Round 3 - Esprit Arena, Dusseldorf - “Welcome to the heavy-weight snooze fest of the world!”

Alright, it’s Wednesday morning, around 9:30am. Ronny picks me up on some parking lot along the freeway and we start our trip do Dusseldorf. Due to the fact that the band had rocked Istanbul and, especially, Bucharest the days before I was expecting them to be in a great shape and I was all pumped for the show when we left. Around 3 hours later we had made it to our little hotel, it was noon and we first went to the Esprit Arena to pick up our tickets for the show there. It was only a 10 minute walk away from where we stayed, and we had the closest train stop right in front of our hotel.
After we had gotten our tickets and our wristbands for the Golden Circle we took the time to go to the city of Dusseldorf. Well, there wasn’t much to do there. We had lunch at an Italian restaurant and I wanted to visit the “Kirmes”, which is 3rd biggest funfair in Germany, but due to the constant heavy rain neither of the roller coasters was going anyway.
We stopped at a bar and caught some alcohol and I saw an announcement of a Bon Jovi cover band playing in town that night and started to wonder “who the hell books a cover band on the same day, at the same time, in the same city when the original act is in town?!”
In retrospect I maybe should have gone to their show and I definitely should have gotten some more alcohol in that bar before leaving to our hotel again.
We arrived at the arena at around 6pm and made our way into the GC area.

At the rear barrier I spotted a friend from our neighboring locality and we had a nice conversation. I was so deflected by that that I didn’t notice Kathleen and the rest of group was standing right next to us. We had never met before, but known each other via another forum since late 2007 I guess. Over the time we exchanged so many stuff, had great discussions and she even helped me on me research paper I had to write for my graduation early last year. Finally getting to meet each other in person was truly great, as well as seeing Thierry and Sebastian again and getting to meet her husband Paul for the first time. When looking back, getting to spend some time together before the show was the only thing that saved that night for me. Sebastiaan, Erik and Katherine arrived short before the show as Erik’s plane was late I guess. I have to admit that I didn’t like Panda much before from his posts here, but meeting him in person changed my mind, he’s a real nice guy!
With Seb, also Semi Giovi and Nicole joined us, unfortunately we didn’t get to talk much.
Meanwhile we were enjoying our time in the back of the pit, The Breakers had done their opening set, I had met Olli and Jay, singer and guitar player of the Jovi tribute band Bounce and they had completely darkened the arena.
I kept thinking that this was my first “arena” show as it was totally dark from the beginning on and pictured that it would be pretty cool to see the stage show with full effect from the first seconds on.
When the houselights went down I was still on the bar getting something to drink (man, they were so damn slow…), but made it to my place within the first few seconds of the intro. I made sure to stay a but away from our tapers as I can’t keep my mouth shut during the songs.
So, the intro played and I enjoyed it being more intensive as during the stadium shows I had seen so far. Happy Now was to open the show and, even though I was happy to finally get to hear one of my favorites of TC, there were a few things I already noticed during that song: the band (which later on got confirmed) didn’t seem to had done a soundcheck before, the whole mix was a bit off and Jon totally too much upfront in the mix. Any time he stretched a note it sounded like shit. Another thing I noticed about Jon: he started the song at the wrong moment and just raised his hand to Tico to show him to go along with him. Furthermore he looked anything else but happy, but he had the same expression on his face when they played Frankfurt three years ago, so I wasn’t too worried about that.
Happy Now doesn’t work as an opener, it’s just too slow for that spot, but the crowd was into it right away. The arena was almost sold-out and I pictured this could become a nice show. The standard trio followed - Bad Name, Born To Be My Baby and Born To Follow. The crowd was into it, though Jon already struggled a bit vocally. Next was Superman, just like in Dresden and we all know where that night went. The performance of that particular tune was much better than back then, Jon did a great job during the verses and went for the first chorus, but sounded like he really was fighting hard in the final refrain. Still, if I’d have to pick 3 songs that were done good that night, Superman would be one of them. It’s My Life followed up, the crowd loved it, but Jon had switched to autopilot.
From then on they lost me: The More Things Change, We Got It Going On, Captain Crash! Out of the five or six songs I really can’t stand, three were played right in a row. That was just too much…
Strange enough was that Jon got a rather big cheer for his rant in TMTC…