Bon Jovi wowed and amazed a sold out eighteen thousand plus crowd at the Pepsi Center here in Denver on February 23, 2006! The concert was spectacular from beginning to end and well worth the price of admission.
First off, I’ll get a few gripes out of the way because I don’t want to end my review with them but I need to get them off my chest. Okay, mean people suck big time! I was shocked at the behavior of some of the crowd. The Disturbed crowd a few weeks ago was much more polite over all than the Bon Jovi faithful though I did meet a few nice people. I had a few minor run ins with people on the way into the arena, fighting for spots at the tee shirt stand and the girl next to me complaining she didn’t have enough room once we were all seated. It’s not my fault they pack people in like sardines at those things.
Without a doubt the worst incidents of the evening were at the cabstand after the show though. I rushed out and got in line for a cab. The line was fairly long but not too bad when I got there. It got much worse. There were people pushing through the line to walk down the street that we had to keep dodging and a number of people trying to butt in line by hanging out on the side. Also, there were some people that were trying to steal cabs before they got up to the stand but there was a cab marshal that was directing them and would go and make the line breakers get out of the cabs if they managed to get in. Most of the cabbies learned to lock their doors until they got up to the stand. There was a woman who had been trying to steal cabs and tried to butt in line in front of me. She fed the guy in charge some line about how her friend was sick and she would sue him if anything happened because of her not going home sooner. He told her he was bonded and to sue away. He knew she was lying. What was funny was that this pair was standing off to the side near me arguing before their failed attempt that they didn’t have a money for a hotel room, having flown in for the concert, and didn’t know where they were going. So they were going to try to steal someone in line’s cab so they could get in and tell the cabby they didn’t know where they wanted to go… sigh…
Okay so I get to the front of the line and the marshal points out the cab that is mine and tells me to get in as it’s pulling up. I get to the cab door and there is already a girl in the cab. She says really condescendingly, “Sorry Honey this one is taken.” I just shrug and look back at the cab marshal. He comes over and tells the girl she needs to get in line and to get out of the cab. She says her sister was in line and it’s her cab. The marshal tells her no that he is monitoring the line and she wasn’t there. She won’t budge. He tells me to come back to the line and he’ll get me the next cab and that the driver isn’t going to take me. A few minutes later he points back at the same cab and tells me to go get in. As the girl gets out of the cab she yells at the driver and marshal, “oh sure, take the four hundred pound lady.” I told her if she’d get in line she could get a cab too. She told me should walk home. That I was fat and needed to “work it off.” I told her to try walking and she said a few more things about how I obviously couldn’t see how grossly fat I was among other things. I am rather proud of myself that I spoke back rather than just letting her belittle me, pretending I couldn’t hear her, which would have been my usual tactic. When it was clear she wasn’t going to shut up, I yelled at her to “Kiss my ass!” and slammed the cab door. I was rather embarrassed, as I’ve never said that to someone in serious anger in my life. I’d never said it to a stranger even in jest before. I apologized to the cabby but he said the girl had been saying vile things to him too and not to worry about it. The ride home was relatively relaxed after that. The cabby was nice and asked me about what other concerts I went to and such, just chit chatting. I’m very proud that I stood up for myself and didn’t let that girl send me home crying this time.
My other minor gripe of the night isn’t something that upset me so much as something that makes me go why? Okay now I’ll admit I’m not a big drinker, have never been the type to get drunk and party so maybe I just don’t get it. The fact I come from a family of alcoholics could be coloring my view a bit too but again I say WHY? Now I can totally understand if you’re out for the evening at a show, wanting to have a few drinks, relax, have a good time, you might end up a little tipsy. However when it reaches the point where you are so drunk that you don’t know where you are or what is going on around you, I think you’ve gone too far at a concert at least. I mean why pay a hundred bucks to see Bon Jovi then get so wasted you won’t be able to tell anyone what songs he played the next day or if he was even on stage. If you want to just get trashed, why not by the CD to listen to at home and save yourself the other eighty bucks? I bring this up because there was an older gentleman in the seat in front of me who was completely wasted to the point he was falling into chairs repeatedly when he tried to dance and when his companion made him sit down, fell asleep a few times sprawled all over the chairs before getting back up to start his bumper car antics again. He only hit me a few times so I wasn’t too upset but it just made me go WHY?
Okay enough of that nonsense. As I said, the concert was awesome! I got down to the Pepsi Center around five thirty. The doors weren’t open yet so I went around the building to an onsite restaurant/bar called Blue Sky Grille. I’d never been in there before but Jessica told me to check it out, that one of her close friends worked there. It’s rather posh inside with the appearance of a mountain lodge with chairs made from thick tree limbs and such, and a classy if rustic atmosphere. I was told there was a forty-five minute wait for tables so I opted to sit at a table in the bar, which turned out to be a good choice. I wasn’t very hungry, as Jessica and I had gone to Qdoba for burritos after lab meeting for lunch so I just ordered a couple appetizers that sounded out. I had their special of the night, which was coconut shrimp, along with a small lettuce and tomato salad with lots of blue cheese. The blue cheese sold me on the salad, LOL. The waiter did talk me into trying their homemade blueberry cobbler before I left though and it was excellent.
By the time I got around the building to the arena entrance, it was about a quarter to seven and the lines to get inside were gone. I got inside and found long lines for the souvenir stands but I knew I’d be fighting for a cab on the way out so I wanted to get my stuff before the show. I settled on a tour program and a really cool tee shirt design. http://stores.musictoday.com/store/product.asp?band_id=1136&dept_id=8012&pf_id=2JCT12&sfid=2 That’s the design of the front of the Tee shirt but the back has the dagger with “Have a Nice Day” etched on it and a bunch of tour dates for this leg instead of Montreal.
I headed into the main floor of the arena and found my seat about fifteen minutes prior to the start of the show. I was 43 rows back on the floor, maybe 4 or 5 rows in front of the sound mixing board set up area, smack dab in the middle. There was a nice older couple that came and sat on one side of me. They were familiar with a lot of the country acts I have seen in the past, having seen some of them themselves but said this was their first Bon Jovi concert. I have a feeling it may be their last too. They complained after the opening act that the sound was too loud and covered their ears for a good majority of Bon Jovi’s show. At any rate they were pleasant to talk to.
Sprint was sponsoring the tour and had it set up while we were waiting for things to start that you could dial in text messages and have them show up on the screen behind the stage. There was the usual mix of “I love yous” both to real people they knew and members of the band. The usual “Marry Me Jon Bon Jovi” or “….Ritchie” showed up along with one proposal that might have been legitimate as it was directed from one audience member to another. A few kids put up messages saying their moms had brought them to the show, and at least one “Daddy please buy me a tee shirt, I love you” message showed up. It made a nice pre-show distraction.
So they come out and announce that Bon Jovi is running a contest in conjunction with XM Radio on this tour that local acts compete to be the opener in each city on the tour. Our local station, ALICE had assisted in the Denver search. The winners from Denver were Bodragaz, a local hard rock band and I was really impressed with them. If you’d like to check them out, their website is: http://www.bodragaz.com/bodragaz/bodragaz.html They received a warm welcome from the crowd and did a solid half hour set.
Then we had a half hour to wait while they took down the opening act’s gear and got things set up for Bon Jovi. There was a screen hanging flat above the stage. Shortly before the show started at 8:30 it started coming down. The lights went out and there was this stuff over the loud system that sounded like a transmission, talking about are you ready and stuff. I couldn’t make it all out but it was clearly designed to sound like some sort of landing or invasion. The screen came down and tilted forward so you couldn’t see anything but the very bottom of the stage. The lights started coming up on the stage and we could see the guys’ feet under where the screen was tilted from my angle. The screen began tilted up the opposite way to stand upright in the back of the stage as the music started for “Last Man Standing” and we could see the guys but Jon was nowhere in sight. I turned around and he was standing on some crates or something in the soundboard area that was right behind me. I quickly whipped out my camera and got quite a few butt shots…well it’s not my fault he was facing the other direction. He did turn around to play the guitar for my section during the instrumental break so I might have gotten a few shots of him smiling at us too. He is so cute up close when he smiles!
At the end of the song, he walked up the far aisle to the stage, giving high-fives to people along the away. I only know this because I read it in a local review. I was still too stunned that he had popped up so close to me to actually know what was going on at this point. I think I just stood there saying “Oh my God” silently for a few minutes. He got up on the stage and said “Are you with me!” I think he was yelling it directly at me because I was still in a daze.
The next thing I heard was Jon signing out “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame…” He pointed at the crowd and we all sang, “You give love, a bad name.” He followed that number up with “Complicated” off the new CD. He stopped to say hello to the crowd and ask if he was doing okay. He mentioned that he knew he was in Crush country, The Colorado Crush being the Arena League Football team owned by former Bronco Quarterback John Elway. They actually do their games at the Pepsi Center. Jon said he knew his good friend Elway wasn’t in the building though so he was going to rip on him all night.
Next he told us to take a ride in a time machine with him. He started rolling back the clock, 2006, 2005, 2004….1995, 1993….1987, 1985, 1983. STOP! A frizzy haired teenage boy walks up to a DJ in a radio station parking lot with a tape of a song he wrote. He tells the guy, “Man I need you to play this. I have a mean set of chords and a great hook line. I’m gonna be a rock star!” This of course is the lead in to Runaway along with several other older songs.
They had a great set up as far as the screen goes, with a huge one at the back of the stage that did close ups of the guys and such along with some cool pictures at times. They had one cool effect during a drum solo by Tico where they had the stage dark and had what looked like gray clouds rolling on the screen. Then when Tico really started playing, they had images of him banging the drums superimposed with the clouds. It looked awesome. This was also a good distraction because when the lights came back up, Jon was standing halfway up the stairs on the second level of seats and about half way back. He ended up singing Blaze of Glory and Bed of Roses from up there. He walked down to get back to the stage during the instrumental part of Roses and stopped to shake hands with as many people as he could along the way. They also had these cool lights that ran up and down around the screen making neat effects but I know I have no hope of describing them. When I get my film developed, hopefully I’ll have a shot or two.
I can’t tell you all the songs they sang as by the time the last encore faded they had played about two hours and forty minutes. It was a good mix of older stuff as well as the newer songs. Jon did make a big deal of mentioning that they now have a country hit. This led into them singing the track that appears twice on the new CD. There is a version with just him that is getting played on Top 40 and one that is a duet with Jennifer Nettles from Sugarland that is getting airplay on country radio. It’s called “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” and is a very catchy tune. As a side note, Bon Jovi used the filming of the video for this song to build homes for Habitats for Humanity, giving four families a place a to live by the end of the video shoot. Check it out if you get a chance and if you have the opportunity to help out Habitat, please do. From all I hear, they are a great organization putting families back on their feet and on the road to self-sufficiency.
Two hours in, Jon leaned back by Tico’s drums with Ritchie close by and told him, “Man I don’t think they can keep up with me tonight. Then again I should pace myself. I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m 44. If I was a pro baseball player I’d be long since retired. If I was say… an ex NFL Quarterback I’d be sitting at home in my rocking chair telling stories about my glories days like my buddy John…. He’s not in as good of shape as he used to be….Well I guess ole Pork Chop there is my inspiration to keep going though..” he laughed and took off his jacket to reveal a sleeveless shirt that showed off some very toned biceps.
During the second encore John announced that if anyone was still sitting, to get their butts out of their seats for the singing of their national anthem, “Wanted Dead or Alive.” They got the audience to sing the first few lines before they joined in. Jon got Ritchie to sing the second verse, which was a nice change since Jon had been doing the vocals all night.
I can’t remember what all else they sang. I know they mentioned Frank before they sang “It’s My Life” and did a short acoustic set in the middle of the show. All I know for sure is they played their hearts and souls out until sweat was just pouring off them. Jon’s voice was pure and the band was tight. The sound mix was awesome even if the people next to me were a bit shocked by the volume. It was a show that was well worth the price of admission. Jon and Ritchie definitely are the last Men Standing in my book!
Come see a
living, breathing spectacle
Only seen right here
It's your last chance in this lifetime
The line forms at the rear
You won't believe your eyes
Your eyes will not believe your ears
Get your money out, get ready
Step right up, yeah you, come here
You ain't seen nothing like him
He´s the last one of the breed
You better hold on to your honey
Honeys, don't forget to breathe
Enter at your own risk, mister
It might change the way you think
There's no dancers, there's no diamonds
No this boy he don't lip-synch
Chorus:
Here's the last man standing
Step right up, he's the real thing
The last chance of a lifetime
Come and see, hear, feel ... the real thing
See those real live calloused fingers
Wrapped around those guitar strings
Kiss the lips where hurt has lingered
It breaks the heart to hear him sing
These songs were more than music
They were pictures from the soul
So keep your pseudo-punk, hip-hop, pop-rock junk
And your digital downloads
Chorus
Take your seats now, folks. It's showtime
Hey, Patrick - hit the lights
There's something in the air
There's magic in the night
Now here's the band, they really play
I'll count the first one in
I don't know where it's going
We all know where it's been
Chorus
The last man standing
Step right up, he's the real thing
The last chance of a lifetime
******
The local music
critic did a review of the show. He’s NOT a fan of the music but for what it’s
worth it is a pretty fair review given that. If you want to check it out, it’s
at:
http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/music/article/0,2792,DRMN_54_4492911,00.html