OTR: Bon Jovi - Cross Road

[illusionofjoy]

It is almost accurate to say that I haven't listened to anything off of this album in ages. Almost, because two times I have heard a song from this disc - "Livin' on a Prayer" each time - in the past few months. More recently was at The Smiling Moose, a bar in Pittsburgh's South Side, where the DJ seemingly threw it on at random leading me to try and pull a friend onto the dancefloor to see how much I could embarrass her. The time prior to that, I was the DJ guilty of playing the song as it had been requested at my friends' wedding.

Cross Road is a collection of eleven of Bon Jovi's biggest hits from their self-titled 1984 début through 1992's Keep The Faith. There are three previously unreleased tracks tacked on to annoy fans: an utterly worthless remix of "Livin' on a Prayer," the tepid "Someday I'll Be Saturday Night" and the bonefied hit mega-ballad "Always" (which was inescapable on pop radio in 1994). At the tender and naive age of thirteen, I thought the same way about this Bon Jovi album as I did about Aerosmith's Big Ones: this was the coolest shit I'd ever heard. I'm older and more cynical now, and much better able to pick out a well-constructed set of songs over a well-written sets of songs (though these states are not necessarily mutually exclusive). It's telling that many of Bon Jovi's biggest hits were penned in part by Desmond Child, whose other credits go to hits by Kiss, Joan Jett, Michael Bolton and Ricky Martin. Nice work, if you can get it.

Throughout their career, Bon Jovi seems to have always wanted to follow in the footsteps of fellow New Jersey denizen, Bruce Springsteen. Unfortunately, it's a pretty tall order to fill Springsteen's shoes and Bon Jovi was, at their core, a rock-pop group more akin to Def Leppard (possibly the American answer to that group, if one thinks about it).

So, here I am, listening to this CD fourteen years after I originally ordered it as part of my "eight CD introduction package" to BMG Music Service. Is this an enjoyable stroll down memory lane or a cringe-worthy endurance test? Well, honestly...it's a little of both. The track playing right now, "Lay Your Hands on Me" is one of the most lyrically insipid cuts on the album, but is one disconnects the higher reasoning centres and just wants to "rock out," then all is well with the world. The same holds true for the song which follows: "You Give Love A Bad Name," which, in what it lacks in intellectualism it makes up for in raw emotion, making it a required cut for any anti-Valentine's Day setlist (along with Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love").

Bon Jovi is at their best playing ballads that are right at home on adult contemporary radio. I have to make my confession right here and now by saying that the most enjoyable songs on this compilation, still even now are "Bed Of Roses," "Always" and "Blaze of Glory." "Bed Of Roses," of course was the song which ensured that Bon Jovi would have a career in the 1990s while most of their big-haired rock star contemporaries were swept away in the tsunami known as grunge (with Nirvana right at the crest of the wave).

So, overall it's not bad, but it's not particularly great either. Also, the fact that these songs have all been played millions of times gives me no real incentive to revisit them on my own time. Been there, done that, what haven't I heard before or way too often? Regardless, I hang on to discs like these because some couple I care about might be getting married and want to hear it.