A rather crappy recording, both in terms of audio and video, but a great show! The audio gets a little more bearable after the first song and once you turn it up and get past the nearby noises, it can be quite enjoyable. Believe it or not, out of two excisting videos, this actually is by far the better version.
Video colours were recovered with Virtual Dub filters and the audio was heavily echoed to get past the nearby sounds. A lot of metallic noise (could've been filmed
on the wheelchair area) close to the filmer. The band's in great shape and the setlist holds a few nice twists and turns!
Tonight, we'll have our time machine run nothing less than 35 years into the past, plunging us right in to the band's Slippery When Wet tour. It may take a minute to adjust to the show, but it's not a bad one overall, in fact, I find it to be much easier listenable than Melbourne 1989 a few days ago. And for a recording of the band's SWW tour, that's actually saying something! The sound was low, distand and echoey (maybe recorded from a higher level in the building), but it turned out decent after some work. Pushing the higher frequencies lead to an unpleasant, "squeaky" sound, so I stuck to what I'd like to call the "analog charme". The bass is a bit more boomy for the first three songs, but then drops off quite a bit and it's overall quite constant in terms of sound quality, once you've adjusted to it.
Reviews on the night were harsh, as this quote from next day's newspaper reveals:
"The top of the pop charts these days is filled with dissimilar acts. There is the socially conscious U2, the socially unconscious Beastie Boys and the socially vague Jon Bon Jovi, who talks about the Joy of love one minute, then turns into a raving sexist the next. Bon Jovi's conflicting impulses were on full display last night. His polished, teen-oriented pop contained a spirited optimism. but it was often undercut every time he opened his mouth between songs. During one acutely boring 10- minute rap, he told of a girlfriend whom he caught playing around with another man. "Was it Superman? Was it Batman? Was it John Cafferty or the Beaver Brown Band'?" he babbled, while dismissing the woman with a few slang curses that were embarrassing. The story went on too long, was dripping with egomania and made you distrust whatever positive feelings were placed in his songs. Worse, Bon Jovi spoke with a shuck-and-Jive accent that sounded like a very bad imitation of Peter Wolf. The show would have been much better had he Just stuck to music. The music itself was well-played. Bon Jovi is often dismissed as a videogenic rocker who got lucky, but he hasn't sold 9 million copies of his last album, "Slippery When Wet," simply because his blond locks and hairy chest..."
This time, we'll trace 5 years further back than last night, to a show on the band's 1995 tour! This era is mostly known for two things - great shows and bad recordings. For a long, I was lead to believe that this was to Bon Jovi having gone to bigger (and not necessarily better suited) outdoor venues due to their success, but that's just a theory since amphitheatre shows don't sound better either. Overall, I think more of these shows were just copied around on cassette tapes at the time, hence there being a lot more low quality copies. That concert here was tolerable in terms of noise, but incredibly boomy and dull, like you listen to a show behind a closed door. Some radical settings brought it back to life and it's overall decent for a listen I'd say. Sound changes appear, especially during the middle of the show, when cassette changes appeared. But going by the reports from the venue, it was also down to that.
The band was in the groove though and the version of Always is nice one with Richie's beautiful guitar tone and "raw" playing! Crazily enough, there's no track off These Days on the setlist. They probably had planned on closing the night out with This Ain't A Love Song, but got rushed off the stage due to strict local time curfews. Still, the night held a song premiere of a different kind :)
Spontaneous premiere! Basically, just because I need a bit of distraction for two hours (if I can make it through the entire show). This version misses one song of the concert, Thank You For Loving Me. Different transers from the original tape exist and this was the better one which gave more room for sound improvement, but didn't contain the song due to a CD error. I have an older transfer in my boxes with that tune, I may add it as a single upload at some point. But since none of this show ever made it to YT, it's new territory anyway ;)
The sound was very dull, I used some harsh settings to change that and I think that it's quite enjoyable to listen to. There's so scratching noise on the right channel which you'll probably only discover with headphones and was caused by some unwinding cable I think. The performance is top notch, the band's on fire and Jon goes for a lot of passages and ad-libs with passion!
The final encore with the spartanic, yet incredible rendition of Never Say Goodbye really is the icing on the cake!
Just to give people a general idea: for every audio you get to hear on YT (especially in the 80s and 90s), there's at least one (or two) of this kind of quality that usually don't make it here. Some boldly stated in the last audio premiere that they'd also get through the "bad ones". Now you can tell me if you'd have made it :D Keep in mind that I got a good amount of even much worse sounding recordings from the band's golden era ;)
This is the show of which, for a long time, I didn't even know a recording existed. I guess it was traded a long time ago on audio tapes and got lost when most of what we have today got digitalized in the early to mid-2000's. A few years ago, I found this on the archived website and after years of begging, the person actually went and dug it out in his attic. Thanks my friend!
Don't expect too much, the quality is average at best, but it's the inaugural performance of Cadillac Man probably no one knew about this cassette came back to light!
The quality changes a bit throughout, probably due to different tapes (it gets better halfway through Wild In The Streets). Even this one came on one Type II and one Type I cassette, hence the clear sound quality change in Good Golly Miss Molly.
Since the tape ran too fast, I corrected it by using Livin' On A Prayer from Rotterdam '89 as a reference since that was the one song they played to a click track even back then.
I didn't do much to the tape, other than duplicating the right channel (left one had no audio), smoothing out and lowering the high frequencies (only hiss in there), a bit of levelling and expanding stereo width/dynamics. I tried a couple approaches of pushing it further, but it only made it worse in a different way, so I decided to leave it as natural as possible.
The performance itself is great, they really were on a roll in Australia '89! Tokyo Road was very rare at the time and Living In Sin has so many ad-libs that the first chorus doesn't start until 5:45 into the song! Played on Alec's 38th birthday!