Hurley was, at least initially, going out with a friend of Bon Jovi’s – but they shared a history class. “I was doing nothing to help my studies along,” Bon Jovi recalled later. “It started with just trying to look over her shoulder at test answers, to making small talk.” Eventually, however, something clicked with these two youthful outsiders, after Bon Jovi’s friend left to join the Navy.

Things weren’t always easy. As Bon Jovi began his relentless pursuit of rock fame, they briefly split up four years into the relationship. But eventually, “I went to her mom’s house, and did the whole, you know: ‘You’ve got to come with me. I wanna be back together [thing],” Bon Jovi told VH1’s Behind the Music. “And she fell for it.”

Into the late ’80s, Bon Jovi would release two blockbuster albums back-to-back – 1986’s Slippery When Wet and 1988’s New Jersey, both of which went No. 1 and sold close to a combined 50 million copies. The world was in the palm of their hands. But, Bon Jovi said, something was still missing: “I had the No. 1 album, the No. 1 single and I opened up the window of the hotel and there was us on the billboard out my window: Literally, right there, celebrating the No. 1 this and that,” he said. “And I thought: ‘Wow, this is a high. What do I do to get higher?’”

The 27-year-old decided to fly to Las Vegas, during a one-day break on the New Jersey tour and secretly marry Hurley. They didn’t even have rings. As it turned out, leaving his band, security and management in the dark led to some stinging questions about the wisdom of Bon Jovi’s decision.

They wondered what his female fan base would think, and how his family would react. “We did it for us and didn’t give a damn,” Bon Jovi told VH1. “I got a lot of heat from it, between the band, my parents, Doc [McGhee, Bon Jovi’s manager]. Everybody was pissed off. It took me a couple of days before I realized that I don’t give a shit what anybody thinks.”

Eventually, those concerns faded, as Bon Jovi continued their impressive run of hits. Meanwhile, Bon Jovi and Hurley brought four children into the world – including a future football player – and the couple remains together to this day.

The Most Shocking Rock Star Fashion Reinventions

David Bowie

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David Bowie

The king of rock-star fashion reinventions, David Bowie adopted a new persona on nearly every album, each with an accompanying musical facelift. From shaggy mod-rocker to androgynous alien rock star to coked-out zombie aristocrat to MTV-ready new wave playboy, Bowie introduced different characters for each new musical terrain, from the raucous glam rock of Ziggy Stardust to the plastic soul of Young Americans to the suave disco-pop of Let’s Dance. These days, it’s impossible to hear the crunchy guitar riff to “Rebel Rebel” without envisioning Bowie’s redheaded urban wastoid Halloween Jack or the propulsive drum groove of “Modern Love” without seeing a besuited lounge lizard leading a packed arena in a rapturous singalong.

The Beatles moptops to hippies

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The Beatles

From matching suits and mop-tops to Canadian tuxedos and chest-length beards, the Beatles were fashion vanguards at every phase of their career. But none of their transformations was more radical than the one they underwent in early 1967, when they traded their snazzy suits for the day-glo, floral-embroidered military uniforms featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In one fell swoop, the Fab Four abandoned the final vestiges of conservative early ’60s fashion and embraced the burgeoning hippie movement, heralding the Summer of Love with their radical new album and aesthetic. The Sgt. Pepper uniforms have become shorthand for the entire ’60s counterculture. They signaled a watershed moment in the Beatles’ illustrious career and popular music at large, spawning countless copycats — not least of which being their closest rivals, the Rolling Stones — who never came close to the real thing.

Kiss with and without makeup

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Kiss

Kiss were in dire straits by 1983. Original members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley had left the band, which was hemorrhaging fans after a series of creative and commercial misfires. So on Sept. 18, 1983, Kiss staged the publicity stunt to end all publicity stunts, revealing their makeup-free faces on MTV. “‘Let’s prove something to the fans,’ Paul [Stanley] said, ‘Let’s go and be a real band without makeup,’” Gene Simmons recalled in his book Kiss and Make-Up. “I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t know if it was going to work, but I heard what Paul was saying – there was nowhere else for us to go.” Simmons confessed he was “scared stiff” during the public unveiling, but the move clearly paid off: Kiss’ first barefaced album, Lick It Up, became their first in three years to go gold, and they returned to filling arenas, enjoying another decade of unmasked success.

Metallica

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Metallica

When Metallica emerged from their five-year recording slumber with 1996’s Load, their newly cropped hair and makeup polarized fans as much as their forays into alt-rock and country, continuing the Bay Area legends’ pivot away from thrash that began with 1991’s Black Album. Even frontman James Hetfield protested the wardrobe changes, which he later attributed to drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist Kirk Hammett. “I think they were really after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter ego. I couldn’t get into it,” Hetfield told Classic Rock in 2009. “The whole ‘Okay, now in this photoshoot we’re going to be ’70s glam rockers.’ Like, what?” Hetfield later conceded to Metal Hammer. “There’s some great, great songs on [Load], but all the imagery and stuff like that was not necessary.”

ZZ Top

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ZZ Top

ZZ Top built a reputation as an incendiary live act by touring relentlessly throughout the ‘70s, which helped propel 1973’s Tres Hombres and 1975’s live LP Fandango! into the Billboard Top 10. But by 1977, the Texas trio was burned out from eight straight years of gigging, so they took a planned 90-day sabbatical that stretched into two years. The time off wasn’t totally unproductive, though: Guitarist Billy Gibbons and bassist Dusty Hill both emerged in 1979 with the chest-length beards that would become their trademark during the MTV era and beyond. ZZ Top took a few more years to adapt to the changing rock landscape, but they consummated their musical and aesthetic shift on 1983’s diamond-selling Eliminator, whose massive music videos for “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man” and “Legs” were as essential as the tunes themselves.

Freddie Mercury haircut

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Freddie Mercury

Queen strutted boldly into the ’80s with the explosive power ballad “Save Me” and synthesizer-laden “Play the Game,” the latter of which turned heads even more because its video showcased Freddie Mercury’s new mustache. The charismatic frontman had already cropped his long hair and ditched the black fingernail polish by that point, but with his new facial hair, Mercury gave a nod to the fashion trends pervading the gay clubs of San Francisco at the time. The image change polarized fans, some of whom allegedly brought disposable razors to shows and threw them at the singer onstage. Unsurprisingly, Mercury didn’t give a damn. “Do you girls like this mustache? Any boys like the mustache?” he asked the audience during one show. “A lot of people are hating it – I don’t give a fuck, actually … it’s my mustache, and I’m gonna keep it!”

U2

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U2

The Joshua Tree established U2 as a rare rock band that could eloquently blend bold political statements, earnest spiritual musings and transcendent arena-sized hooks, catapulting them to the upper echelon of rock stardom. But after the live/studio hybrid Rattle and Hum was criticized for being both self-serious and self-aggrandizing, U2 changed tack on 1991’s Achtung Baby, a genre-hopping smorgasbord of alt-rock, industrial and electronic music full of Bono’s snappy, self-deprecating one-liners. The accompanying Zoo TV Tour furthered this reinvention, with Bono portraying several characters he had conceived, including MacPhisto, a red-horned glam rocker in a gold suit and pancake makeup who was meant to represent Lucifer himself. MacPhisto would emerge during the band’s set to wax philosophical on sociopolitical issues, proving that even if U2 had dialed back the earnestness, they hadn’t forfeited their thoughtfulness.

Eddie Van Halen haircut

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Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen would winkingly tell journalists that he shaved off his signature tresses one night in 1994 as the result of losing a bet, but really, the drunken stunt was an act of frustration — and perhaps a cry for help. “The truth is, cutting my hair off did come at the end of an unbelievably heavy time for me,” Van Halen told Rolling Stone in 1995, shortly after the release of his band’s 10th album, Balance. “Our manager, Ed Leffler, died. Then Sammy Hagar was off doing his loony fucking solo career. So we were managing ourselves, and I’m going nuts because I’m getting the bullshit phone calls Ed must have gotten that we never heard about, like ‘Hey, Eddie, would you like to host Star Search?’” The virtuoso guitarist recalled “guzzling a bottle of wine” and sitting with Aerosmith manager Tim Collins when he promptly got up, grabbed his clippers and sealed the deal. “I guess everything in my life all came to a head, literally,” he confessed. “I was losing it. I was so frustrated and pissed off that I just didn’t know what else to do.”

Jon Bon Jovi haircut

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Jon Bon Jovi

After the back-to-back smashes of 1986’s Slippery When Wet and 1988’s New Jersey — and the latter’s gargantuan, 16-month world tour — the burnt-out members of Bon Jovi went on an unceremonious hiatus to focus on solo projects. Their 1992 comeback album, Keep the Faith, contained much of the chest-beating arena rock of its immediate predecessors, but it augmented the band’s party-metal sound with plaintive ballads and sprawling, heartland epics. More importantly, though, Keep the Faith marked the end of Jon Bon Jovi’s meticulously teased, collarbone-length hair. “I was on the road for Keep the Faith with the whole new look,” Bon Jovi told InStyle in 2000. “My hairstyle was on CNN. It was like, ‘Holy cow, Jon Bon Jovi cut his hair!’” The singer said his decision was not motivated by any deep-set ideological shift or existential crisis: “I got tired of it. I look back at those pictures and I’m like, ‘Oh, God, look at all that hair!’”

Ozzy Osbourne shaved head

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Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne’s nefarious behavior on the 1982 Diary of a Madman tour could be seen as routine rock-star debauchery or a cry for help from a severely depressed musician at the end of his rope. After mistakenly biting the head off a dead bat at one show and drunkenly urinating on the Alamo after another, the Prince of Darkness went into a full-fledged tailspin after guitarist Randy Rhoads died in a plane crash. But the show had to go on, so after a two-week break following Rhoads’ death, Osbourne’s manager and wife-to-be Sharon put him back on the road with guitarist Bernie Torme, who was quickly replaced by Night Ranger axman Brad Gillis. Osbourne’s band was back in business, but he was still caught in the throes of addiction and crippling depression. It climaxed in August, when Osbourne shaved his head in an act of desperation. Sharon once again shut down her husband’s attempts to get out of performing, forcing him onstage in a wig, which he threw into the crowd.