Summer in the (Quebec) City: Festival D'ete Boasted Everyone From Bon Jovi to Skrillex
Festival d'été de Québec, or Quebec City Summer Festival if you're insistent on not integrating, isn't really all that much different from the other major summer festivals that take place along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. Enough that the bands should travel by giant flotilla next year to save costs.
Like the interchangeable Ottawa Bluesfest and Montreal Jazz Fest, this year's FEQ had no trouble enticing big names to Canada's oldest burgh and, thanks to the large mainstage on the historically significant Plains of Abraham, got some massive 100,000-plus crowds to boot. Over the festival's ten days, pretty much every type of music fan had at least one night to call their own.
Bon Jovi have become one of the biggest draws in the world largely through attrition and, much like the familiar poutine of famed Quebec fast food chain Ashton, on July 9 the group coasted on their legacy.
Even compared to the vastly superior show by Aerosmith later in the week, the Jersey boys' set bordered on unbearably cheesy. The opening keyboard riff on "Runaway" has aged about as well as you think and although Jon Bon Jovi still has a megawatt smile and a Stars and Stripes leather jacket/aviators combo he presumably pilfered from the Top Gun set, his one stilted manoeuvre of pointing his microphone towards guitarist Richie Sambora lost its lustre after the fifth or sixth solo.
The group rattled off their most well-known hits early in the set and lost considerable momentum by the end. That being said, the trio of businesswomen who observed the show to my right would likely disagree with my critique: they were having a ball drowning in Molson Dry and belting out the choruses phonetically. Clearly,
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