“I almost passed out,” she told her cousins after the show.
Instances like this happen at every great concert – idols and fans meet, and everyone goes home with a unique story to tell. The All-American Rejects and Boys Like Girls concert Oct. 23 at the UCCU building was especially eventful because every member of the crowd was involved somehow, from the unknown people who caught the water bottles the singers threw offstage to Paul Blubaugh, 24, also known as “Captain America” for the T-shirt he was wearing, who was spotted by Martin Johnson, the lead singer of Boys Like Girls, and told to come up onstage and dance to their song “Life of the Party,” because he was the craziest rocker in the audience.
“I just made the most noise, moved around enough,” Blubaugh said. “It was great – just unreal. I could get used to that.”
There were a lot of dramatics included in the concert, from the first band, Parachute, jumping up onto the piano to sing or play as high above the crowd as possible, to The All-American Rejects’s shenanigans with glow-in-the-dark instruments.
Chasing Chance, a local band of UVU students, opened the show with a couple of their favorite songs including “Background Music.” They expressed gratitude for the opportunity to open such a big show, and their fans peppered the crowd with white “Chasing Chance” T-shirts.
Boys Like Girls, the last act of the night, announced to the crowd they would be playing songs from their older albums, in a nostalgic gesture. For one of the newer songs they’ve made, “Two is Better Than One” they brought up student Carli Tischmer to sing in place of Taylor Swift. They were the band who involved their audience the most, in both positive and embarrassing ways.
The finale saw Boys Like Girls preparing to sing one of their most popular songs, “Love Drunk.” But in the middle of the first chorus, singer Martin Johnson stopped what he was doing to look in the crowd. Suddenly, he was shouting, “Stop the song!” to the entire UCCU center, and the rest of the band gradually stilled, bewildered. The roars from the rock-crazed crowd had hushed to murmurs of, “What’s wrong?”
Johnson pointed to a person in the middle of the floor, someone holding up a cell phone taking a video of them, and said, “Is that video really going to be worth it?”
He continued to call out the fan for recording him rather than simply watching the show, telling him and the whole concert hall that he could go look up a million videos of him singing the song the exact way he was now, and that he might as well watch the band while they were there live.
Then, bidding security to open the gates and let everyone onto the floor, Johnson announced that they were going to do the last song properly, without cell phones.
“Can we do one [song] old-school, rock n’ roll?” Johnson said to the hundreds of fans pouring onto the floor. “Three and a half minutes, no cell phones?”
Beginning “Love Drunk” again, Boys Like Girls performed the finale to a wild, dancing crowd, enjoying the sight of fans crowd-surfing or sitting on each other’s shoulders.
