Time
seems to stand still as Bon Jovi rocks on
Bon Jovi/Damone
TD Banknorth Garden
December 9, 2005
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in
The Boston Globe, December 12, 2005
Like fellow populist success story R.E.O. Speedwagon before it, Bon Jovi was never going to be mistaken for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame material, but what the band did, it did with a ruthless efficiency. With hooks aplenty to grab the pop crowd and just enough crunch and power to grab the ear of the metalheads, its songs may have been aggressively middle-of-the-road, but it defined anthemic eighties rock as much as anyone.
Showcasing a liberal mixture of career-spanning hits and tracks from Bon Jovi’s latest album, Have A Nice Day, Friday’s show at the TD Banknorth Garden showed how well the formula has held up, as well as how little it has changed. Every song had a catchy simplicity, and new material such as the charging title track and the vaguely rootsy “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” sounded right at home alongside “Bad Medicine” and “You Give Love A Bad Name.”
The band’s audience-friendliness resulted in singalongs on “Born To Be My Baby,” “Livin’ On A Prayer” and “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” but it was a double-edged sword. Jon Bon Jovi seemed to play to the cameras as much as out to the crowd itself, and the video on the stage-sized screen that served as a backdrop made it tempting to ignore the action onstage and just watch television. Opening the show with the singer on a satellite platform out by the mixing board (a stunt he repeated later from another spot during “Blaze Of Glory”) gave those without front-row tickets a closeup of him and allowed him to high-five and hug audience members on the way back to the stage, but it also drew the attention completely away from the rest of the band.
But that eagerness to include everyone at all costs was partly how Bon Jovi made its name, and over the course of two and a half hours, the band delivered exactly the same slick kicks it promised ten years ago, and twenty. “I’m not old, just older,” sang the frontman, and the audience nodded in agreement.
Local band Damone opened Friday’s show, and the band’s easy adjustment to the cavernous space suggested that, like the headliners, it was born for arenas and is simply biding its time until it gets there. A natural arena frontwoman, guitarist Noelle LeBlanc led her band through a tight and ferocious set that leapt from the Judas Priest/Kiss gallop of “What We Came Here For” to the massive power ballad “When You Live.”