Wednesday 12 October 
The soundtrack for today is:

Bon Jovi
12 October 1992
Fast Lane, Asbury Park
New Jersey 🇺🇸
🏟️ first promo concert Keep the Faith

If it had not been for the continuous female screaming during the opener “With a little help from my friends”, one may indeed have mistaken Bon Jovi’s debut performance to promote their Keep the Faith album, for a run-of-the-New-Jersey-mill bar band.
As several newspapers implied.

But as much as that might have been true, musically speaking, there was one aspect to Bon Jovi playing there, at the Fast Lane venue in Asbury Park, New Jersey’s holy ground for anyone who is anything in the New Jersey music scene, an aspect that was the theme of the whole night, and that aspect was;
They had been away.

Unlike local bands, Bon Jovi had been from New Jersey, not in New Jersey.

The audience to this under-cover club gig, consisted largely of family, friends, people from the music industry, and then there were the few lucky fans who managed to get a ticket.
None of them knew what to expect.

The upcoming album Keep the Faith, had not been released yet.
And what Bon Jovi knew, was that they had a big acoustic production in the wings, coming up in two weeks time; An Evening With Bon Jovi for MTV.
Bon Jovi needed to get their head around their set, including the 60s covers they intended to blend in.
But they didn’t want to lose the connection with the audience either.

To make matters one could say “worse”;
The band were not just transitioning into a new musical style, but they were out of practice and even out of touch, of playing together live.
When in the first months of 1990, touring had finally come to a stop –
Bon Jovi needed to clean house.
For a while they were literally out of touch, and did not even speak to each other. Many, including the band, did not know if there was a future for Bon Jovi.

In October 1992, that was all put behind them and the band had been on the west and in Canada for over half a year, recording Keep the Faith, before they came back to New Jersey and played Asbury Park.

What do you play when after all that time, you are finally home?

 

Not sure what to play

👩🏼‍💻 the story October 12

.

In the second half of 1986, Bon Jovi went from being a struggling band, who had been fighting to make their mark in music with two albums whose biggest achievement had been that the record company had allowed them to make another one.
Another one, that would be big.

In 1986, Bon Jovi’s third album needed to go big- or the band needed to go home. It was released in August, and before the year was over, Bon Jovi had attained super stardom.

Yet up until the late 80s, few music journalists bothered to pay attention to any hardrock band who carried Elnett hairspray. There were so many bands behind the veil of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball and Europe’s music festivals for hardrock and heavy metal, that the hardrock bands who did manage to get their songs played on radio, and who did have hits (such as Scorpions, Europe and Whitesnake, and of course Bon Jovi) were still not given attention.
As if they could drop back in line with the other dime-in-a-dozen bands, at any moment.

In particular in The Netherlands, and I believe Europe at large, few hardrock bands were known, and Bon Jovi was scrutinized and made fun of.
In particular after their 1986 breakthrough.
I never dug into it, but I can imagine someone who had seen them opening for KISS, who had been in Tilburg in 1985, and even the November 1986 concert in Arnhem, with Bad Name and Prayer both high up in he charts-the newspaper press would have been positive.

But the music press, the journalists who wrote long articles about bands?
That was a different story.
To this day, I have not found or read or seen, even one interviewer or journalist, who in the 80s was able to hear that Bon Jovi’s albums and their live performances, contained a depth, complexity, and musical richness, that made it blatantly obvious this band was here to stay.

That Bon Jovi would survive not just the decades, not just all the other bands, but that like the Stones before them;
Bon Jovi would go down in history as the biggest band of their generation.

Listening to Bon Jovi albums, and even to their earliest recordings, it is impossible to not know the difference between Bon Jovi playing Asbury Park’s Fast Lane in 1992, cracking jokes with the audience, reminiscing about the past, and all those times the band played there and there was almost no one in the audience-
and a professional local bar band.

So did Bon Jovi struggle, to come up with a proper setlist?
They did.
Were they unsure what to play?
Probably, yes.

But after opening with an XL rendition of Joe Cocker’s version of “Little help from my friends”; 
Cutting straight into a staccato drum intro – 
“Are you ready? Are you willing? Are you able to rock n roll?”
blasting into Wild in the Streets.

Jon Bon Jovi greeting the audience with a “Good evening Asbury Park, New Jersey”, that is satisfying at an almost visceral level, and turning the audience on and the mood up, with casual conversation about reasons to celebrate today.
The crowd, understandably, goes wild! 

They make momentum with a string of three hits, back to back:
You Give Love a Bad Name, Born to be my Baby, and I’d Die For You, which indeed does sound like a bar band has taken the stage!
In the most wonderful, we-all-wish-we-there kind of way.

Jon cracks open the memory box, giving a lively description of New Jersey 1978, the music scene and how he met Tico Torres.
And how Jon played the Stone Pony every Wednesday and almost nobody showed up!

Brave attempt to decide on what to play next through a democratic process with a yelling crowd.
A “New?” “Old?” poll, leads to a cut-short version of Runaway, with Jon saying it’s “not bad for guys who haven’t played together all year” and excusing himself he’s probably more excited about the new stuff.
“You too?” 

Three new songs from the Keep the Faith album, possibly the first time they are played;
Sleep When I m Dead with Jon effectively playing the dance-on-my-bar barman role from intro to outro!
A confession-filled introduction to Bed of Roses;
Going all in with Keep the Faith, and we can already hear the hallmark maracas!

Giving the people what they want, with Lay Your Hands On Me, plugging in anything electric within reach and providing ample sing along time;
The story of how Jon “fooled” David Bryan into playing in Bon Jovi instead of becoming a doctor;
Good Lovin’, best known in the 1966 version from The Young Rascals;  
An upbeat and prolonged Bad Medicine that will seldom have been belted along more enthusiastically; 

An acoustic set with Livin’ on a Prayer and a dressed-down version of the Allman Brothers “Midnight Rider”,  leading into “Wanted Dead or Alive”;
“Kansas City” with New Jersey icon Lance Larson, who gets thanked for letting Jon Bon Jovi play the clubs when he was still underage;
And closing with what was then their most recent hit, Jon Bon Jovi’s solo song, Blaze of Glory.

With all these things in place, everybody left knowing the difference between Bon Jovi and a New Jersey bar band.
Even a professional one.

Looking back, it is unmistakable that 1992 Bon Jovi had not just gone way further than all the New Jersey bands before them; 
And had not just survived an entire decade of hardrock bands, globally, that would get lost in history and never make it back on their feet again;
Had not just proved the critics wrong.

But that the state of New Jersey, a state they had brought into the light by naming their 1988 album after it;
That the state had become synonymous with Bon Jovi.

That yes, all those years touring from August 1986 to early 1990;
The silent years ’90-91 when Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora both made their highly acclaimed solo records, both recorded in California;
And in 1992, with the resurrection of Bon Jovi, and recording their new album Keep the Faith in Vancouver, Canada;
That although all that time, Bon Jovi the band, had indeed not been in New Jersey -Jon tells how he has not been home for eight months, before the show.

But that by that time, Bon Jovi had become synonymous with New Jersey.
And New Jersey would be known, worldwide, because Bon Jovi was from there.
Bon Jovi and New Jersey, had become inseparable. 

And when you’re that big brother that comes home from his travels, to a house filled with family, delighted to see you;
Then it really doesn’t really matter, what you play.

What matters, is you’re there.

Therefor

12 october 1992, New Jersey 🇺🇸
Bon Jovi – Live at Fast Lane | Audience Recording | Full Concert In Audio | Asbury Park 1992
is the soundtrack for today

.
The show is added to the playlist 
“Bon Jovi concerts on this day”
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiGoDE3C06ScAo9UN4GyhtQWYfl3d6jMT
at October 12.

 ~Suzanne
Rock Star Writer
☕️ Buy me a coffee
🥳 PayPalMe 
🇳🇱Tikkie van de week 

Exciting news!
As already announced last Monday, this blog #dailybonjoviyoga has been renamed to

#dailybonjovilive
Bon Jovi history, for the world of today 

Where I will share these stories inspired by Bon Jovi concerts.
I really love that tag line! I hope you do too.

On Monday 10 October 2022 – and for reasons that do not have anything to do with how much I love you! – I cancelled all things yoga and business related. 
That is why I had to change the name of this site, to one without yoga.

This also means that Rock Star phase 2, as outlined below, has moved into phase 3. But there are so many moving parts!
I have to set it up in phases.

Today I bought a new domain name, dailybonjovilive.com, and it already refers to this site, the one you’re currently on.
But there is a 96 hour waiting period before I can make that url the main one, to this site.
Which is why you may still see dailybonjoviyoga.com, in the address bar.

All blogs and YouTube channels will be addressed personally, and redesigned or put on hold. 

Old yoga videos on YouTube will stay available, and the videos I still have on private (since a tech problem in 2020) will be updated and unlocked as was planned.
In general, old yoga content will not be removed, just no new ones created.

updated project list soon, this one was Phase 2: