The Bon Jovi Bond
My brother and I were at one of those critical junctures in our relationship that all brothers come to eventually. I was 17 and he was 15. We were at the age when fighting tooth and nail with each other was getting old and yet the idea of being friends was still a little unsettling. When Dan wasn’t mentally torturing me or trying to sabotage any possibilities I might have with the opposite sex, he was emulating everything about me. He dressed like me, listened to the same music as me and watched the same TV shows as me. On the other hand, when I wasn’t trying to beat the piss out of Dan, I was including him more and more in my social and leisure activities.
A typical day would go something like this: Dan and I would arrive home from school at about the same time. The phone would ring and Dan would answer it. If the caller was a girl for me, Dan would invariably tell her that I couldn’t come to the phone because I was in the bathroom taking a big, smelly dump. At that point, I would wrestle the phone away, make my apologies to the caller, hang up and chase Dan around the house. When I caught him I would sit on him and punch him repeatedly in the shoulder or thigh until I was too tired to hit him anymore. I always punched Dan in the shoulder or thigh because he bruised easily and I had to hit him where it wouldn’t be immediately obvious to my parents. (Dan’s arms and legs ranged in color from yellow to purple for most of his early teenage years.) When the beating was over, we would take my boom box and a couple of tapes out to the driveway and play basketball amiably until dinner like nothing had happened. It was a weird time in our lives.
I’m not a psychologist, nor do I make any claims to any educational background in that field. But, in my opinion, someone should do a study of brothers from ten to eighteen years old focusing on the love/hate phenomenon that occurs at this age. To me, it seems like however you come out of this stage of your development will determine your relationship with your brother for the rest of your lives. Either you become friends or you grow apart. When I look at my all my friends’ fraternal relationships, there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.
Once, when I was particularly mad at Dan for some egregious offense, I didn’t speak to him for two weeks. When I say I didn’t speak to him, I mean that I flat out refused to acknowledge his presence. Even to the point where, if I were asked to relay a message to him, I would write a note, drop it on the floor next to him and walk away. I tell you I was stone cold toward him. Finally, Dan went to my dad because he was truly concerned that I would literally never speak to him again. My dad, who had a terrible relationship with his own brother, exploded at us. In an expletive-laden tirade, he told us that we had better make up our differences before it was too late. To my dad, whose brother died before they could ever reconcile, there was nothing worse than alienating a sibling. I believe it was shortly after that lecture that Dan and I decided to be friends.
For my brother and I, the common bond was heavy metal. Dan had a brief flirtation with Duran Duran (I think he wrote a school report about them), only to renounce them when I teased him for liking a band that mostly appealed to girls. The fact that I was listening to bands who occasionally dressed like girls was totally lost on both of us. Fortunately, the mid-80’s were metal’s heyday and Dan and I snapped up every new release by the spandex coalition. We loved Def Leppard, Dokken, Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot. Even flashes in the pan like Winger, Keel and Hurricane found their way into our tape collections. And we worshiped at the altar of pioneers like Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Ozzy. What we didn’t own, we taped off the radio and made into our own mixes. Those were loud, but harmonious times in the Kaplan household.
Dan and I could discuss and debate heavy music for hours without ever once throwing a punch. Most of our friends hated it, so we made it our own brother thing. We were closet metal heads, dressing conservatively and wearing our hair short while secretly rocking out at home. The only thing that hinted at our musical leanings was the band logos we used to draw on our school notebooks. It was Dan and I and our music against our conventional, little world. The time had come to test our brotherly bond. We decided to attend a concert together.
A big show was coming to Worcester that December, an act that was selling out arenas around the country. At 9:59 a.m. the Saturday morning the tickets went on sale (Ticket sales for Centrum concerts always started on Saturdays at 10 a.m.), I began dialing the Centrum box office. This was before the Internet and multiple phone lines, making it a simple contest of who had the fastest fingers and the best luck. I got through on the second try. Armed with my mom’s MasterCard, I ordered two tickets on the floor for a little quintet from New Jersey known as Bon Jovi.
Bon Jovi has been called a lot of things by heavy metal fans, very few of them flattering. “Hair Metal,” “Girl Metal,” “Glitter Rock,” and “Aquanet Music,” are some of the monikers The Garden State’s favorite sons have had thrust upon them. Other metal acts even refused to be placed in the same category with them. James Hetfield of Metallica routinely placed a piece of tape with the words “Kill Bon Jovi” on his guitar during concerts. (His other favorite message was “More Beer.”) So, admitting that I went to this concert, even all these years later, causes an involuntary reaction in me akin the moment your balls make contact with ice-cold water.
Adding to the estrogen level of this show was the opening act, an up-and-coming Philadelphia group called Cinderella. A band who, collectively, had the worst hair in rock ‘n’ roll. Lead singer Tom Keifer looked like a bushier version of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and bassist Eric Brittingham’s platinum blond ‘do was once described as “The Palm Tree” by a fellow guitarist. Cinderella was on this tour presumably because Jon Bon Jovi had “discovered” them and helped produce their debut album Night Songs. The two biggest songs from this record were the catchy “Shake Me” and “Nobody’s Fool,” a power ballad that oozed sharp cheddar. Thanks to these hits, and sugar daddy JBJ, Night Songs was enjoying almost as much success as the multi-platinum Slippery When Wet. This was a powerful double bill that barreled into the Worcester Centrum that winter night in 1986.
Now in possession of my very own driver’s license, I decided it was time to take concert going to the next level. After always being a passenger on the ride to shows (mostly in my dad's car), I was actually going to drive to one myself. Only one thing stood in my way: a 5-foot-9 tower of angst known as Amy Kaplan. Or, more familiarly, Mom. I had only been street legal for five or six months and my mom didn’t like the idea of Dan sitting in the passenger seat while I was driving. Her fear was that we would start fighting and I would lose control of the car causing a multiple-car pileup. For this permission slip effort, Dan and I went for the double team.
Dan: Hey, Mom. CJ and I are going to the Bon Jovi concert.
Mom: How are you going to get there?
Me: I’m driving.
Mom (hooking a thumb at Dan): How’s he getting there?
Me (rolling my eyes): Come on, Mom.
Mom (continuing without acknowledging me): …’cause he’s not going in your car.
Dan (incredulous): Why?
Mom (responding to Dan): You’re going to distract him and he’ll wind up in a ditch.
Me (seeing my dad walk into the room): Dad, help us out here. Mom won’t let us drive to Worcester together.
Dad (wishing he’d never entered the room): Shit.
Me (trying a reasoned approach): Dad, I’m going to college in six months. I think I’m old enough to drive a car for 45 minutes with my brother. Do you really think I’m going to let go of the wheel and start fighting with him? Give me a little credit, huh?
Dad (in obvious pain): I’ll discuss it with your mother.
The night before the concert, my dad came into my room while I was reading.
“You have to call us when you get to Worcester,” he told me.
Remember, this was before portable cell phones were everywhere. Even car phones were in their infancy. Which meant Dan and I had to find a pay phone somewhere in the Centrum and bring along the $1.50 in coins it would take to complete the call.
“Dad…,” I began to protest.
“Do me a favor,” Dad interrupted. “Just call your mother when you get there and you’ll save us both a lot of aggravation.” Anytime Dad wanted to end a debate, he pulled the “aggravation” card. “I don’t need this aggravation” was essentially his catchphrase. To hear Dad tell it, he spent most of my childhood being aggravated.
“Fine,” I relented. “We’ll call.”
Dan and I set out for Worcester in plenty of time to arrive for Cinderella’s set. We parked in the Centrum garage and then walked over to the line where security was patting people down before allowing them into the arena. There was already a pretty good crowd and we were about twentieth in line. We leaned up against the side of the building and had a look around while waited our turn. There were teenage girls dressed in various layers of spandex, leather, eye shadow and glitter. At first glance, it was like the Elysian Fields for two horny high school boys. Until we realized that, with a few notable exceptions, every girl there was fourteen or younger. Dan wasn’t so far removed from them, but I felt like a narc. Or worse, a pervert. All I needed was the cheesy mustache.
Several minutes went by and our line hadn’t moved much, further adding to my discomfort. The girls in front of us chatted away excitedly as did those behind us, no one seeming to care about the slow pace. Suddenly, Dan and I felt drastically out of place. I looked forward to the front of the line and discovered that everyone ahead of us was a female. The same was true when I looked to the rear.
“Dan,” I whispered. “I think we’re in the wrong line.”
“No wonder everybody’s looking at us funny,” he replied.
I got out of line and walked up to a separate entrance. A middle-aged security guard stood alone in front of the door. He looked bored.
“Umm…Is this the line for guys?”
“You found it, son,” he answered.
I signaled to Dan, who tried his best to be nonchalant as he left the girls line, and we stood there while the guard patted us down briefly.
“My first customers,” he grinned. “Enjoy the show, fellas.”
It was our first inkling that this particular show might not turn out to be our proudest moment. When we got inside, we found that the security line situation was not an anomaly. The ratio of girls to boys was about 10 to 1. And that included the dads who had been coerced into bringing their pre-teen daughters. In other situations, this would have been great news. But, even if these girls had been closer to our age, they still weren’t here to see us. They came for Jon and Richie. We were just in the way.
Despite our adventure in the security line, we were still had about fifteen minutes to kill before the show started. Dan decided this would be a good time to buy a concert t-shirt.
Now, you have to understand something about Dan before we continue. As a kid, Dan was the prototypical anal-retentive when it came to clothes. Everything he wore had to be spotlessly clean, wrinkle-free and without the tiniest of holes. My clothes generally looked like I had slept in them. Dan’s always appeared to have been just purchased that day. Even now, it takes Dan hours to do his laundry because he straightens every article of clothing when it comes out of the washing machine and then hangs it just so on the line to dry. As far as I know, Dan will only trust the dryer with his socks and underwear. Once the drying is complete, Dan needs the balance of the day to properly fold and put away his clean clothes to ensure the preservation of their now pristine condition. Dan has turned laundry into a visual art form, albeit a demented one.
So it was that my selective younger brother and I arrived at one of the dozen or so makeshift souvenir stands set up in the lobby of the Centrum. There was the usual array of memorabilia ranging from pins and concert photos for the collectors to sweatshirts and tour jackets for the real losers. (Even then those cheesy leather jackets were like 150 bucks. Really, who buys those things? Unless you’re in the band, related to someone in the band or making fistfuls of money off the band, there is no way you should be wearing one of those jackets.) All Dan and I wanted was the conventional t-shirt, the item that when presented to your friends along with your ticket stub proved beyond all doubt that you had in fact attended the concert.
As usual, the nine or ten t-shirt options were tacked up on the flimsy cork board that served as the back wall of the booth. Right away, we eliminated all the Cinderella shirts. No way in hell we were going to buy or wear one of those. We pared it down further by refusing to acknowledge those shirts with pictures of the band on them. Nothing calls into question your masculinity more than wearing a shirt with another guy’s face on it. These criteria left us with three choices. Two of those had designs which much have been some silkscreen artist’s idea of cool (probably the same guy who painted the sides of vans) and the third was simply the Bon Jovi logo on the front and the tour dates on the back. We had our winner.
I plunked down $15, the guy tossed me an extra-large and I turned and started walking into the arena. When I looked back, Dan was still at the booth. He had four of the exact same shirts laid out on the counter and was meticulously inspecting each one. The cashier looked exasperated and a rather decent-sized line was starting to form behind Dan.
“They’re all the same, kid,” said the cashier in an annoyed tone.
“Just give me a second,” replied Dan, holding a shirt up to the light and then flipping it over to scrutinize the back.
After a good five minutes, Dan made his selection and we hurried to our seats just as the lights went down.
The most remarkable thing about Cinderella’s set occurred while they sang “Nobody’s Fool.” There’s a line in the song that goes: “I scream my heart out just to make a dime/and with that dime I bought your love/but now I’ve changed my mind.” As Tom Keifer screeched this memorable triad, a hailstorm of small, metal objects came down on and around the stage. Dimes. The sound of all that currency hitting the equipment nearly drowned out the song itself. For a few moments, the members of the band looked as though they were being fired upon. They bobbed and weaved and tried gamely to continue posing and looking fierce while performing their hit ballad. When the song ended, Keifer addressed the audience:
“We appreciate your support,” he said with a smile. “But please don’t throw stuff at us while we’re playing. It hurts.”
Cinderella was new and still trying to win fans, so they accepted that pelting with grace and good humor. A few years later, I saw them open for Judas Priest and the same thing happened. This time, Keifer stopped in the middle of the song and shouted: “STOP THROWING THE FUCKING DIMES!!!” I guess you can only take so much abuse in the name of Rock.
When the lights went up, I looked over at Dan who was studying his Bon Jovi shirt with a pained expression on his face.
“What?” I asked. Although I knew what was coming.
“There’s a hole,” Dan answered glumly.
“Where?”
Dan showed me a small opening where the sleeve met the shoulder about half the size of one of the dimes Tom Keifer was doubtlessly pulling out of his rat’s nest of hair about then.
“Dan, who’s gonna notice that?”
“I have to trade it for another one,” he said, ignoring me.
“Here. Take mine. I’ll take yours,” I offered holding up my shirt.
“No, yours has a bunch of threads sticking out of it. I want a new one.”
“Fine. We’ll get it after the show.”
“No. Now. They might be sold out after the show.”
“Do you realize how long the line is gonna be now?” I pleaded. But Dan was already on his way up the stairs to the lobby.
When we got to the souvenir booth, there was a crush of people trying to buy shirts before Bon Jovi went on. Dan fought his way to the front and got the attention of the guy who had sold him the shirt. I actually saw the guy’s eyes roll back in his head as he recognized Dan.
“What can I do for you…now?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“This shirt has a hole in it,” said Dan, undaunted.
“Kid, these shirts are made in, like, Indonesia. It’s amazing that they all have two sleeves.”
“Well, I want a different one.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Fine. Then I want my money back.”
The guy stared hard at Dan for a minute. Dan stared right back. Here was this skinny kid all bent out of shape about a lousy shirt that probably cost about a buck fifty to make. At this point, the guy probably figured he had two choices. He could continue going back and forth with Dan, which, although amusing, was a big waste of time. Or, he could give Dan a new shirt and get to the twenty-five kids behind us who didn’t care if the shirts were made out of camel shit as long as they said Bon Jovi on them.
“Here,” he said, tossing a few shirts down in front of Dan. “Pick one and get out of my face.”
Dan began the same process of inspecting the shirts as he had earlier when I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Dan,” I said, “if you don’t pick a shirt in the next thirty seconds I’m going to punch you in the head. I don’t even care if Mom and Dad see the bruises either.”
Dan began an accelerated assessment of the shirts and finally settled on one a short time later. Hurrying away from the souvenir stand for the second time that evening, we made it to our seats just seconds before the lights went down again.
I realize that I’ve spent the majority of this essay trying to distance myself from Bon Jovi, their fans and my own participation in this event. My tone would seem to suggest as much. But, smarmy as I try to be, I can’t get past the truth. I was excited for this concert. I not only owned Slippery When Wet, along with the rest of teenage America, but I had also purchased 7800? Fahrenheit when it first came out. And I’m pretty sure I had the single “Runaway” from the first album on a mix tape. So, no one held my feet to the fire to get me here. I was already on board this party train.
A lot of people (read: metal heads) out there probably think I’m a wuss (or worse) for going to this show. You would never be caught dead listening to Bon Jovi, much less going to one of their concerts, right? Let me just say this in my defense. You’re full of shit. As much as Bon Jovi dominated the radio airwaves and MTV in the mid to late 80’s, you couldn’t help but like at least one of their songs. Even if you couldn’t get abide by the cutesy “You Give Love A Bad Name” or the schmaltzy “Livin’ On A Prayer,” you had to like “Wanted Dead Or Alive.” That was one, cool friggin’ song. No way around it. I don’t care if you only listened to Pantera, Slayer and Megadeth from 1985 to 1995, there was at least one time when you were driving in your car and that song came on and damned if you didn’t crank up the volume and sing every single word by heart.
I walk these streets
A loaded six string on my back.
I play for keeps
‘cause I might not make it back.
I’ve been everywhere (Oh, yeah)
Still I’m standing tall.
I’ve seen a million faces
And I’ve rocked them all!!!
If you weren’t singing it in your head already, I bet you are now. So, don’t damn me for being at the Worcester Centrum that night in 1986. Because, given the chance, you probably would’ve been there too.
When the curtain dropped, four of the five members of the band walked on stage, waved to the crowd and went to their respective instruments. Now, I may be remembering this from the “Lay Your Hands On Me” video, or it may have actually happened this way. But, I swear Jon Bon Jovi did that thing where he comes up from beneath the stage on a pneumatic lift and then leaps on the stage in perfect time with the drumbeat and the flash pot explosions. (Dan can’t remember for sure either.) One thing is for sure, though. They opened with “Raise Your Hands” as they most likely did on for nearly every show on that tour. This got the crowd going right away and allowed them to segue easily into their new and old hits.
I seem to remember a formula from 80’s concerts where the band reserved the fourth or fifth song for their current hit single. At the time, this was “You Give Love A Bad Name.” Jon Bon Jovi prepped us for this song by telling a long, convoluted story about a girl he had met in Vancouver who he thought was hot but turned out to be this scary chick with green makeup or something to that effect. As he was telling it, I remember thinking, “Damn! He’s ripping off Peter Wolf’s story of “Reputa the Beuta” on the intro to ‘Musta Got Lost.’ And within shouting distance of Boston, no less.” However, this transgression was lost on most of the crowd who, if they knew Peter Wolf at all, associated him with “Centerfold” and “Freeze Frame.” I don’t know if it was my outrage at the J. Geils slight, but I felt it was the weakest song of the night. It just never really got going and it seemed a bit out of sync.
On the other hand, “Wanted Dead or Alive” did not disappoint. Jon and Richie Sambora donned the cowboy hats, grabbed their acoustic guitars and sat on simple, wooden stools at the front of the stage. I’ve read a couple of articles that give Jon and Richie credit for starting the “Unplugged” craze because they performed this song the same way at the MTV Music Awards. If that’s true, then they deserve it because we had never seen a rock song played like this. The crowd was way into it, waving lighters and singing along. It was a risky move, but it worked big time.
There are two other things worth mentioning about this concert. After “Wanted Dead or Alive,” the rest of the band joined Jon and Richie on stage and proceeded to do an a cappella version of a 70’s soft rock tune called “Drift Away.” I remembered hearing this song all the time on my mom’s AM radio station as we drove to my YMCA basketball practices. Usually, it was sandwiched between two songs like “Baker Street” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” You get the picture.
I suppose they did a nice rendering of “Drift Away.” But, I was too shocked that they were actually singing it to give a credible critique. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if they had introduced the song by saying, “This is for all the moms and dads stuck up in the balcony and for the two or three 17-year-old pervs down here on the floor!” It was just too random. I can only imagine 12,000 teenage girls scurrying home to their tape collections after the show to find out which Bon Jovi album “Drift Away” was on.
Then came Richie Sambora’s guitar solo. Still reeling from “Drift Away,” I was nearly knocked off my folding chair when he opened with a Led Zeppelin riff. It may have been “Whole Lotta Love” or something along those lines (time has altered the memory a bit), but it was definitely and irrefutably Zeppelin. Again, I felt like the majority of the audience only thought of Robert Plant as the singer in The Honeydrippers (if they thought of him at all) and Jimmy Page as the bloated guitarist in The Firm. This was not the time nor the place to give a bunch of teenyboppers a schooling in Zeppelin. The rest of his solo became inconsequential to me after that.
On the whole, Dan and I left the Centrum that night feeling like we had seen a pretty good show. We wouldn’t go out of our way to see Bon Jovi again (As it turns out, neither of us would ever buy another one of their albums again, either.), but we felt like the show had been worth the trip. As with most guilty pleasures, there was the uneasy feeling that what we had done was somehow wrong (or, in this case, un-cool) and that we would probably be best served by not sharing our experience with our friends.
We drove home in relative silence, Dan studying his shirt for any overlooked defects and me thinking about my New Year’s Eve plans. As we approached our house, something began to nag at me about the evening. It wasn’t the show or the t-shirts or the security line. It was more like something we had missed. I pulled the car into the driveway with this amorphous thought sitting just beyond the reach of my consciousness. My father met us at the door.
“You forgot to call,” he said simply.
In those four words, the entire evening’s events were instantly sucked to the back of my mind where they landed with an audible thud as that one formerly hazy thought filled every square inch of the vacuum that was left behind.
We had forgotten to call. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckety-fuck, fuck, fuck! How could we have forgotten to call? Dan and I looked at each other. There was a moment when we briefly thought to blame each other for the oversight, but we realized that it didn’t matter whose fault it was. Then we looked at my dad and saw in his eyes what waited for us inside. Those eyes also told us that he would not help us one little bit because of what he had doubtlessly suffered for the past few hours.
There was a moment, a brief instant, when I considered getting back into the car and just driving away. I had no idea where I would go, but anywhere would have been preferable to the kitchen where my mother was waiting for us. My dad must have seen me glance at the car because he pointed at the house and issued a single command.
“Go!”
Like doomed men marching to the gallows, my brother and I filed into the house with my father trailing behind us mumbling about all the aggravation he’d endured that evening. My mother sat at the green, circular table where our family took most of its meals. Her eyes were red and puffy and her skin was sallow. Foolishly, I spoke.
“We’re sor-…” was all I got out.
“I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!” she opened.
“But…”
“Every time the phone rang, I thought it would be you because you promised to call us. YOU PROMISED! Then, every time the phone rang I thought it was the police calling to tell me that YOU WERE DEAD!
“Mom…”
“Then I thought that maybe you had been beaten up at the concert and were in a hospital somewhere.”
There is a point when you’re getting yelled at for screwing up when you think the person yelling at you has overstated the severity of your screw-up. That’s when you get mad and try to defend yourself. This is also known as trying to put out a fire with a can of gasoline.
“Mom, who’s going to beat us up at a Bon Jovi concert? A gang of 14-year-old girls? Stop being so dramatic.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my dad shake his head slowly like he couldn’t believe I had dared to speak. Even Dan took a step away from me.
“You promised you would call,” my mother repeated. It was becoming her mantra.
I was in too deep now to turn back now.
“Okay, I promised. And I forgot. I’m sorry, okay? But, guess what? Six months from now I’m going to be 300 hundred miles away at college and I’m not going to call you every time I go out. So, maybe you better get used to me not calling a lot!
My mother stood up and approached me.
“You’re docked!” she screamed. (“Docked” was her word for grounded. Usually, when she told me I was docked I replied, “But, Mom, we don’t even own a boat.” I did not try that little joke this time.)
“What?!?” I asked incredulously.
“No car for a month,” she decreed. “You can take the bus to school. Maybe then you’ll remember to call.”
The Monday after Christmas vacation Dan and I walked the half-mile to the bus stop in a steady freezing rain. I was cold, miserable and mortified at having to take the bus with freshmen and sophomores. Dan, who had been spared the bus experience because I drove him to school every day, was equally bummed. As we waited at the bus stop with five or six other kids from the neighborhood, this girl began talking excitedly about what she had done over the holidays.
“I was down in New York City for Christmas and I was up in Vermont skiing over New Year’s. But, in between was the best thing of all. I saw Bon Jovi at the Worcester Centrum.” With that, she unzipped her parka to reveal her concert t-shirt (the one with the pictures of the band on it, of course). “How cool is that?” she asked rhetorically.
Dan and I looked at the t-shirt and spoke in unison.
“Bon Jovi sucks,” we said.
Epilogue
I wrote this essay years ago and since then my stance on Bon Jovi has softened considerably. In fact, if they ever let us go to concerts again, I'll probably try to catch them when they come to Boston. Maybe I'll even dig up that old t-shirt when I do.
For those of you who care about such things, here's the set list from that night nearly 35 years ago.
Set list for Bon Jovi-December 27, 1986, Worcester, MA
01. Pink Flamingos
02. Raise Your Hands
03. Breakout
04. Tokyo Road
05. You Give Love A Bad Name
06. Wild In The Streets
07. Silent Night
08. Livin’ On A Prayer
09. Let It Rock
10. Guitar Solo
11. Drum Solo
12. In And Out Of Love
13. Runaway
14. Wanted Dead Or Alive
15. Drift Away
16. Get Ready