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 now on the second disc which had a total of 12 tracks, 10 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 album kicks off with the song “Garageland” which was written by Richie and Jon at Jon’s new York apartment. The song was written during the Crush era and was about where the members of the band were when they were younger. Now, the individual band members might have been in garage bands, but I don’t see Bon Jovi as ever being a garage band so this doesn’t feel authentic to me. There are some cool moments in the song and it does rock out at times, but it is in rough shape and needs a lot of work to turn it in to something. Jon’s vocals are rough and the bridge/chorus is not that good. For me, not a favorite on this disc and could skip it.
Like “Taking It Back” on Disc 1, “Starting All Over Again” shows the band with attitude and a chip still on their shoulder. Jon explained that the band had their mojo back in 1992 and realized it was the band against a new machine that was rearing its head in music, Grunge and Rap. They were competing against a whole new scene. This was them saying they were going to take it all back and rise to the top again. But it doesn’t sound like anything else on “Keep the Faith” stylistically so was left off the album. I actually like this track. It has some great attitude, I like the guitar tone and it rocks out really great. A vast improvement from the opening track. This song was on a Japanese Bonus Track for ‘Keep the Faith’, but this is actually an alternate version.
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2 Loud 2 Old Music 