Tour Statistic & Summary
Tourname: Crush Tour
Legs: 3
Shows: 39
Canceled: -
Almost four years or 1.454 days had passed since the end of the These Days tour, when Bon Jovi embarked on their Crush world tour in July of 2000.
For a good week, they played 5 shows at the big domes in Japan and these can be regarded as some sort of “final transition” between their previous and current tour: Much like in 1996, the setlist contained a 3-song acoustic set in the middle for which the entire band came up to the front.
In 1996, a re-arranged version of I’d Die For You had seen the light of the day in that spot, this time around it was Runaway which got reworked into a piano ballad. These Japanese shows felt like the band was testing the waters as to how the setlists were going to be structured for the upcoming legs of the Crush tour. This also meant that some of the most interesting setlists already got played at this point with the concert in Fukuoka featuring the combo (It’s Hard) Letting You Go and Damned and hence making it the only show on the entire tour to feature back-to-back tracks off These Days.
By the final night in Osaka, the acoustic set had vanished and was not to return again for the remainder of the tour. However, Runaway held steady in its new arrangement, leading to the original version not being played again until the One Wild Night tour.
In early August, the band kicked off their European tour in Finland where the previous one also had ended. A few things had already become clear by this point: The shows had overall gotten a lot shorter. Whereas in 1995 and especially 1996, most nights had run up to 150 to 180 minutes showtime, this time around the majority of shows only made it a bit past the 2-hour mark. Furthermore, almost all songs from These Days had vanished from the setlists and, bar one outing of Damned in Belgium, most fans could hope for was the title track.
Their comeback tour overall proved to be successful though with them playing the final two nights at Wembley Stadium before its demolition and them wrapping that leg up a the Zeppelinfeld in Nuernberg. This show drew in around 70,000 fans which was not only Bon Jovi’s second biggest audience in Germany, but also a bigger one than there had been at the Monsters of Rock festival at the same place in 1986, when they had played as an opening act.
During this stint, the band had also recorded their concert at the Letzigrund Stadion in Zurich, Switzerland for an official concert video release, but fans in general agree that it hadn’t been the band’s best night and neither this nor Wembley, but Bremen is widely considered to have been the standout concert of their European leg.
After a break of almost two months, during which they had done some promo performances in the US in mid-September, the band took off on what was to become their comeback as a live act on home soil in Charlotte, North Carolina in early November.
While they had been regarded as hip and basically sold out any place across the US in the late 80s, the early-90s Grunge movement had pushed them off the radar and lead to them heavily struggling with tickets sales in their home country throughout the 90’s. Crush, along with its smash hit It’s My Life, catapulted them back into the position of a major live force at home again and had them established as that for the years to come.
This tour had been quite laid-back for the band’s standards with only 39 shows spread across three continents whereas they had easily played such an amount in the US or Europe alone in the 90’s. But the situation had changed for the band members: not only had they all gotten older, they had also all became fathers in the meantime and individually underlined in interviews that they enjoyed the more mellow touring schedule because they got to spend more time with their families. And, by the time the band was rocking across Europe and the US, it had already become clear that Crush’s success meant they were in for an extension – in 2001, on the One Wild Night tour.
Song statistic
The shows had songs from 8 different albums (incuding Jon's solo album Blaze Of Glory).
Only 7800° Fahrenheit has been completely ignored.
Livin' On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name, Wanted Dead Or Alive, Bad Medicine, Lay Your Hands On Me, Keep The Faith, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, It's My Life and Just Older were played at every show.
Captain Crash & The Beauty Queen From Mars (38 appearances), Someday I'll Be Saturday Night (36), One Wild Night (35), Next 100 Years (34) and Born To Be My
Baby (33) were setlist staples as well.
The rare songs of the tour were (It's Hard) Letting You Go and Hey God with only one performance followed by the acoustic version of I'd Die For You (2), Living In
Sin (2), Love For Sale (4), I Believe (4) and Damned (4).
Also remarkable that with Say It Isn't So and Thank You For Loving Me two of the albums' three singles only got played about half the time. While Thank You For Loving Me got played at 37 % of the European and 67 % of the North American shows, Say It Isn't So was dropped completely in North America after being played at all European shows and during 3 of 5 Japanese shows.
Save The World and She's A Mystery are the only Crush-songs (besides the bonus tracks) that haven't been played live at all.
(Click on the images to enlarge them)
