The Official June 2 Tallinna Lauluväljak, Tallinn, Estonia Thread

Not only are Jon's vocals on WGIGO absolutely woeful but the crowd are as dead as any European crowd I've ever seen.

Moscow was, juding from the bootleg video (-1 min for the intro and -4-5 mins on the encore break) 140 minutes. Tallinn had one song less (ITA), so I'd say it was something around 135 minutes.

Thanks mate. Pretty much in between then.

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When the band played for two hours in Sofia in 2013, I left pretty disappointed. My disappointment morphed into pure rage when they played for 3 hours 8 minutes in Munich just four days later. Nowadays, Jon can no longer perform for three hours anymore, it's that obvious. Sure, he tries to keep the show going beyond the two-hour mark despite his voice limitations and I wonder if that won't inflict further damage down the road. Do you think his voice would be in a better shape if he had never performed a 3-hour show at any time of his career and had just stuck to 2 hours at the most instead?

I don't think that made much of an impact. Most of the time in their career (not counting 2013 onwards) he only went for a three hour show when his vocals were holding up well throughout the night. Like MSG 2011 where the last two songs were In These Arms and Always after close to three hours and he still nailed them. When his voice was off, the show was cut shorter on most occasions. Like Dusseldorf 2011.
This can even be traced as far back as 1996 (and probably to 1993). When they played Madrid on the TD tour, he was sick and his voice off. That show was only 110 minutes! If you compare the Frankfurt recording from the same which I posted two days ago, it not only went on for 180 minutes, but he still had so much in the tank that he went for the final chorus on This Ain't A Love Song in a higher range and that was the 30th song of the night!

Him sounding like that today is a combination of songs that were at the limit of his then-current-range for most of his career (older Bon Jovi stuff is insanely high to sing for a standard male voice) and not learning/never properly sustaining a certain technique. Plus smoking and probably a lack of constant vocal exercise for the better part of his career.

I honestly think that the long shows absolutely played a part in the overall damage to his voice. The fact that he was still nailing notes at the 3 hour plus mark says that he was not holding back and giving his all for that whole time. That is going to wear your voice out way earlier than if you were playing two hours and under each night. Sure, it gave people incredible long shows, but in the end I think the smart thing to do would have been to cap shows at the two hour mark. These songs are tough to sing and will wreck your voice, especially when you have 3 nights in a row, which they did often. Obviously Jon was getting very little advice on his voice back then, if he was he would have been advised to do no more than 2 shows in a row and no more than 2 hours a night.

Though I don't disagree, I think simply not being on the road every second year would've done him much more good. He was practically always on the road or back in the studio from 2000 to 2013. That could wear out professionally trained voices as well.
About the advice, I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, we all know that Jon likes to surround himself with only yes-sayers, but it's also been known that he thought he was smarter than people giving him advice when a lot of money would've been at stake. Think back to Washington 2006 or Padova 2001 where he was sick as a dog and doctors adviced him not to do the shows, but postponing would've driven the costs up and he went on and performed them anyway, resulting in sub-standard concerts.