On the road | Bon Jovi 1989 12 23 | Frankfurt, Germany | New Jersey Syndicate Tour (14th month)
Concert Reading
Today’s card is:
On the road
Bon Jovi
23 December 1989
Frankfurt
New Jersey Syndicate Tour
🎛️🎶🎧-> (text continues below video)
by YouTube channel hAnD90, uploaded 23 December 2023.
Backstory
23 dec 1989 Frankfurt
With a four band line-up (Bon Jovi, Alice Cooper, Great White and Dan Reed Network) , this concert shortly before Christmas was actually a festival and not a regular concert.
It was called “Christmas Rock”.
At this point Bon Jovi had been touring for 13 months, three weeks and two days, and fatigue was setting in.
Where the first concerts had had their own challenges, Jon Bon Jovi was now dancing a very fine line between collapse and just pulling it off, legend has it with help from steroid injections in his throat.
When YouTube channel hAnD90 unlocked this recording after 34 years, I immediately wrote a whole article about it on my website Daily Bon Jovi Yoga.com. This site will almost certainly be dropped, for a number of reasons but one is that WordPress has eaten the layout and I would have to manually change html codes of all archived posts, if I would like to keep it operational.
But I did renew the domain recently, and changed the html, so the link to the Frankfurt 1989 article will probably work until March 2026.
I will use that 2023 article for the backstory.
The paragraphs below are from this article “a Christmas concert avant-la-lettre” (link works until March 2026)
The On the Road– Card Reading below it, is new and was written today.
“A Christmas concert, before Bon Jovi even knew they had Christmas concerts!
Frankfurt 1989, is when the band hit what must have been their Christmas-infused homesick rock bottom, playing night after night in another city in Germany.
You can hear the melancholy drip off Blood on Blood’s introduction, and throughout the show every time Jon Bon Jovi drops the word Christmas – which is often and a concept that clearly means more to him than to the 1989 German crowd, where Christmas still revolved around baby Jesus not Santaclaus (who some say was given life by Coca-Cola!)-
the pain of missing home is almost palpable.
A year after this concert, they were indeed home.
Exactly as they had longed for, playing Germany around Christmas time, having been 16 months on the road and counting.
But they would not just rest on their laurels.
For seven years, from 1990 to 1996, they would play New Jersey’s Count Basie theatre, in the week before Christmas;
The Christmas Shows
(link to the bjtours website where you can find them all)
But nothing explained the profound meaning it had to them, to spend Christmas at home;
Than Frankfurt 23 December, 1989.”
On the Road
the card
The On the Road Card means you’re bypassing your own needs, claiming you are accepting and even choosing for things to be this way.
Labeling your version of working at Christmas as purpose, as inevitable, as what you have to do because it is the right thing.
You can deceive other people, but the heart is not so easily betrayed.
You have come to the brink of exhaustion, convincing even yourself this is your divine duty.
But you’re working yourself to death.
Go home, Rock Star.
Or did you not see A Christmas Carol.
~Suzanne Beenackers
Rock Star Writer
“On the road | Bon Jovi 1989 12 23 | Frankfurt, Germany | New Jersey Syndicate Tour (14th month)”
was also posted on my website Rock Star Writer
NEXT UP, ON THE Suzanne L. Beenackers SUBSTACK:
Not sure yet!
If I’m off tomorrow, I may have a day out with a photo collage for you. But I also have an appointment in the middle of the day, which if it follows through will block any photogenic plans.
But I’ll think of something.
EXPECTED: Monday 21 April 2025
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Founded on the 4th of December 2024, Concert Readings are the Bon Jovi equivalent of a Tarot reading.
Can we find the stories still buried deep inside the bootlegs?
Can we elevate the ones already told a thousand times?
This series is intended to run for ten years, covering a good part of the available 20th century concerts.
And who knows?
Maybe from 2035 up, we’ll do what Jon calls a round two!
Covering the tours 2000 – 2010.
Map out your future but do it in pencil.
Jon Bon Jovi
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