Wachovia Center, Philadelphia - A Review

After reading this, it seems like a rehash of Tuesday night's review with just a hint of last night's show. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Just like old times, Bon Jovi rocks the Wachovia

At the height of his hair-metal fame, you'd hardly have pegged Jon Bon Jovi as the type to get nostalgic for simpler times.

But age - his and, more to the point, his audience's - has a way of shifting perspective. At the sold-out Wachovia Center on Tuesday night, the bad-boy anthems of Bon Jovi's youth were outnumbered by recent songs built on inspirational nostrums and blue-collar solidarity. (The band also played the venue twice yesterday: another sold-out concert last night, and a late-afternoon show for fans of Bon Jovi's departed arena football team, the Philadelphia Soul.)

Although the band's latest album, last fall's The Circle, largely bypasses the country dabblings of 2007's Lost Highway, it's clear the band has kept up its research, or at least its set designer has. The show's imagery, both visual and lyrical, drew heavily from Nashville's well of just-folks standbys.

During "I Love This Town," the gigantic video screen above the stage broke apart into more than a hundred smaller screens showing fans touting their hometown's virtues, a variation on a staple used by country singer Toby Keith in his live show. The mild rebellion of "We Weren't Born to Follow" was accompanied by a dizzying potpourri of portraits ranging from Desmond Tutu to Princess Di, suggesting criteria so broad as to render iconoclasm almost meaningless.

Like most of Bon Jovi's songs (only with more unintended irony), "We Weren't Born to Follow" is composed of a string of well-worn phrases strung together like fragments from a magnetic poetry kit. "Come on and get up off your knees," he sang. "When life is a bitter pill to swallow, you got to hold on to what you believe." It's hard to imagine a less revolutionary call to arms.

Lyrically inventive he may not be, but Bon Jovi believes every familiar word. At their best, the band's metallic anthems - a group of songs that hasn't changed much in the last two decades - have an effect that's practically Pavlovian, provoking at least a small thrill in all but the most sour-faced listener - not that there were any skeptics in the room.

Rather than impatiently waiting for the old hits, the nearly 20,000 fans followed the band through material old and new; their mouths rarely stopped moving, and their seats were rarely occupied.

"Uh-oh," Bon Jovi said by way of introducing "Runaway." "It's 1984 again!" It could have been any year between now and then, and the show would have been fundamentally the same.