• Very large crowd, well over 700 people: Yes
• Gig is at a wedding factory: Yes
• Gig is not actually a wedding: Yes
• Said wedding factory was once a bowling alley: Strangely, yes

They say that nostalgia takes twenty years in pop culture since it's about that long after high school that most people are settled in family situations and have children in school. It's the first chance to look back, and maybe the first time you'd even want to. At this point you're a target for advertisers, since you've probably got a steady job and disposable income (and again, you have kids that want stuff.) Do you think it's a coincidence that when you walk into Chili's on a Saturday afternoon they're essentially playing the soundtrack to the movie "The Wedding Singer"? Or that so many '80s songs have been used in commercials the past few years? (Here's a short list. I remember thinking that the Toyota ad with the Buzzcocks' "What Do I Get" was the worst thing I'd ever heard, but then I read that Papa John's Pizza changed the Go-Gos' "We Got the Beat" to "We Got the Meat.")

What is interesting to me is that this music is frequently ok with high school students. It's the pendulum swinging, I guess; if you graduated during the hair band era you remember that all of those bands were killed by Nirvana, mostly because no one could listen to another teary power ballad in G major. Then when grunge became inescapable, hip-hop took over. Now we've got a generation of kids that grew up with no melody (or frequently, no instruments other than samples) in their music, and their reaction is to dust off their parent's Bon Jovi CDs. I've got guitar students asking me to teach them "The Trooper" by Iron Maiden, which means I finally found a way to get paid for blowing off homework in high school. And since they are too young to have an emotional attachment to any of it, everything gets lumped together. So you might see girls in leg warmers and big hoop earrings watching their boyfriends crowd-surfing to Bryan Adams songs.