Livin’ on a Prayer! Desmond Child on writing bombastic hits for Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and more
‘During Covid,” says Desmond Child dreamily, “the whole city of Chicago opened their windows at the same time and sang Livin’ on a Prayer.” The veteran songwriter breaks into a proud grin. “It gave them hope and community. Jon Bon Jovi always tells me, ‘We didn’t just write a song – we wrote something special.’” And their something special has now notched up a billion plays on Spotify.
Child also co-wrote Bad Medicine and You Give Love a Bad Name among many others with Bon Jovi. He penned Dude (Looks Like a Lady) with Aerosmith, Poison with Alice Cooper and even Livin’ la Vida Loca for Ricky Martin (which was then quoted in Sisqó’s hit Thong Song, earning Child another credit). The hitmaker to the stars has also worked with Meat Loaf, Cher, Barbra Streisand and Katy Perry. He has scored 80 Billboard hits over five decades and his songs have racked up 500m sales – five times more than Coldplay. But he is keen to point out that, of the 3,500 he’s written – a remarkable stat in itself – “half of them were rubbish. But I try to finish every song I write. You try to give it your best and so far people haven’t asked for their money back.”
Child, a stylish, youthful 69-year-old who lives in Nashville with his husband Curtis, insists that there isn’t a magic formula for globe-conquering anthems. “Diane Warren writes songs like they’re confessionals about her own life,” he explains, referring to his closest peer, a good friend. “Then she’ll give them to Toni Braxton or Céline Dion. In my case, I’m fitting the songs on the person like a suit. I try to meet them before we go into a writing session, taking down everything they say. I ask the right questions, they tell me their story and sometimes they might start crying. But can you imagine anyone but Aerosmith singing Dude (Looks Like a Lady) or anyone but Joan Jett singing I Hate Myself for Loving You? It just goes with who they are.”
Formula or not, he does have trademarks – notably those titles. “I learned early on that art is the tension of opposites,” he explains, as Curtis brings us coffee and croissants in this fancy London hotel. “So You Give Love a Bad Name. I Hate Myself for Loving You. Dude (Looks Like a Lady). The title sucks you in and people think, ‘I wanna hear this.’” Another tip – picked up from Bob Crewe, the co-writer of Lady Marmalade who coached him in the 1970s – is that “rhymes need to be as clean as possible. So you can’t rhyme ‘name’ with ‘games’. It has to be ‘game’. Because when people are singing along in a stadium, they need to anticipate the next rhyme. If it’s clean, they’ll remember it – and by the second chorus they’re singing along.”
Child’s latest project is not a song but a book: a page-turner of an autobiography full of the remarkable stories behind his songs. Livin’ on a Prayer: Big Songs Big Life features encounters with stars such as Mickey Rourke and Michael Jackson, brushes with music industry homophobia, and colourful incidents such as his mother getting shot or his aunt having an affair with Fidel Castro. “David Ritz, who I wrote it with, said, ‘Your book is gonna be 1,000 pages long.’” He laughs.
Born John Charles Barrett in Gainesville, Florida, he spent his earliest years in revolutionary Cuba, his mother’s homeland. They lived comfortably in Havana and he describes Elena Casals, his mother, as a “bohemian it girl”. But following a move to Miami, he grew up in poverty in the city’s Liberty projects. By then, Casals, an aspiring songwriter who’d had him after an affair, had left her American husband and taken her three children. She kept the identity of Child’s real father, a Hungarian, from him until he was 18.
Child’s mother could not accept his sexuality and at the age of 13 he was given testosterone shots in an attempt to make him more “manly”. “Even years later,” he says, “it took her a long time to acknowledge that Curtis was my husband.” But he appreciates the sacrifices she made to feed them. “Selling mops or wigs, flipping burgers – she had 15 different business cards with different aliases.”
While friends and cousins “fell into the cycle of incarceration”, Child’s path opened up after he saw Janis Joplin performing at a racetrack. “She was singing and getting drunker,” he says “until finally she was lying flat on the ground and had to be carried off. But there was something magical about her. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ I had nothing to lose. I couldn’t sing a note but I turned myself into a singer.”
In 1975, after changing his name, he formed Desmond Child & Rouge with fellow Latino singers Maria Vidal (an early girlfriend, before he accepted his sexuality), Myriam Valle and Diana Grasselli, appearing on Saturday Night Live and achieving moderate success for their funky, sophisticated pop. However, destiny called after a gig in Trax, a club in New York’s Greenwich Village. “George Harrison was in the audience,” says Child, “and Paul Stanley popped backstage.” Stanley is the singer of tongue-lolling glam legends Kiss. “Nobody knew what Kiss looked like then without the makeup, but he wanted to make friends and said, ‘Why don’t we try writing a song together?’ Lightning struck. I Was Made for Loving You is one of the biggest-selling songs I’ve ever had. I