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

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.

And that brought home how quickly the Internet has become our collective conscious.

It holds our memories, our
knowledge, our facts. "Google" became a verb almost overnight for a reason. I'm honestly surprised we even still make kids
memorize anything. Does anyone need to know the date of the Battle of
Hastings unless you plan to hit up Jeopardy some day? As long as there
are people out there with a) an intense passion for something, b) free
time, and c) a Web site, our pursuit of trivia will be rewarded. We're
not quite up to building a hive mind yet, Twitter notwithstanding, but
we are building the hive mind's long-term memory, and we're doing it
awfully quickly.

Quickly enough to surprise me when I find a gap, anyway.

Our
music reviewer, Rick DeYampert, told me what "riff rock" was: a song
composed mostly (or completely) of one distinct, repetitive riff, a la the Rolling Stones' "I
Can't Get No (Satisfaction).". So now I know.

Maybe I'll start a Wikipedia page about
it.

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.

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.")

Here's the last recap I posted.

OK, Teres made it back to the motel all right. She's still breathless and trying to absorb it all, and I'm sure she'll go into a lot more detail for you when she's back, but here's some highlights:

Jon was awesome.
The rest of the band was good, too.
She did, in fact, get to see him pretty clearly.
Her pictures didn't come out, though, and the one time he came out to her area to sing she's afraid she took too much time trying to take pictures and didn't spend enough time just gazing at him.
No luck with the binoculars; she tried 'em during the opening act and couldn't see through them so she gave up.
Jon was awesome.
The lady next to her kept getting beer – a lot of it – and then would spill most of it dancing around. When she left to get more, that's when Jon came over to sing. The person with her told Teres "Oh, she's gonna kill me."
Jon and the band walked under Teres, twice. Yes, she was on top of Jon Bon Jovi twice in one night, and she won't be forgetting THAT any time soon.
She's not sure that Richie got a cake (Guitarist Richie Sambora's 49th birthday is today), she thought it might have been a pyramid of champagne glasses with candles in it. Not sure.
Jon can't sing "Happy Birthday." He might have been singing it badly on purpose, but it's just weird.
She tried using the video recorder on the camera to record a few songs, figured she could get the audio even if the picture didn't come out. Got a few, then they started doing the acoustic encores and that's when the memory card filled up.
Jon was awesome.
She did get a recording of Jon saying he wanted to hear her scream. She wants that for a ringtone now.
Actually she's pretty sure the only thing she recorded was herself, screaming. A lot. Not with the music, either. Just all out fangirl screaming. Her throat is sore.
She thinks the crowd was especially rowdy. The band did the two encores, came out and held hands and bowed, and the audience kept screaming. The band huddled together, and then played one more song (a cover). Lisa (another forum member who met her there) said they never do this.
Teres kept walking into people coming out of the concert. Not just absentmindedly. Hard. Then she would apologize and walk away and do it to someone else.
She's afraid to go to sleep now because she'll forget everything. I assured it it would be stuck in her brain forever.
She will be in front of him next time. Not sure yet how she'll manage that, but she will. Oh, yes.
Did she mention Jon was awesome?

When I mention this to friends at work or online, I invariably get the same reaction: arched eyebrow (or smiley of same) and "Bon Jovi? Whatever, I guess." Apparently my friends are not part of the 120 million people who have bought Bon Jovi albums and CDs over the last 25 years, or who pushed his latest one ("Lost Highway") to the top of the charts worldwide. I like him, although I don't plan to follow his tour or work my way up the side of his apartment building in Manhattan on a window washer rig (Teresa at my side, with burlap sack and ether) any time soon.

Even if I didn't, I certainly can't talk. Most of my office area at home (and a fair amount at work) is taken up with Joss Whedon-related items, and I took off for LA last December on a trip I could ill afford just to march with him and his friends in the writers strike. I understand obsession. I may not be at the "I <3 Joss" notebook cover stage but that could just be because I haven't yet seen "Dr. Horrible" yet so it can't be ruled out.

She went, she saw, and now her casual obsession may turn into a career. Obsessions are like that.

This tour is almost over for Bon Jovi, so at least for awhile following the band won't be too difficult. Mostly moving from room to room I expect, and saying "woo!" occasionally. So she can ease into it.