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I was a fan of Bon Jovi circa Slippery When Wet and New Jersey but kind of lost interest in the modern years. I have remained aware however, of their ability to retain fans by putting out the essentially the same songs with the same sound for decades while maintaining enough freshness to keep fans coming back. And buying records. Their box set, 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t be Wrong is a statement of that longevity.

So I was excited to see the Great 80s Hair Band in what I thought would be a “past-their-prime” type of show.

I vastly underestimated the utter adoration of Bon Jovi fans. The audience cross-section included a good amount of eighties cougars, suburban parents with babysitters at home, DINKs, an 8-year-old boy with his parents and a gramma where also sitting in our row. Can you say big demographic?

When the show started it was a head-spinning, literally arena-shaking explosion of love and lust for Jon and Co. Tico Torres walked on stage to thundering applause. Then David “the-curly-haired-keyboard-dude” Bryan entered to shrieks of glee. Richie “Shiny-dentures” Sambora’s entry would seem to have maxed out the volume of an arena. Then the mere video of Jon-jon drew unmanageable volume. He burst through the door of the highway-diner stage set to easily the most psychotic applause I have ever been deafened by.

Jon Bon Jovi could quite possibly be the biggest brand in media today. I have never witnessed such command of an audience, one that was gushing with love for this guy. I would go so far as to say he is the Elvis Presley of our generation.

They also played much more “new stuff” than I expected. Unlike say, an Aerosmith concert where “new stuff” is just filler for their few hits, Bon Jovi has an extremely strong and large fan-base for their recent work and in particular their current record Lost Highway.

The newer “country-ish” work is not really my cup of scotch (I was wearing a KSE t-shirt).

Tags: acc, bon jovi