Bon Jovi Live at last

Last month, on Thursday June 27th I had the chance to see Bon Jovi in concert!

Though I don't really like their latest album " What about now" the band from New Jersey will always hold a special place in my heart. You see, around the year 2000, I was a young 16 year old not listening to much music except to what they played on the radio and my old Spice Girls and Aqua CD's. Oh yeah, and occasionally Eminem (I went through a very brief hip-hop phase). Anyhow, unlike the first time I heard HIM, I don't remember the exact details with Bon Jovi. I do remember, however, staying up late to watch the transmission of a Bon Jovi concert on TV and printing and cutting out pictures of Jon Bon Jovi to hang on my bedroom closet door. *g*

The first  song I remember hearing from Bon Jovi, was It's My Life. It was a life changer. That summer that song became the anthem for my summer holidays in Sweden (we'd march through the woodlands singing it *g*) and after that it became something more. It was the song that made me jump, scream and send everyone that had ever harmed me to hell and back. It was the song that gave me courage. It was the song that officially got me into rock and metal music (even if some time later I realized that rock had always been present in my life with my dad's passion for Led Zeppelin and The Doors). All in all, Bon Jovi got me started down a path that would mark the person I am today.

Due to this, I always wanted to go see them live in concert. What could be more thrilling? Unfortunately, if it wasn't one thing it was another and I wasn't able to go to any of their Spanish shows until this past June. Quite by accident, around April, I was searching the Ticketmaster for an article I had been writing when I discovered that the band from New Jersey was not only coming to Madrid but their tickets were really cheap (conscious of the Spanish economic crisis they decided to not get paid for the show, thus selling cheaper tickets). Right then and there, I bought them. For the first time in over a decade I'd be seeing Bon Jovi live. I was ecstatic!

Time seemed to crawl -especially since around those dates I was suffering through my driver's license- but finally the date arrived.

Our seats were numbered (pit tickets were sold out when we bought ours) so we didn't have to worry about getting there early, but we did so anyway, and good thing too, since we came through the wrong door and had to be escorted to another part of the Vicente Calderón Stadium in Madrid. (Fortunately, the waiting and escorting was made much more entertaining with some really nice and cute security personnel).

Our seats were way, way, way at the top. Bon Jovi would be little more than ants, but it didn't matter, what was important was the vibe of the show; the possibility of listening to that music live.

The stadium quickly filled up as the finishing touches to the stage were prepared.  Dusk started to fall, lights went on and Bon Jovi entered the arena. The crowd went wild and so did I.

The Spanish audience thanks the band

Old classics like You Gave Love a bad name, Runaway, Bed of Roses, Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen from Mars, or Bad Medicine, got the crowd singing and dancing with the band. New songs, though not as well learned, were also cheered. I alternated between sitting in my seat and moving to the rhythm of those rock anthems. However, I have to admit that the best moment of the concert for me was when they played It's My Life. I sang the lyrics at the top of my voice and fisted my hand in the air with the rest of the crowd as my thoughts whirred around the terrible few weeks I'd been having lately. If time could have been stopped I would have done it at that moment, during that song, when my anthem was playing and assuring me that it was my life and because I wasn't going to live forever, my torment was not going to last forever.

Unfortunately, 2 things marred my first Bon Jovi concert. One, the sound in the Vicente Calderón stadium was truly awful. Perhaps because we were so high up, or because it was windy, or because the sound technicians weren't doing their jobs right or there was just bad acoustics, but from where I was the music and lyrics would fade and disappear into nothing or sound distorted. More than one song was ruined in this way.
The second thing was that I had to leave early. Since I didn't have my driver's license and I live in the middle of nowhere, I had to take a bus back home and the last one left at 1am. To reach that bus I had to leave the concert at around 12:15, missing out on almost another half hour of concert.

Still, I'm happy and thrilled that I finally had the chance to eliminate "seeing a Bon Jovi Concert live" from my bucket list, and do hope to see them again, this time with better acoustics, from the pit and until the end.




It's so shaky because I kept jumping up and down *g*