Posts Tagged ‘bon jovi’

Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora recorded a new version of "Stand By Me" with Iranian superstar Andy Madadian. It's meant for the Iranian people, and can be downloaded for free here. It was created with the intention that all people of the world stand together. And as my wife Teres is reminding me, over and over, because "Jon's so wonderful."

Here's the video. I never knew Jon Bon Jovi knew Farsi…

Photo: C. A. Bridges

I was at a Jon Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey with my wife a month ago and he was talking about the next Bon Jovi album. The last one, "Lost Highway," had a decided country tinge to it, but the new one was going to be back to basics.

"I'm tellin ya, you gotta trust me on this one," he said. "You wanted a riff rock record,
you got a riff rock record.  They wouldn't let me back into Nashville so I had
to turn up the loud electric guitars on this one." And the crowd of devoted fans went nuts.

One slight problem, of course, was that we didn't know what "riff rock" meant. But we cheered along with the rest and planned to go home and look it up later. I could take a guess. I know what a riff is, and I assume a "riff rock" song would be one with a lot of riffs shoved in it. But the way he said it made it sound like it had an identity. Was it a specific genre, a school, a trend, a group name, a musical theory, what?

No problem! Interweb to the rescue! There were probably hundreds of sites devoted to answering this very question. The Internet knows everything!

Except, apparently, for this. Wikipedia has no "riff rock" entry, not at all. There's a "riff rock" tag at Last.fm, but no explanation. Riffrock.com seems to think I should know already or I wouldn't be there. Google listed plenty of pages and Amazon had several reviews where "riff rock" was being used descriptively, but none of them included a single definition. Ask.com said it didn't know, dot com.

This staggered me. It has been years, literally years, since I casually reached out for information on the Web and came up dry. Had I walked outside, dropped a can, and watched it fall upward, I could not have been more surprised.

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Thanks to maru1221, I (and everyone else) can now see my wife Teresa at the Bon Jovi concert at the TD BankNorth Garden arena, July 10. She keeps a camera in front of her face during her screentime, but if you look closely, starting around 1:46,  you can see her trying to focus past Richie Sambora (12 feet away from her) to get a better picture of Jon (way the hell across the stage). She does have her preferences, my Teresa. Also, that piercing fangirl scream? That's her.

Friday was an interesting day. And I use the word "interesting" with loaded meaning (couldn't find the right smilie to indicate that, so here we are).

High point: finding out with an hour to spare that I would get to do a phone interview with Joss Whedon. All I really remember was that I was focusing on not sounding like a doofus, my painful discovery that it's a big, big mistake to pound down a large Sprite to calm your nerves when you're afraid to leave the phone long enough to pee, and that when he did call and we talked I sounded like a doofus.

With luck it'll appear online Tuesday and in the paper later in the week. Only really new thing in it that I haven't seen anywhere else: the Dr. Horrible episodes will appear on drhorrible.com pretty close to 12:01 am on their launch dates. Didn't get if it was PST, I'm hoping to hear back about that. My favorite quote was when I was asking about his knack for attracting obsessive fans:

"That’s what I am, that’s what I grew up as. The things I love, I love very hard."

Low point: immediately thereafter, when my car blew a head gasket on the way home and my brother-in-law and I spent four fun-filled hours next to Beville Road trying Bars Head Gasket Fix in the desperate hope that mine had blown in just the right way for this to work and save me many hundreds or thousands of dollars that I don't, strictly speaking, have.

Results: I have an interview which I have now transcribed and will tomorrow edit, modulate, and possibly remaster until I sound like David Attenborough, am now working on my article. Car is running well if not smoothly, the oil has been changed, and we'll see how that goes.

All in all, best thing about the weekend? Watching the little videos Teres took of the concert with our camera, where her fangirl shrieks can plainly be heard over the din. She's been blushing nonstop, I'm working on making one of them my Windows startup noise.

Teresa has decided to become a full-time groupie.

Not just the type who gushes about her band online, pins posters around her room and writes "Mrs. Bon Jovi" on her notebooks, although she does that too (not the Mrs. part, she said she has no interest in leaving our marriage or breaking his; I believe she has in mind more of a sophisticated arrangement, like a time-share). No, she plans to be the one who follows her band, concert to concert, city to city, country to country, becoming friends and confidant to the road crew. The fact that we're broke has no bearing on this. You can't deny your calling. She has already begun looking into which countries allow you to sell your children.

Yesterday, on an extended and carefully planned last minute whim, she flew to Boston to see Bon Jovi in concert. She's even now in the air on her way back, possibly without waiting for the plane. With her are the well-wishes, advice, and (in some cases) open envy of the other ladies on the Bon Jovi forum she frequents. They have kept up on her doings from other forum members at the concert who are calling in song-by-song updates, and from me, as I've been hearing from Teresa and posting on her behalf with her account. (I am, apparently, "Mr. Teresa.")

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