I remember the first time I heard Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer.” I was a football cheerleader and was walking from the bus to the field for a game when a friend of my boyfriend’s drove up alongside my sister and I in his truck one crisp September night.
“Hey, pretty sisters. Wanna a ride?”
We hop in and are enveloped in, “Oooh wa ooh, wa ooh ooh, ooh ooh,” blaring from his speakers. (Boys and stereos, I tell ya.)
“What is this?” my sister’s voice yells from underneath her permed head.
“Bon Jovi’s new album!” he grins, and cranks it up more.
We arrive at the field being serenaded by Jon Bon telling us us to take his hand, we’ll make it he swears, because Whoa . . . we’re livin’ on a prayer.
Loved the song. Loved Bon Jovi. Loved that album.
The band definitely provided the soundtrack to many of my teenage moments and so when they played Fargo this weekend I simply had to go. I grabbed my three favorite friends, my new Hudson jeans and prepared for a night of time travel back to 1989.
Well . . . a lot has changed since then.
Including Bon Jovi.
An hour into the concert they’d played more new stuff than old and I was fighting the urge to sit down, feeling more dead than alive and resisting the urge to nap, and not in a bed of roses. This folding chair will do just fine.
“Is it just me, or is this like one giant Pepsi commercial?” my girlfriend next to me confesses.
I look up at the screens showing pictures of people in their hometowns and listen to a song that sounds like the theme to a video montage people make after a unifying natural disaster like a flood or a tornado and nod in agreement. On top of that, Jon Bon danced around the stage like he was in an episode of Glee. Where’s my bad ass hair band? They’ve been kidnapped by middle aged men in skinny jeans singing songs that would be more fitting around a campfire.
I leave a couple times for a bathroom break. Buy some water. And find the t-shirt stand more exciting than the show.
Oooh. This pink one’s cute.
The final encore is, finally, thank you Jesus, Living on a Prayer.
Two hours of torture and I finally hear my favorite Bon Jovi song live. But by then I’m so bored I can barely even get into it. And mourning the fact that the rock stars of the 80’s are now kings of lame.
Oh well.
Even though I felt shot through heart by the fact that my favorite 80’s bands has run away and is no longer born to be my baby, I survived the bad medicine and celebrate the fact that at least they did end with my favorite song.
And went down.
In a blaze of glory.
“Oooh wah oooh wah oooh, oooh oooh ooh, Oooh wah oooh wah ooh ooh ooh ooh . . .”
Five stars.
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