Post Jovian thoughts

Listening to: WMA player on random. Right now it is Glenn Frey's "You belong to the city" from the Miami Vice sountrack. The 1980's Miami Vice.

Mental notes from last nights concert:

- I think there is a rule somewhere that no Hutt boy or girl's life will be complete without seeing Bon Jovi play a stadium on a hot summer night. Kind of like muslims needing to go to Mecca, but less classy.

-I haven't seen so many drunk bogan rock chicks since the Fleetwood Mac concert last year.

-I wonder how many were in the audience just to perve at the frontman.

-I also wonder how many thought 'Pretty Woman' was a Bon Jovi song they hadn't realised was a Bon Jovi song.

-The appearance of various punters cause several utterances along the lines of "Is that a wig?", "I think thats a wig", "I hope thats a wig".

-Due to certain demographics the number of people at the gig I recognised was way higher than normal.

-At times the crowd around me was loud enough to drown out the actual music which was fun. Not so fun was the woman screaming behind me, which hurt my ears more than any loud music could. Screaming was alternated with cries of "Owh huees sooo suxay!" (say out loud for better accent approximation) and imaginings of what she could do with Jon Bon Jovi's fingers after his hand was shown in close up on the big screens.

-Speaking of the big screens, the half second lag between live audio and visual was distracting. There were a couple of sound issues early in the show, and I was wondering if there were vision issues as well.

-Jon and Ritchie both saying "Wellington, New Zealand!", instead of just "Wellington!" made me wonder if they were suffering from the "Where are we tonight again?" syndrome, even if reassuring us they did know where they were, even if they didn't know much about where they were.

-Parts of the show were sheer classic arena rock theatre, always slick, often cheesy, and occasionally downright silly. Some parts I think were meant to look spontaneous, but clearly weren't. Meh. I can know these things and not care, it didn't make it any less fun.

-The use of fan videos for 'Living on a Prayer' was pretty cool.

-The encore performance comprising of 'Wanted Dead or Alive' and 'Living on a Prayer' was probably worth the price of admission alone. The whole stadium singing along was a nice moment to be a part of.

It was a lot of fun, even if I was only familiar with at best 30 or 40 percent of the material. It was never going to be sophisticated high culture, even by rock standards. Not the greatest gig I have ever been to, probably not even top ten, but I am still glad I got to it and enjoyed it. And I got a T-shirt.

Rich was there with me too, his observations are here.