Before he auditioned for Cinderella and before he started Skid Row, Dave “Snake” Sabo was a self-described jock from Sayreville, New Jersey, and his good friend was Jon Bon Jovi.
I was walking up the street to a friend’s house and Jon was playing basketball outside of his house. I was probably ten or eleven and he was two or three years older than me. He had this weird blue basketball and I was a basketball freak, and I think I challenged him to a game or something like that. And we became very good friends. Not long after that he started playing guitar and I noticed how cool it was.
I went to go see Kiss at Madison Square Garden with Jon and a bunch of other people. It was December 16, 1977, and I was thirteen. And it changed my life completely. Up until that point it was all sports, predominately baseball and basketball. After seeing that concert I knew my immediate and distant future would be in music.
So I started teaching myself guitar and I loved it immediately. Then shortly thereafter I let Jon know, “Yeah, I started to play guitar, too.” And Jon started teaching me a little. But he was still a beginner, so he suggested I go to his teacher, Al, who lived across the street diagonally from where Jon grew up. It progressed quickly and I had developed a huge fondness for all things hard rock and heavy metal. Jon and I became really close but we just had too different taste in music. He was leaning more toward Springsteen and Elton John and Southside Johnny, whereas I liked some of that stuff, too, but my taste went more toward the Aerosmiths and the Judas Priests of the world. So I had various bands and cover bands, and then he joined a band called the Rest. They ended up playing this big show at Freehold Raceway in New Jersey [in 1980], opening up for, I believe, Hall & Oates. Willie Nile was on the bill, too.
Yes, exactly. I think I was about fifteen or sixteen when I went to go see them and it blew my mind. And Jon would take me to their rehearsals at the Fast Lane in Asbury Park, so I was getting a great education as well. Then I was working as an assistant bar manager at a club called Willy’s [in Sayreville], which is now the Starland Ballroom, and Jon had written and recorded “Runaway” and sent it in to WAPP in New York for, like, a locals’ contest. And if you won the contest they would put your single in rotation. They put out an album [New York Rocks 1983] with all the tracks on it—Twisted Sister was on there with “Shoot ’Em Down.” And “Runaway” won the contest. So all of a sudden Jon had to put together a band to go play these shows that were part of the deal. He had David Bryan from a band he was in previously called Atlantic City Expressway. And he asked me, “Would you help me out?” “Yeah, of course, man.”
We used to rehearse during the day at a banquet hall where they used to have wedding receptions for all the Polish people from Sayreville. There was no bass player and I knew Alec John Such from a club band called Phantom’s Opera, who were one of the best club bands of that time. I contacted him and I was like, “Hey man, would you be into this?” And he said sure. He met Jon and Dave, got along great. Then Alec knew Tico, who at the time was playing with Franke and the Knockouts. So Tico came down and we got our band. I’m the little baby of the whole thing. I was nineteen when this whole thing was going down. We went out and played a bunch of shows.
I was still working at Willy’s as the assistant bar manager, and we had, like, a front lounge area where we would have bands come in and do some acoustic stuff, some covers. And one of the people that came in was Richie Sambora. He would do a bunch of covers, like Free and Bad Company, just really cool, soulful stuff. I was immediately enamored with this guy as a guitar player, as a singer and as a person. Alec knew Richie very, very well, so Richie was aware of what Alec was doing with Jon, and Alec had introduced Richie to Jon.
So after we were done with those six, seven, eight shows, Jon was like, “Okay, I’m gonna get serious now.” And it was very obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be a part of that band. First of all, Jon needed—and found—his Joe Perry to his Steven Tyler, or his Jimmy Page to his Robert Plant. I was not that guy. I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen or Randy Rhoads or whatever hotshot guitar player was out at the time. And Richie is more than capable of doing all that stuff, but he can sing amazingly, too. That’s something I definitely couldn’t do.
When Jon was like, “Okay, I’m going to have Richie play guitar in my band,” I wasn’t shocked or hurt or anything. I loved playing with the guys and they’re friends of mine. But it just wasn’t my thing. It was his thing. Jon knew exactly what he wanted and he found it in Richie. And you know what? It was absolutely the right thing to do. So certainly no bitterness. I’m grateful for the time that I had. I got to watch the whole building process of it and watch it go from, you know, a club band to a rec-ord deal to getting a major manager to making a record to going on tour to making another record to more tours to making the biggest record [1986’s Slippery When Wet] in a long, long time. All the while Jon and I remained dear friends. He was always like, “Man, I’ll do whatever I can for you. Come along for the ride. Put together something great or become a part of something great, I’ll help out any way I can.”
And after three years, maybe four years. I put together Skid Row. And he held true to his promise.