Montreal Gazette Review
 

Delirium greets Bon Jovi
Pop-metal hero still going strong. Tanned, blow-dried poster boy shows his staying power at the Bell Centre

T'CHA DUNLEVY
The Gazette

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Jon Bon Jovi, back at the Bell Centre for the third time in two years, basks in the delirious cheers of fans last night.

This may ruffle some feathers among the boomer set, but if someone is compiling a list of potential Rolling Stones successors on the nostalgia-rock arena circuit, they might want to consider 20-year-running pop-metal act Bon Jovi.

The New Jersey band led by venerable blow-dried poster-boy Jon Bon Jovi packed the Bell Centre for the third time in two years last night, before an ecstatic crowd of 16,000-plus fans.

Every seat was full - or at least could have been had anybody wanted to sit. The standing O began before the curtain and lasted throughout most of the night. The deafening screams started immediately.

Bon Jovi's been on a rebound of late. Returning to the pop radar in 2000 with the radio-ready album Crush, the band wasted little time before heading back to the studio for last year's Bounce, the title track of which led off the evening.

Front and centre: Mr. Bon Jovi himself, with boyish grin, manly tan and flowing locks intact. Pumping his fist to the simple-yet-effective chorus, "Bounce!"

The result? Delirium, of course. And if the song was helped along by early-show adrenaline, it was heavyweight hit power that propelled the next song, You Give Love a Bad Name, off the group's 1986 breakthrough album Slippery When Wet.

Bon Jovi had only to sing the opening line, "Shot to the heart," before the entire room joined in for, "you're to blame! / You give love / a bad name."

It is songs like this that Bon Jovi's staying power is built on. Bulging guitar riffs paired with head-bobbing, shout-along refrain.

Two songs later, another smash: Living on a Prayer. With more classics peppered through the show (Wanted Dead or Alive and the encore-igniter Bad Medicine, to name but two), the framework was in place.

Add some nuts and bolts, from the cheer-eliciting Runaway (off Bon Jovi's very first, pre-world-fame album 7800 Fahrenheit) to the come-together Americana anthem Undivided, off Bounce, and you've got yourself a career-spanning rock show.

It's a very simple formula, and one that works for one main reason: nobody's messing with it. This is no-pretension, hands-in-the-air, party-hard rock, custom made for good times.

That the band still has no shame in closing the night with its familiar cover of Twist 'n' Shout is proof of its devotion to the fun of its fans. Rock on.

tdunlevy@thegazette.canwest.com

http://media.canada.com/scripts/loca...c-4cb3227fee0a

Jon Bon Jovi, back at the Bell Centre for the third time in two years, basks in the delirious cheers of fans last night.

CREDIT: JOHN KENNEY, THE GAZETTE

Does anyone have the software to change the above picture of Jon from a .bmp to a .jpg which would be smaller than 103 KB? I'd like to put it on my site, but don't want to use up so much of my limited Geocities disk space quota. If you can, could you PM me. Thanks. :)