KEEPING THE FAITH
Bon Jovi still knows how to please Air Canada Centre crowd,
Bon Jovi
(out of 4) At the Air Canada Centre on Monday. Repeats on Tuesday.
Bon Jovi’s got such a weird hold on this city I’d be tempted at this point to attribute it to some sort of occult intervention were it not for, y’know, the tunes.
But there they are: the tunes. It’s hard to argue with the tunes. As much as one might sometimes cringe at the unapologetic, populist cheesiness that has typified Jon Bon Jovi et al.’ s output for close to 35 years now, he and the band that bears his name have always had an ear for a crowd-pleaser. And nowhere, it would appear, does this New Jersey-born outfit more consistently and regularly please a crowd than in Toronto, where it holds the distinction of being the band that has played more Air Canada Centre dates than any other since the arena opened in February 1999.
Bon Jovi notched its 18th appearance in the venue — where a banner naming it the first member of the Air Canada Centre Hall of Fame has hung since 2013 — on Monday night, and it was to be followed by a 19th on Tuesday evening. And if the warm reception it received from the full house in attendance was any indication, it will be back for a few more before either the band decides to call it a day or the rink itself is bulldozed into dust.
There was some question whether Bon Jovi might make this week’s Toronto dates since throat troubles on its titular frontman’s part forced the cancellation of a couple of hometown-esque gigs at New York’s Madison Square Garden last Friday and Saturday.
But — while the man in charge was noticeably straining on a lot of the higher notes, cutting them short and/or shifting them into a lower register throughout much of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour set — the band showed up to play in professional form on Monday.
Had it shaved maybe 45 minutes off that set list, it would have had a pretty much flawless piece of no-frills pop theatre on its hands.
Even up in the cheap seats, however, the energy tended to flag when Bon Jovi, clad in a Maple Leafs tank top, and the six-piece ensemble behind him these days — which now features Toronto’s own Phil (Phil X) Xenidis on guitar, prompting the bandleader to jokingly introduce everyone as “Phil Xenidis and the Jersey Boys Band” early in the evening — dwelled a bit too long between stubborn classic-rock radio nuggets like “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” on material from last year’s This House is Not For Sale and the sort of just-OK even-more-obvious-than-usual wannabe-Springsteen anthems that have been its stock in trade for most of the 2000s during the first third of the set.
There was a point to be made, mind you, with all the This House is Not for Sale stuff, since Jon Bon Jovi’s longtime right-hand-man Richie Sambora departed the band in 2013 and weighted everything to follow with the burden of being a new beginning.
Bon Jovi talked quite a bit about that new beginning — which has, incidentally, involved replacing Sambora with both Phil X and John Shanks on guitar — around the middle of the set, when he invoked an iffy shipbuilding metaphor to illustrate how the new number “New Year’s Day” signalled “a big, bright light ahead to the future” during the making of This House, further hammering the point home within the song itself with lyrics about ships setting sail toward the horizon, “a newborn baby’s cry” and, indeed, “new beginnings.” Yeah, yeah. We got it.
Bon Jovi’s smart enough to know when he’s testing even a forgiving room’s patience. So, after kinda failing to keep things in the “second gear” promised by “It’s My Life” by lapsing back into wayward newbies like “God Bless This Mess” and the dreadful ballad “Scars on this Guitar,” he stopped himself and righted all wrongs that came before.
“From here on out, it’s hits, hits, hits and nothing but hits,” he proclaimed, cuing up a run of just that: hits, hits, hits and nothing but hits: “Born to Be My Baby,” “Bad Medicine,” “Lay Your Hands on Me,” “Have a Nice Day,” “Keep the Faith,” “Raise Your Hands” and on into the inevitable — and still exquisite in you’ll-hateyourself-for-singing-along-butyou’ll-still-sing-along terms — onetwo encore punch of “Wanted (Dead or Alive)” and “Livin’ On a Prayer” to send the crowd home fizzing.
Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re hits for a reason. And they are the reason Bon Jovi will keep rolling through town and selling out the Air Canada Centre indefinitely.