Source: Philadelphia Inquirer

At the height of his hair-metal fame, you'd hardly have pegged Jon Bon Jovi as the type to get nostalgic for simpler times.

But age - his and, more to the point, his audience's - has a way of shifting perspective. At the sold-out Wachovia Center on Tuesday night, the bad-boy anthems of Bon Jovi's youth were outnumbered by recent songs built on inspirational nostrums and blue-collar solidarity. (The band also played the venue twice yesterday: another sold-out concert last night, and a late-afternoon show for fans of Bon Jovi's departed arena football team, the Philadelphia Soul.)

Although the band's latest album, last fall's The Circle, largely bypasses the country dabblings of 2007's Lost Highway, it's clear the band has kept up its research, or at least its set designer has. The show's imagery, both visual and lyrical, drew heavily from Nashville's well of just-folks standbys.

During "I Love This Town," the gigantic video screen above the stage broke apart into more than a hundred smaller screens showing fans touting their hometown's virtues, a variation on a staple used by country singer Toby Keith in his live show. The mild rebellion of "We Weren't Born to Follow" was accompanied by a dizzying potpourri of portraits ranging from Desmond Tutu to Princess Di, suggesting criteria so broad as to render iconoclasm almost meaningless.

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