In your opinion, what are their best live performances?

I am glad to see someone of the younger generation agreeing that those early Circle shows are excellent. So many glorify the "good old days" without really listening to what they are getting live these days. Having been there for both ends of the spectrum - I was seriously blown away by the early Circle shows. I'll take them over many of the different "eras"

That said - for me the early KTF shows late 92 early 93 are the holy grail for me. I love the These Days era also but there was just something magic about those "comeback" shows. I also feel the same about the 2000 "comeback" shows. It had been so long - and I wasn't expecting much - and the November 2000 show here at Continental Arena in the Meadowlands just blew me away. I am still deeply indebted to Paragon for archiving that show (that's a nice way of saying bootlegging LOL) so that I still have a favorite memory to revisit.

What about the HAND tour? Haven't seen anyone comment about it...
I didn' t like that era, for me, the worst tour of the 2000 decade. But I do like Story of My Life ... I love this song, should be a regular even today.

Keep The Faith era hands down for me. The band was in top form!

For me personally it's always been about how they sound and the emotion in it, I don't really need to see them running around stage the whole night.

So if I had to pick one show to be at (front row) I would pick 1992 Evening with Bon Jovi. Small venue, great sound, and they brought their A-game. Honestly I don't think Jon ever sounded better than he did in this show. Only downside is that it was pre-these days so we miss out on those songs.

Milton Keynes 1993

I love Wild in The Streets from this concert! I think this may be the best bootleg ever put out in terms of sound quality/performance of the band. But its a short show unfortunately.

Aloha !

The HAND tour had mostly dull shows. It featured a TLFR set that no one cared about and the first 10 songs were all roughly in the same key to save Jon's voice, meaning no build up in the set. It's the tour on which Richie started to **** up and Jon's voice was completely shot in the higher register.There's only about 15 shows from the entire tour that were even remotely interesting.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

As many have pointed out, I think their best live performances were on the KTF tour. I saw them in April 1993 and I´d say that show was my ultimate BJ experience. I saw them twice on the NJ tour and it was of course magical to see them for the first time. Still, I think their performance was tighter and even more relaxed on the KTF tour. Since then, not every BJ show I´ve seen have represented such enthusiasm and energy.

Saw them twice at the O2 last summer. I liked a lot what I witnessed.

Exactly. Even though many setlists looked good on paper, they weren't anything special live as Jon's voice and Richie's guitar playing were average at best mostly. And there were no stand-outs in terms of big ballads as just none of them was played. For example Munich 2006: got all excited when I read the setlist and couldn't wait to hear the show and to this day I think I have never listened to it in it's entire as the performance was just boring...

Keep the faith tour by miles. They just sounded great + the energy was just getting less & less by the tours followed.