BON JOVI: ONE WILD NIGHT: LIVE 1985-2001 (2001)
1) It's My Life; 2) Livin' On
A Prayer; 3) You Give Love A Bad Name; 4) Keep The Faith; 5) Someday I'll Be
Saturday Night; 6) Rockin' In The Free World; 7) Something To Believe In; 8)
Wanted Dead Or Alive; 9) Runaway; 10) In And Out Of Love; 11) I Don't Like
Mondays; 12) Just Older; 13) Something For The Pain; 14) Bad Medicine; 15) One
Wild Night.
It is very hard to decide whether a Bon Jovi
live album would be better thought of as a single performance from a single
show (or at least a bunch of shows from the same tour), or as a sprawling
retrospective like this one, with performances drawn from 1985, before they
even matured into major stars; 1995-96 (the height of the «rebranding» era);
and the most recent tour in support of Crush.
Normally, tight and compact works best for live performance, but only when the
band in question is tight and compact, and can boast a fabulous live sound;
with Bon Jovi, chances of their ever producing a Live At Leeds have always been negative at best.
As it happens, though, it really does not
matter: Bon Jovi have always been a
rather boring band when plopped on stage. Sure they had the looks, and the
hair, and wings to fly (sometimes almost literally so), but they never truly
gave any of their songs any additional life on stage, beyond maybe an extended
intro or two (these days, for instance, they always start off ʽLivin' On A
Prayerʼ with an actual simulation of a «musical prayer», which may last almost
as long as the song itself — not here, fortunately, where there is just a
little bit of atmospheric talkbox fun before the entire band kicks in). This is
actually quite normal for a «pop» band — which they were despite all the «rock»
trappings — and if one does not demand radical stage reinventions from Paul
McCartney, why should one do so with Bon Jovi?
The problem being, of course, that Bon Jovi
play Bon Jovi songs. Mostly — sometimes, when they play non-Bon Jovi songs, you
wish they wouldn't: Neil Young's ʽRockin' In The Free Worldʼ loses all of its
tragic flavor when stripped of Neil Young's voice and Neil Young's guitar, in
the place of which we have Bon Jovi choral harmonies and hair-metallic
Samborisms — melodic all right, but without any individual style. From the same
1995 tour, they also include a duet with Bob Geldof on ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ —
nice song, sure enough, but why would the world need a Bon Jovi version? It's
essentially a vocal-driven musical number, to which Jon cannot add anything
that is not already present in Geldof's vocal timbre. It goes without saying
that they could have done much worse (for instance, chosen an Osmonds song to
cover), but these particular examples are totally uninspiring.
As for the originals, it's competence
throughout and brilliance nowhere in sight. The talkbox sounds terrific on
ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ, blown into with even more versatility than in the studio
(considering that this version is from 2000, I guess you can't go wrong with
more than 15 years of experience), but the vocals are consistently weaker — not
out of tune or anything, just sort of feeble; with all due respect, Jon has
always been more of a looker than a singer, and although in the studio he can
usually work hard enough to get that «perfect take» or close to it, live you
really have to see him to fall in love with him, if you're the falling-in-love
kind: Mr. Tom Jones he ain't. Just compare the studio and live versions of
ʽKeep The Faithʼ for proof.
The good news, and the only reason why the
record will not be getting a thumbs down from me, is that they intentionally
avoid allmost of their power ballads — how this happened, I don't know, but
there's no ʽI'll Be There For Youʼ, no ʽBed Of Rosesʼ, nothing. They must have
performed them, but they aren't here: the album relies almost exclusively upon
«rocking» material. This is sort of an uncommercial decision, and if it was
undertaken in order to make way for the retrospective approach and make more
space for old renditions of ʽRunawayʼ and ʽIn And Out Of Loveʼ, so much the
better. Still, the album as a whole — and any other live Bon Jovi album — may
really only be recommended to people who probably do not read these reviews.
And, although this really has nothing to do
with the music, what's up with the incongruent title? Is this One Wild Night or Live 1985-2001? Or is
this a subtle metaphorical point — that the entire time from 1985 to 2001 has,
for this particular band, been like «one wild night»? If so, it's not as if the
metaphor were seriously substantiated by these performances, whose level of «wildness»
often leaves a lot to be desired. These guys aren't cavemen by no means — they
are very much a product of the technological era.
"(for instance, chosen an Osmonds song to cover)"
ReplyDeleteDunno - Bon Jovi doing Crazy Horses (extended, with of course some more cheese) might be interesting at least, provided they do it with full pathos.