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JON BON JOVI GIVES ARENA ROCK A BAD NAME

Bon Jov was so awfully rotten at the Schotten Center last Wednesday that I found myself wishing Jeffrey Dahmer would drill a whole in my skull and pour in a gallon of acid to ease my suffering.

This was shortly after the secon son, you understand.

Jon Bon Jovi and his lounge band of greasy Roman lizards would go on to play many, many songs that made for many, many painful moments. Between the so-called hits came the histrionic filler, alleged songs where the verses searched for melodies, the lyrics bespoke of morons searching for mythological romance, and the star of the show revealed himself to be fabulously unnatural at performing.

And "You Give Love a Bad Name" is still stuck in my head. Stil. It's torturing me more than any cannibalistic serial murderer ever could. And Jon Bon Jovi is to blame.

Ah, that Jon Bon Jovi. He's a graceless, cunning animal with a finely cut jaw. But he's still truly one of the most emotionally paralyzed, physically arthritic and generally talentless performers ever to put meaningless corporate swill to guitar chords.

He has no soul. Only a coward could pass off with conviction the uninteresting rubbish posing as pop lyrics - words that pale in comparison to the sentimental tripe of supermarket greeting cards.

That brings us to one of the greatest enablers since Eva Braun: Bon Jovi's insatiable audience of Bon Zombies. They're hungry and insatiably salivating for their fair-haired jerk-off of a hero. Oh, isn't he handsome? Maybe he'll pick me to towel him down after the show.

It's his diabolically shallow audience that sustains this professional phony's mastery of infantile overstatement. Even in the rafter-toucing sections of the cavernous arena, they stood for the entire show, paying tribute to their White Knight of Sloth Supreme.

It was pathetic.

I didn't think Bon Jovi would be so bad. When the band played Buckeye Lake back in the day, I actually liked the show. Maybe Jon Bon Jovi's hair back then made all the difference. Or his relative youth. Or the girl I was talking to.

But at the Schottenstein Center, as he rolled out "Have a Nice Day," "Bad Medicine" and loads of car-radio-friendly sing-along songs, I watched him slosely on the many huge video screens. The man's hair is his emotional exoskeleton - there is nothing more nor less to him.

His eye,s however, were the great betrayer. Nearing the home stretch, he indulged in the ridiculous ploy of playing guitar in the audience while singing some wretched power ballad. The live video did massive close-ups of him, and you could plainly see a complete lack of emotional commitment to his output. Not only was there an emptiness, there was a weariness.

This bad actor, who communicates so little, was revealing himself involuntarily. And this is what he revealed: I'm a billionaire vampire with Fortune 500 financial planning on my mind. With something around 12,000 suckers in attendance paying at least $50 - plus T-shirt and merchandise sales - the schmuck walked out with $1 million, more or less.

My mother used to remind me that if I didn't have anything nice to say, go all the way and link it up with a bizarre mass murder. But I do have one good thing to say about seeing Bon Jovi: Guitarist Richie Sambora faintly resembles Dean Martin - if you were to put long greasy black hair and a stupid donkey's hat on him.