We are in the year 2004 and Bon Jovi has now been around for 20 Years at this point. To celebrate their 20th Anniversary, they released a really cool box set of mostly unreleased tunes and a lot of little extras titled ‘100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong’. The Box Set is a collection of 50 songs spread over 4 CDs, 38 of which had never been released. The others were songs from soundtracks, remixes and/or B-Sides. This was a band dumping everything sitting by the wayside in to one set and I applaud them for that. Us diehard fans love this kind of stuff. And if that wasn’t enough, if you have the Japanese Edition, which i do, you get another CD of B-Sides and Japanese Bonus Tracks. That is another 10 songs.
This is a lot of music to absorb and we won’t be absorbing it all here. Nope. I’m going to go through each and every CD, track by track over 6 posts. We are on the first disc now which had a total of 12 tracks, 11 of which were previously unreleased. So let’s get started and dive into the music as that is why we are really here any way.
The opening track to the whole set is “Why Aren’t You Dead?” which was written and demoed for the ‘Keep the Faith’ album. The song didn’t make the cut because the band felt the song was more of where the bad had already been and not where the band’s sound was going. If you know that album, you understand why this didn’t make the cut. It is a great play on the line “If you can’t live without me, then why aren’t you dead” which is a cool line and probably a great country song. A band that was moving forward, easy to see why they left it off as it sounds too much like older Bon Jovi.
Next up is the only promo single released from the set for the song “The Radio Saved My Life Tonight”. The song was written on a piano and no sign of that piano on this version. Jon was very burnt out from the New Jersey record and tour and was becoming a little jaded. This song reflect a lot of those feelings. This is a really cool song and one of the better ones on the album. It sounds like old school Bon Jovi and it shows how great his writing was becoming. However, it would not have fit on ‘Keep the Faith’ either. Glad to see this one getting to finally see the light of day.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 