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Up on the roof of Clinton Recording Studios back in 2009, Bon Jovi recorded the video for their Number 1 single We Weren’t Born to Follow.
It was the first single released from Bon Jovi’s album, The Circle. It premiered on radio on August 17, 2009. Jon Bon Jovi told the Daily Mail that the song is “about working people picking themselves up by their bootstraps in hard times.”
The video has a background of Hell’s Kitchen and midtown Manhattan – and features clips of:
Bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989
Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France
The Dalai Lama
A collection of the Wright brothers plane, a space shuttle and Spaceship One of Virgin Galactic
Virgin Records owner Richard Branson
The Great Wall of China
The protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the famous Tank Man picture
Images of US President Barack Obama
Princess Diana in Africa
Patrick Thibodeau, a renowned basketball player of Cumberland, Maine, who suffers from Down’s Syndrome, playing on the Greely High School boys’ basketball team.
Martin Luther King delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech
Protests about climate change
The late guitarist Les Paul
The successful emergency water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 and pilot Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III
Scenes of the separation stage of a Saturn V rocket along with various astronauts in EVA
Gloria Steinem and feminist demonstrations.
Robert Kennedy
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
2009–2010 Iranian election protests
Clinton Recording Studios closed the year after on June 30, 2010. It had been at 653 10th Avenue (on the corner of West 46th Street) since December 1983.
Clinton’s Studio A was one of the few remaining large orchestral tracking rooms in NYC. Over its 27 years in business, Clinton Recording Studios hosted many top artists (alongside Bon Jovi), including Frank Sinatra, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Sting, Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen.
If you’re not sure of the location, it’s because the building was demolished. A new apartment block was built there in 2012. Trek Bicycle operates the retail store on the street level.
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