Bon Jovi rocks Moncton again after 16 years
Published Monday June 29th, 2009
MONCTON - A sticky, humid Saturday and New Jersey rock star Jon Bon Jovi brought more than 25,000 concertgoers out to the latest instalment of the Magnetic Hill Music Festival.
After a week of grim weather forecasts that predicted rain for the annual big summer rock show, the temperatures soared to 25 C and sparked a flood of late ticket sales - by a predominantly female crowd - who wanted to see the handsome, ageless rocker deliver hits that spanned 25 years.
"We weren't going to miss this, no way," said Joanne Wroth, who made the crack-of-dawn drive with two friends from Halifax to be standing first in line behind the concert gates by 9 o'clock Saturday morning.
The concert's entrance was more than 1,500 metres from the stage's front row fence, meaning a mad dash when the concert site opened shortly after 1 p.m.
"We sprinted as fast as we could," Wroth said. "I wore flip flops, they were flying, but we have the front row."
A fan for the last 22 years and owner of Bon Jovi's third and breakthrough album Slippery When Wet right through to his latest 2007 effort Lost Highway, Wroth had only seen her idol once in Ottawa before this weekend.
The last time Bon Jovi played Moncton it was a cold and snowy Monday night in December of 1993, and the Coliseum was sold out.
"I just found out it has been 16 years since we've come to Moncton," Jon Bon Jovi told the screaming crowd. "That's too long. We've got a lot of catching up to do."
The rockers from New Jersey closed the show with two of their biggest anthems from the 1980s - Wanted Dead or Alive and Livin' On a Prayer.
They also played tribute to their opening act, the Randy Bachman/Burton Cummings group with a rendition of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive hit Takin' Care of Business.
Cummings told the crowd the two had travelled over night from Saskatchewan to play the Moncton show.
"Atlantic Canada is much prettier than the prairies," he told the audience.
The Hub City was the province's hot spot this past weekend as 10,000 motorbikes made their way to Moncton for the annual Atlanticade Motorcycle Festival Rally. A three-day district convention of the Jehovah's Witnesses also ran throughout the weekend with thousands meeting at the Coliseum.
But the largest crowd congregated at Magnetic Hill.
The large open field in the city's west end was originally built in 1984 for Pope John Paul II who delivered a papal mass at the site during a tour of Canada.
It was then redesigned in the 1990s and welcome its largest show in 2005 when the Rolling Stones came to town and played for 85,000. The summer concert then became a regular event with Brooks & Dunn headlining in 2006, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw in 2007, and the Eagles, John Fogerty, KT Tunstall and Sam Roberts playing for a crowd of 55,000 last year.
This year, a second summer concert has been scheduled for Magnetic Hill for the first time as Australian rockers AC/DC perform on Aug. 6. City officials say they expect more than 60,000 people.
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