers to overcome.

“Look, I don’t want to go into it in too much depth,” he says, before going into it in a fair amount of depth. “Right before a leg of one of our tours, I was going through a pretty strange period. My dad was dying of cancer, I was getting a divorce and becoming a single dad, and then I broke my shoulder in three places.”

There were, as he puts it, “twenty-eight stadiums on the barbie”. His doctors put him on medication – rightly so, he says, “cos without those pain pills I would never have got through it”. That’s when his problems started.

“I was extremely high on painkillers. Now, before that, I’ve stopped everything in my life by myself. So one day I go: ‘Okay, I’m done, I’m not gonna do this shit no more.’ And I’m shaking like a leaf. I didn’t realise I was coming down, right? I thought I had Parkinson’s. That’s how naïve

I am, fuckin’ idiot. But I took a couple of days, sat it out, went back out on the road with Bon Jovi and finished that tour. And that was it.”

Do you ever look at Prince or Tom Petty and think: “That could have been me?”

“No, no, my brother. I wasn’t even close to that. Are you kiddin’ me? I look around and I see how people are getting all fucked up and doin’ whatever they’re doin’, and I was only doin’ a little bit. And I don’t do that shit no more. I don’t fancy it. It doesn’t wear well with me.”

And how are you now?

“Have ya seen me lately? I’m the happiest camper on the planet. Hey, listen, ain’t nobody throwing me a pity parade. Mr Sambora is fiiiiiine, as well as he ever was in his life. I weigh what I weighed in high school right now, y’know.”

It wasn’t long after he left Bon Jovi that Sambora met the woman who today shares his life, his house and the record he has made. He was on holiday in Hawaii when Alice Cooper called to see if he wanted to join him on stage at a show on the island that night. “I go: ‘I’m hanging out with my daughter and her friends. They’re teenagers. You think they wanna be around me? Are you kidding? Let’s go!’”

When he turned up at the venue, he noticed that Alice had a blonde guitarist in his band. “I went: ‘Who’s that?’ And he goes: ‘It’s Orianthi. She played with Michael Jackson.’ And I go: ‘Riiiiight…’”

“I’m the happiest camper on the planet. Ain’t nobody throwing

me a pity parade.”

Richie Sambora

Now seems like as good a time as any to properly introduce the ‘O’ in ‘RSO’. Orianthi Panagaris was born in Adelaide in 1985, the year before Bon Jovi released Slippery When Wet. Given that particular time frame, it’s hardly surprising when she admits she’s not entirely au fait with the deeper corners of her other half’s ex-band’s catalogue.

“I loved Livin’ On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name, Bad Medicine. Those songs were massive everywhere,” she says, her accent located somewhere in the mid-Pacific between South Australia and California. “But I can’t say I was a huge, huge fan of every single thing they’d done.”

Instead, she’d grown up with her dad’s record collection. While her school friends were listening to New Kids On The Block or the Backstreet Boys, she’d be cranking out Santana, Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers and Cream. As she puts it: “I grew up in a time warp.”

She was a precocious child. At three she was playing the piano. At six she’d moved on to the acoustic guitar. By 10 she was studying classical music theory. All that changed a year later, when she saw Santana playing live. “I heard Carlos playing Europa and thought: ‘Classical is boring. That’s what I want to do – it’s incredible.’ He put such heart and soul into his every note.”

The guitar hero became an early, if distant, mentor. Orianthi had recorded her first album, a precocious mix of instrumental originals and Santana covers, in her mid-teens. She mailed it unsolicited to Santana’s office, and received an unexpected email back from Carlos’s brother, Jorge. “I love your record,” it said. “We’re playing it in the offices.”

They weren’t empty words. When Santana returned to Australia, he invited the now-18-yearold Orianthi to join him on stage. She’d already opened for another guitar icon, Steve Vai, four years earlier, but this was something different.

She stayed on stage with Carlos for 45 minutes, jamming. “I knew every single one of his songs.

I’m such a fan.”

What happened next reads like a Hollywood movie waiting to be made: a growing buzz on MySpace, followed by a deal with music industry heavyweight Jimmy Iovine. By the time she was 21 or 22, Orianthi was living in Los Angeles and making her first album for a major label.

“Before that came out, I got a call from Michael Jackson. He’d been watching my videos on YouTube.” She pauses. “Actually, before that it was Prince who called me.”

It’s worth pausing the movie here to focus on that one, seemingly tossed-off detail. Prince called her on February 5, 2007. She knows this because it was the day after his iconic performance at the Super Bowl half-time show. Understandably, she didn’t believe it was him at first. When he finally convinced her that he was Prince, he invited her to join him and Sheila E at the Record Plant studios in Los Angeles.

“We ended up jamming for four or five hours,” she recalls. “I played guitar, he played bass, Sheila played drums. I was going: ‘Oh my God, this isn’t reality.’”

Prince wanted to produce her albums, but record label politics – apparently of the most insane kind

– prevented it. They stayed in touch down the years, speaking every few months and occasionally meeting up. Orianthi last saw him six months before he died. “He lived for music,” she says sadly. “He was like an alien. He wasn’t from this planet.”

Her collaboration with Prince may have fallen through, but there was another megastar waiting in the wings. In early 2009, Michael Jackson’s camp contacted her to ask her to sign up for what they said would be his swansong shows, a 21-date residency at London’s O2 Arena. In the end, Jackson died from cardiac arrest before the shows were due to take place.

As with Prince, she enthuses about the time she spent in the King Of Pop’s company. Ask her what he was like and she goes into overdrive.

“He was such an amazing artist,” she says. “He was so passionate about every little part of the band. Working with him for four months opened my mind a lot. It made me a better performer, a better artist. I learned so much.”

Yeah. But what was he really like?

“Michael was eccentric, sure,” she says. “But he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived, along with Prince. You can’t expect these people to be normal. But it was such a shock when he died. Like: ‘What the hell?’”

One key figure in her life who, ironically, is most definitely normal is Alice Cooper. The two met when she was playing guitar on American

Idol, a show created by her then-manager Simon Fuller. She would go on to be part of Alice’s band for four years. He appears on the RSO album, on a track called Together On The Outside, having recorded his vocals for it in – where else? – Castle Dracula in Transylvania.

It was Alice who unwittingly played Cupid between Orianthi and Sambora on that night in Hawaii. Like contestants in some parallel universe version of Love Island, they hit it off right away. When they returned to LA, Sambora called up his new friend and invited her over to jam. Within two weeks they were dating. Soon after, they started working on the songs that would eventually make up Radio Free America. Love – and Alice Cooper – works in mysterious ways.

That was four and a half years ago. The length of time it has taken for the album to appear is apparently no reflection on the pair’s work rate. In an unlikely but reassuringly domestic move, they converted Sambora’s kitchen into a studio, where they proceeded to record far more songs than the 15 that appear on the album. “It was like a commune, for weeks at a time,” says Sambora. “The house is like a church of music these days.”

There were other distractions. The pair toured Australia together in 2014, and Orianthi appeared on the debut album by the Alice Cooper/Johnny Depp supergroup Hollywood Vampires. More recently, for Sambora there was the small matter of Bon Jovi’s temporary reunion at this year’s Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony – an event that seemed both disgustingly amicable and surprisingly well oiled.

“Look, we were the hardest working band out there, and when you’ve done something for thirty-one years you slip back into it,” he says with a what’re-ya-gonna-make-of-it? shrug.

Do you envisage ever rejoining the band at any point?

“There’s no talk of it whatsoever,” comes the reply. “Why would there be? Just think about it. They’re on the road, they’re doin’ what they’re doin’ – maybe that’s his new band, that’s his new sound, and that’s fine. When I quit, I didn’t plan on returning. But you never say never. You never know what’s gonna happen, especially in this business.”

Do you regret quitting?

“For me it was the right decision. For a lot of other people it wasn’t. Obviously, the fans are a little wonky about it… then obviously the band is wonky. I feel very proud of everything that went down with that band, and we certainly made a lot of people happy all over the world. But, you know, it’s a chapter. A very long one. [Laughs] A thirtyone-year chapter, man.”

Sambora can afford to be blasé. His and Orianthi’s Radio Free America is unlikely to unseat Slippery When Wet or New Jersey in the list of BiggestSelling Rock Albums In History, but it’s clearly a passion project for the two of them.

“The songs on this record are only a fraction of what we’re sitting on,” says Orianthi. “We just went with the way we were feeling when we were in the room together.”

It’s a flint-hearted cynic who doesn’t wish these young(ish) lovebirds well. Somewhere out there, a woman in a black wig and a man with a porn-star moustache are looking on and smiling.

“I got a call from Michael Jackson. He’d

been watching my videos on YouTube.”