Bon Jovi Archives

I became a Bon Jovi fan in the late nineties, almost by accident. Destination Anywhere was on sale for just three guilders at a local CD store in the village where I lived, so I bought it. When I mentioned Bon Jovi to my dad, he told me that one of my cousins owned a lot of their music. I borrowed his CDs, made two mixtapes from them, and quickly realized that I already knew far more Bon Jovi songs than I thought I did. In the nineties, Bon Jovi were simply everywhere on the radio.

It did not take long before being a casual fan turned into something much bigger. Once I grew up and started making some money, I began seriously collecting Bon Jovi releases. Over the years I built up quite a collection, including many exclusive and obscure pressings that are increasingly difficult to find nowadays. If there is a rare edit, mix or version of a song, chances are I have it somewhere on an official CD single.

Like a lot of people in the late nineties, I also decided I needed my own website. What started as a fan site eventually became a fairly extensive Bon Jovi live archive. I started seriously building the archive in 2001, long before setlist.fm existed, collecting concert dates, setlists and whatever other information I could find.

One of the things that fascinated me was how much Bon Jovi actually changed their shows. Jon often talked about mixing up the setlist every night, but once I started collecting bootlegs I discovered that the reality was a little different. Usually only three to five songs changed from one night to the next, and even those songs tended to come from a fairly familiar pool. Despite all the talk about changing things around, it was surprisingly difficult to be genuinely surprised at a Bon Jovi show.

But being a fan became about much more than collecting CDs, bootlegs and setlists. Through Bon Jovi I met people, made friends and eventually had relationships with other fans. There is something pretty great about having a girlfriend who is every bit as enthusiastic about the same band as you are. Suddenly travelling to concerts, discussing songs, collecting releases and planning the next show are things you can share instead of things you have to explain. One of those relationships became serious enough that I got engaged, but unfortunately, it ended badly.

The end of that relationship happened around the same period that Richie Sambora left Bon Jovi. Richie had been the reason I really got into Bon Jovi in the first place. To me, Bon Jovi without him felt a little like Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen or Aerosmith without Joe Perry. The name was still there, but something essential was missing. In a strange way, it felt like two eras were ending at exactly the same time. The Bon Jovi I had grown up with was suddenly no longer the same band, while my own life had changed dramatically as well. Music that had been connected to some of the happiest moments of my life had also become connected to some of the most painful ones. Songs, albums and tours could instantly remind me of people and moments I did not particularly want to be reminded of.

So I gradually stopped listening. I stopped following the band as closely. I stopped collecting. And somewhere along the way I stopped paying attention to the domain name of my website and eventually lost it. By then I did not care enough to rebuild the site somewhere else. That part of my life was over and for quite a while, that was that.

I don't really relate to Bon Jovi lyrics nowadays, but in a strange way, Jon has spoken quite a bit over the years about picking yourself up when life does not go according to plan. In my own completely different circumstances, that was something I had to do as well. Life moved on. I had to rebuild things, find out what I wanted and create a life that was no longer tied to what had happened before, which I did.

My life today bears very little resemblance to the life I had back then. While I no longer travel to see the band play, I've traveled the world and back (35 countries spread out over 4 continents, and counting!) and enough time has passed that I can listen to Bon Jovi again without every song automatically dragging some painful memory along with it. A song can just be a song again. An album can remind me of why I liked it rather than who I listened to it with. And somewhere along the way, I started thinking about that old website again.

I still had the data. I started looking at setlist.fm and realized that, useful as it is, it simply does not do many of the things I always wanted a live archive to do. Then Bon Jovi announced another tour and I thought: why not give it another shot?

So here we are.

I do not want this site to be just another list of concert dates and setlists. There are already places where you can find those. What interests me is the bigger picture. How much did the setlist really change from night to night? Which tours were the most unpredictable? Which songs disappeared for years and suddenly returned? Which album tracks actually got played? How often did a particular song open or close a show? How unusual was the show you attended compared with the rest of the tour?

That is what I've tried to build here. The statistics, song histories, tour comparisons, rarity ratings and all the other features are attempts to turn more than forty years of Bon Jovi concerts into something you can actually explore rather than simply scroll through. In some ways, it is the website I wanted to build more than twenty years ago, except that the technology, the available information and hopefully my ability to build it have all improved quite a bit since then.

An archive like this will probably never be completely finished. Setlists from older shows are often incomplete, different sources sometimes contradict each other, and new recordings and information still surface decades later. Wherever possible, I have tried to verify information against multiple sources like old ticket stubs, concert posters, tour shirts and recordings, but there will inevitably be mistakes.

This site would not have been possible without the many Bon Jovi and setlist websites that have existed over the years. I started building my archive in 2001, so there have been quite a few sources along the way that probably no longer exist. Some of the information preserved here ultimately came from people who put it online decades ago with no idea that anyone would still be using it in 2026.

It also would not have been possible without the bootleggers who recorded and shared these shows. I know how much effort it can take to get the equipment into a venue, record the show, mix it afterwards and put it online in the hope that someone out there cares enough to listen. A huge amount of live history would simply have disappeared without those people. Thank you to everyone who put in that time and effort. This archive owes a great deal to your work.

And finally, regardless of how I feel about Bon Jovi nowadays, I have to thank the band themselves. Their music has been there through relationships, friendships, travelling, collecting, great nights, terrible moments, beginnings and endings. For a while I needed to leave all of that behind. It is actually quite nice to have reached a point where I can come back to it and remember why I enjoyed it in the first place.

My life has moved on, but apparently the archive came with me.

I travel a lot these days, so maybe our paths will cross someday and I can tell you in person why they really should play a certain song more often. Who knows?

All the best,
Sebastiaan