New on YouTube

Bon Jovi
27 January 1987
Center Coliseum, Seattle🇺🇸
2nd night
🏟️ Slippery When Wet Tour

🎛️🎶🎧->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhABTEltNY&t=71s

The concert was unlocked, remastered, uploaded and made available to the public on 9 February 2024, on the Bon Jovi channel that focuses entirely on Bon Jovi’s roaring 80s;
YouTube channel FighterBJ.

The Era Things Got Wild

👩🏼‍💻 the story 

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Unlocked after 37 years by channel FighterBJ, we are treated to a ride to what I consider to be Bon Jovi’s roughest era.

It were the concerts that were opened by the close to heresy combo of “Pink Flamingos”, the instrumental piece which belongs to the song Let It Rock;
Followed by Raise Your Hands.

As a consequence, Let It Rock was pushed back into the show, and contained a “my side – your side” game of screaming fans on Richie Sambora’s side versus Jon Bon Jovi’s side;
That went on too long by any standard.

Speaking of “standards” and “going on too long”, there was the “Hallmark Speech” in one of its many iterations, introducing Bad Name.
It started commemorating their time in Vancouver recording their latest album Slippery When Wet, but quickly had Jon pushing the boundaries between the passable and the misogynistic, and ending up on the wrong side of them.
Which considering the 80s liberal climate, was almost an accomplishment.

In his defense (and there could be many made, of course!), his voice dangled on the cusp of being shot and totally unusable, more often than not, during the non-stop touring that was Bon Jovi’s second half of the 80s.
Long speeches were one way to give it some rest.

And “yet”, or maybe even “as a result”, there is no way to not fall head over heels in love with the concerts from the Slippery When Wet Tour.

For starters it was the time when Jon always went the extra mile flying over the crowd, hanging from a cable, to the back of the room to visit the fans there, and sing the second album song Silent Night.
Which would later be replaced with the newer ballad, Never Say Goodbye.

“My chariot please!” he would call in the cable he would hook himself onto, that would take him soaring over the crowd.
After having asked the people in the back “What do want me to do, come back there and see you guys?” only to be met by excessive screaming.

Speaking of which;
I could be wrong, but in my imagination, the screaming on US soil has never been harder, louder, more enthusiastic, than during the Slippery When Wet era.
The crowd was clearly whipped into an Elvis-level frenzy.

In Europe I would pinpoint the height of their Insane Screaming Phase one record later:
During the New Jersey Tour.
But if you listen to Seattle second night 1987, it is impossible to imagine the crowd being any louder than they are.
They are clearly giving it all, just like the band.

Although it was their third album, and although they had been touring from the start, the Slippery When Wet Tour was actually their first headliner tour in the US.
Their second album had given them headliner gigs in Japan en Europe, but in their home country, they had not been able to stand out in the legion of other hair metal and rock bands.
Mid-80s, the American rock market was a very large and densely populated pond, and the first two albums had not been enough to make their mark.

But when Bon Jovi made their biggie, the album Slippery When Wet, released late summer 1986?
You Give Love a Bad Name and Livin’ On A Prayer stormed the charts and when they played Seattle January 1987, the audience was so hungry for them, hanging on them every word and possessed by their undying adoration, which reached levels they’d be hard-pressed to match for the rest of their lives;

That rough-edged, giving it their all, diving in head-first and coming out the other side sweaty, stinky and covered in God knows what Bon Jovi?
Was exactly what they came for.

This new concert

Bon Jovi
27 January 1987
Center Coliseum, Seattle🇺🇸
2nd night
🏟️ Slippery When Wet Tour

has been added to:
New in Bon Jovi concerts before 1997

And to the playlist:
“Part II: Bon Jovi concerts on this day 6 Dec-9 June (before 1997)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiGoDE3C06ScbVI_oPZcf77OtrO_935JD”
at 27 January 1987.

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~Suzanne
🇳🇱 Tikkie
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