That was my second ever BJ gig and first in golden circle. Great show, at the greatest stadium in the world. Hyde Park a few days later was even better.

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Aloha !

Yeah... but your list is a bit wrong. When We Were Beautiful is a new album cut and Someday I'll Be Saturday Night was never released as a single in the U.S.A. If you put the setlist of Seattle, with its 2 rare songs from the eighties, directly next to the first setlist with Lost Highway and Whole Lot Of Leavin' played back to back and no eighties rarities the only differences are;

Shot Through The Heart out, Whole Lot Of Leavin' in and Runaway replacing Roulette.

Everything else is completely the same bar the order of the songs. This is still the same set for casuals. No, they're not getting Runaway, a song they might be more familiar with, but I'm also willing to bet they'd much rather hear Shot Through The Heart over Whole Lot Of Leavin'. The difference is the first one pleases the crowd while the second one pleases Jon.

Jon Bon Jovi giving up rarities in the U.S.A. because they're not going over well is nonsense. He still plays plenty of songs which go over a lot worse than most of the stuff he's dropped over and over and over again.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

Whoops, you're right about Beautiful.

I don't agree that casuals would rather hear Shot Through The Heart than Leaving because if a chunk of the audience has seen them before on the last tour, they're already at least more familiar with it than STTH, a song I don't they they know at all. What are we basing this on, song quality? The type of people going to see Bon Jovi in it's then-current incarnation in America, I think the fan base that was there Pre-Slippery was long gone. It'd please the people sick of the current setlists, sure, but Jon doesn't give a shit about us.

No, I agree that Jon pulls out songs all the time that not a lot of people know and plays them ad nauseum. My point was more you can't do that AND the first two album rarities. It should have been one or the other.

I didn't realize Saturday Night wasn't a single here, neat.

It's worth remembering that off of the back of the success of Slippery etc, both of the first two albums ended up selling over 3 million copies.

People who are there for the nostalgia trip are probably more likely to want to hear tracks from those albums than from Lost Highway etc...

I'd like to bring in another theory (fully aware that some pages ago I argued with the songs chart positions ;-)):
I think to a certain extent it doesn't matter at all if the audience knows a song or not - if the song really gets performed, which means that the artist puts in all his effort, all his power, than he can really take the audience with him.
In the early 2000s I listened to Robbie Williams quite a lot. Recently I once again came across his concerts in Cologne, Germany from 2001 and Knebworth, England in 2003 (just search on YT). I think a lot of his recorded album versions lack some power, some oomph behind it if you know what I mean. And lots of his lyrics are mediocre at best, too. But the energy he has on stage, that power with which he performs his songs, no matter if it's one of his hits or an album cut...man, that's impressive. With a performer like this on stage the audience doesn't get the chance to even think about a piss break.
So I'd say that's the much bigger problem Jon has. Back in the days he was one of those awesome performers, too. But nowadays he doesn't care too much about his performance anymore. It's the much-quoted autopilot.
I think Love's The Only Rule was the last song he really performed on stage. An album cut in which he put all his effort on stage. And thus that one got along pretty well.

Anyone seen clips of that private show? Wow......give it up Jon you’re shitting on your legacy with every live performance.


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For sure but that's 3 million over the course of 20 some odd years, right? LH sold decently enough in the three years before The Circle tour that the average concert-goer that's a casual fan is more likely to have it in their car. This is all just my crazy opinion but Jon keeping those songs in is lazy and selfish but at the same time it's more recent in people's memories than Shot Through The Heart. If people are going to respond to nostalgia I don't know if track 4 on the debut album is going to get the reaction people think it will. We're also talking about songs that were on the recent DVD releases. Again, I'm not saying people are going nuts for these songs and going to the shows to hear them, I'm making the point they're songs more people know about than album cuts from 84.

But this is all just my opinion. Faceman and Seb is right, it's all in how you sell the songs and looking back at those early performances it felt very going-through-the-motions trying not to mess up, it needed more time to get comfort but that's what rehearsals are for. Either way it's a shame.

I kind of disagree. I think the fan base was still strong enough at that point that a lot of sales would have been coming from hard core fans, not casuals. People coming to hear the hits would not have been interested in hearing anything from the current albums, they want the stuff they know, which for a a lot of the audience would be the slippery/jersey era, and maybe the earlier stuff. Those people wouldn't have a clue about lost highway. Those kind of fans do not want new material. Sure the other half of the audience is the fan base that keeps up with the new material, BUT they will also be familar with the first two albums. They may not own them, but they may know them from iTunes, Spotify etc. Usually, Nostalgia fans are not really the streaming/downloading type. So overall, I think more people know the older stuff. Or maybe it's 50/50. But who really knows...

Of coures you also have the fans that only know Cross Road or The Greatest Hits

I certainly think here in the UK stuff from the first two albums would go down way better that anything from the last 15 years, album track wise.

Yeah I agree, it's for sure a question of regionality. UK-wise I have no doubt that stuff would go over better hence why it was brought back when they went over there. It's all hypothetical anyway.

I'm purely basing this on 20 shows in Canada watching crowds during songs. It's a sitdown fest if it's not a song you know but it's also a bit of an older crowd so *shrugs*.

Isn't it more likely that the casuals would prefer not to listen to neither a cut from the first two records, or album songs from post 2000? Wouldn't the casual "Bon Jovi are coming through town, they have some cool songs, let's check them out" fan prefer a setlit built entirely of singles?

Whether those singles were popular at the time or not, when they head to YouTube or Spotify, for example, those are the songs they will see/hear. There are plenty of singles that would appeal to both the casual and die-hard as much as Shot Through the Heart or Whole Lot of Leaving would. In fact, Whole Lot of Leaving was a single in some markets, so I guess people would prefer to hear that as a casual listener.