Five of our listeners were there — here’s how the comeback really went

Full circle. That is the only way I know how to describe this one.

On July Fourth, we gave away tickets on New Jersey 101.5 to Bon Jovi's comeback show at Madison Square Garden — the first real Bon Jovi concert since 2022, the first since Jon underwent vocal cord surgery, the show the whole music world had been quietly holding its breath for. Five winners listened all weekend during our Made In America Weekend, caught the Bon Jovi songs in rotation, and earned their way into that room. Congratulations to Brock from Tinton Falls, Nadine from South Amboy, Lauren from Avenel, Joan from Cedar Grove, and Kathy from Livingston. Our boss Sam was there too and snapped some photos. You were all there for something real.

My own history with this band goes back further than most. In 1983, when I was the nighttime DJ at our sister station WPST, we were already playing "She Don't Know Me" and "Runaway" — Jon Bon Jovi before anyone called him a superstar, before the arenas, before any of it. I have written before about his visits to the station back then, and about the softball game our station played against the band in Mercer County in the summer of '84. I was there before the world caught on.

Then the world caught on. Completely.

SEE ALSO: I met Jon Bon Jovi in 1984 — and now he's back 

David Leach of Mercury Records, Jon Bon Jovi, EJ and Tom Cunningham | WPST photo by Hal Stein from EJ collection

Livin' on a Prayer became something bigger than a hit

I remember the exact moment I understood what this band had actually built. It was watching a gymnasium full of middle schoolers at my daughter's school, dancing and screaming every word to "Livin' on a Prayer" — kids who were not alive for a single second of the 1980s, who found the song anyway, who made it theirs the same way my generation did. That is not what happens to a hit song. That is what happens to an anthem.

When I started at New Jersey 101.5 in 1999, Bon Jovi went into heavy rotation on our weekends, when the music comes out to play. There was the first great comeback in 2000, "It's My Life" reintroducing the band to a generation that barely remembered the 80s. And now there is this one — the comeback nobody was fully sure would happen, given everything Jon's voice had been through.

Bon Jovi at MSG | photo by Sam Gagliardi

How Tuesday night actually went

According to the review from Ultimate Classic Rock, our sister site covering the show, it went about as well as anyone could have hoped. Bon Jovi opened with a Joe Cocker-style take on the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends," backed by his bandmates' harmonies as he worked his way back into full voice. Twenty thousand fans roared through a 21-song set that ran from newer material into the deep, unmistakable classics — "You Give Love a Bad Name," "It's My Life," "Livin' on a Prayer," "Lay Your Hands on Me," closing the main set with a sprawling "Keep the Faith" before a three-song encore of "I'll Be There for You," "Wanted Dead or Alive" and "Bad Medicine."

Jon told the crowd he had not heard a roar like that in four years and was not sure he would remember what it felt like. He called the twenty thousand people in that arena his personal, private guests. The review's verdict was clean and simple: it was not perfect, but perfection was never the point. He proved he was ready to get back in the ring.

This is a nine-show run at Madison Square Garden before the tour moves on to the U.K. and Ireland. If Tuesday night is any indication, this is not a band easing back into things cautiously. This is a band that meant every word of "Keep the Faith," and just proved it, in front of five lucky New Jersey 101.5 listeners who got to see it happen in person.

Forty-three years after "She Don't Know Me" played on a Trenton radio station with a 22-year-old Jersey kid behind the songs, that same kid stood on a Madison Square Garden stage Tuesday night and reminded everyone why they showed up in the first place.