"Bon Jovi to the stage. Bon Jovi to the stage. Black lights ready? Black lights are working. They're in the elevator." The arena dialogue over the public address ended and elevator music ensued, as the sold-out FleetCenter crowd anxiously awaited the arrival of the men from New Jersey. On a stage resembling a rooftop - perhaps in reference to the band's Letterman performance on top of the Ed Sullivan Theater - a large projection screen backdrop revealed frontman Jon Bon Jovi, lead guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboardist Dave Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, and bassist Hugh McDonald inside the elevator by way of an overhead black-and-white camera.
Hysteria blanketed the crowd as if it were 1986 all over again, back when Bon Jovi's breakthrough album Slippery When Wet turned it into one of the biggest bands on the planet. Now, fourteen years later, the band that is making its way up the Billboard charts yet again exited the elevator to play the first song, the guitar-heavy, fist-pumping "One Wild Night," off the group's latest release, Crush. And "wild" does not begin to describe the electricity that ran through the FleetCenter for the following two and a half hours.
Following the song, Jon Bon Jovi made his intentions for the evening clear with a Springsteen-inspired testimonial: "I ain't here for the sport of politics! I ain't here for the politics of sport! What I am here for is to preach to you the gospel, the religion of rock 'n roll!" Knowing that his band appeals to a second generation of fans, he aptly broke them up into two groups: "The Believers" and "The Newly Converted."
The band then went immediately into its first number one hit, "You Give Love a Bad Name," an obvious crowd favorite. The next song, "Captain Crash & The Beauty Queen from Mars," a title as original as the music and lyrics, which nod to the psychedelic, slap-happy rock of the '70s. Towards the end of the song, Jon actually looked out in the crowd to search for the "Captain Crash" character, and it turned out to be former MTV VJ Jesse Camp, who was standing next to an equally eye-catching and make-up layered "Beauty Queen."
Almost as much of a spectacle as Jesse Camp was Sambora, who sported a white ruffled shirt with a pair of silk, pink bellbottoms with a ticket stub design across the legs. Bon Jovi did not surprise anyone by coming out in a tight leather outfit that featured silver pants, a black shirt, and a blue and white jacket.
While Torres and Bryan hit their stride early - on the drums and keyboards respectively - the show belonged to Sambora and Bon Jovi. The two shared the spotlight throughout the night, with Sambora ripping off a finger-shredding guitar solo at least every other song. However, the stage presence of Bon Jovi was overwhelming as he made all the right moves to seduce the audience. With dancing that at times looked like high-impact aerobics, the 38-year-old exhibited the energy of a teenager. At one point he exclaimed, "Ricky Martin, watch out!"
The excitement Bon Jovi generated during each song created a snowball effect. "Blood on Blood," "Livin' on a Prayer," and its most recent sing-along rock anthem, "It's My Life," fueled one frenzy after another. The crowd still had yet to sit down following the band's arrival on stage.
"Bed of Roses" provided the crowd its first opportunity to catch its breath, but what Jon did during this ballad took everyone's breath away. Walking stage left, Bon Jovi extended his arm to a pit of twenty radio contest winners and took the hand of one lucky girl with whom he then slow danced during the song's solo. The tableau created was something out of a wedding reception. Jon stared straight into the girl's eyes and all she could do was look back and wrap her arms around him. Right before returning her to the pit, he kissed her softly causing a streak of jealousy and envy to run through the veins of every female in the building.
Bon Jovi ventured into the pit again during "Lay Your Hands on Me," and also on "Bad Medicine." However, he found it harder than ever to break free of the women's grasps when he wanted to get back onstage. The performance of "Bad Medicine" made it feel like 1988 with Bryan pounding on the keys and Sambora crooning on his Stratocaster.
While the audience relished hearing all the classics, they were dancing just as hard to the new songs. Two strong entries on the set list were "I Got the Girl" - an upbeat ode not to his wife of 11 years, but to his 5-year-old daughter - and "Just Older" - a tune destined to make many radio playlists. This song reveals that the band is in excellent spirits, with a chorus that proclaims, "I like the bed I'm sleeping in/ Just like me it's broken in/ It's not old, just older/ Like a favorite pair of torn blue jeans/ The skin I'm in is alright with me/ It's not old, just older." To add to the performance, a high school friend of Jon's threw his Sayreville, NJ varsity football jacket to the stage from the second row and Jon wore it for the rest of the song.
Besides being happy in its own shoes, the band has also grown socially conscious as evidenced by the projection screen behind the stage. During "The Next 100 Years," the screen played a retrospective of the past century's events as Sambora tore up a Hendrix-style double-time jam. With images of the Great Depression, World War II, JFK, MLK, and Watergate - among many others - coming up on screen, Bon Jovi seemed to have grown from an '80s hair band into a socially responsible group of men - even having played a few fundraisers for Al Gore.
Some of these images returned during a second encore featuring "Keep the Faith." The evening finally ended with Bon Jovi in a black beret and Sambora in his trademark cowboy hat as the band concluded with its timeless classic, "Wanted Dead or Alive" - complete with waving lighters.
The capacity crowd could not have asked for anything more. The band left everything on the stage, and while the final ovation was the loudest of the evening, a close second came when Jon Bon Jovi stated where his namesake band stands in the music industry. "I left you [music fans] to your own devices and what did you give me? A bunch of boy bands. Well, this is a man band up here!" As the man band left the stage for the night, the crowd was left singing choruses of "Livin' on a Prayer" as they went down the FleetCenter stairwells and out of the arena.
