Critique de l'album :

No question Bon Jovi is a great live band. So great, in fact, that I would say that at the peak of their live career they have been perhaps even the best live act on the planet. They gradually developed into great live performers because they enjoy playing live, are all great performers and Jon - who is a fine front man - knows how to handle the audience well, and many Bon Jovi songs simply sound best when played in front of some 50 000 people in your regular football stadium. The band were always great at structuring their shows too and making the set lists so that every night is at least a little different to other nights, and they just had that important skill of putting up a great, exciting live show.

They developed as a live band when they were a supporting act with their first two albums, and when they were headlining with Slippery When Wet they could already pull up thrilling live shows. In the 1980s they could do shows sometimes as much as five nights a week, and the hectic and very, very large tours for Slippery When Wet and New Jersey left their marks to the band as the five-piece experienced a burn-out. In the 1990s they learned to do shows with a better pace and in a more relaxed mode, and thus their performances were perhaps sharper than ever before in the 80s. They had played in some large places before, but Bon Jovi developed into a full-scale stadium rock band for the first time in 1995, and from then on they played stadiums in the European countries and Japan. The year 1995 can be considered as the highpoint of their live career, as they did a large tour playing in stadiums all over the world, playing in many new, exotic places they had played never before and playing three consecutive sold-out shows at the legendary Wembley stadium in England. In 1996 they played a second tour for These Days, doing majestic three hour shows in stadiums in Japan and Europe.

Looking back at this, it's no wonder the fans were long craving a live album from Bon Jovi. While it was for the first time planned to be released in the start of the 1990s (a record from the New Jersey tour), a live album didn't happen until finally in the year 2001. What was released was One Wild Night live 1985-2001. It is a one CD collection of 14 live songs and one studio track, a remixed version of the song One Wild Night (which is a totally unnecessary remix - much worse than the original Crush version - and totally pointless thing to have included here).

While one should be delighted that they finally did something to the live album matter and managed to get something out there, the sad truth is that One Wild Night is a miserably failed live album. There are many reasons for it, and in the end this little release is no more than a fine example of what live albums shouldn't be like. Unlike the title One Wild Night misleadingly suggests, the live tracks of this album span an era of 1985 to 2000, but still half of the album - seven songs in total - are from the year 2000, and there are no songs at all from 1986 to 1993, from the very essential tours of Slippery When Wet, New Jersey and Keep The Faith. The selections for the concerts from which the songs are taken from are really poor. For example there are three songs from Zurich 30.8.2000, concert which had already been released officially as video and DVD, and, it certainly wasn't a great concert anyway. Livin' On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name and Bad Medicine, all very important Bon Jovi songs, sound incredibly lazy and lame on this album. There are two songs recorded at the China Club in New York. Keep The Faith and Wanted Dead Or Alive, both fantastic and enormous live songs, certainly should have been taken from a stadium concert, and not from a small club gig.

Many tracks on OWN have been edited, which is something that in my opinion should never be done to live tracks. Editing album tracks for radios and single releases is fine, but live tracks should never be cut down at all. For example Bad Medicine, which already sounds bad as it is taken from the lame Zurich concert, is cut down to miserable four minutes. The reason for doing this is obvious - to make the 14 songs fit one disc - but it very much hurts the final result. Rock concerts hardly last 70 minutes, and live albums have little chance of being succeeded if they are no more than just one disc. One Wild Night is one disc. The band wanted to release a double album but the record company didn't allow it. Still, they should have fought it harder to have a proper double album released, because a band that has sold as much as Bon Jovi has (and that's a lot) certainly should be able to have a say in the matter of just one more additional disc. And, one more disc would have done plenty of good and given this a chance to be a great live album.

Still the biggest reason for criticism is left. That's the fact that an ideal live album is one single concert released in its entirety. This album, of course, is far from that. But that is what really should have been released. While a concert from New Jersey, Keep The Faith or These Days tours would have been by far the best thing to get out there, it would have been perhaps a bit weird to release that old concert in 2001, so they could have settled with a more recent concert. Releasing Toronto 27.11.2000 as a full concert, a double live album, would have been just fine. Well, more than only fine actually, it would have been a really great thing to do.