“I feel on top of the world,” Megan Doyle, mainstage chair of the Student Programming Board (SPB) said immediately following the fall concert headlined by Third Eye Blind last Saturday.
Doyle’s smile and sense of accomplishment was not lost on anyone left in the room as the stage began to be disassembled. The students had trickled out of the TD Bank Sports Center and after four months of planning, the concert finally ended. The night had been a magical evening full of live performances, crowd surfing and random displays of yo-yo action between sets from freshman Corey Lynch. Like all good things, the concert came to a crashing end at the strike of 11 p.m.
“[SPB] has been looking forward to this day and selling out a show for years and years,” Doyle said. “We’ve wanted Third Eye Blind for a very long time and to get them and have a successful show is a great, great feeling.”
Local band Great Caesar opened the show at 8 p.m. and performed to a not-yet-packed venue, but the band was surprisingly seasoned, especially in comparison to Third Eye Blind, who has been around since the early ’90s. Throughout their 20-minute set, Great Caesar encouraged the audience to download the EP from their Web site.
“We put it up for free this weekend because we figured there was going to be a lot of people here so we might as well give our music to everybody,” guitarist Mike Farrell said to The Chronicle.
Following the set performed by Great Caesar, power pop-rock-electric dance band Hot Chelle Rae excited the increasingly pumped up crowd. They electrified TD Bank during a mash-up of their single, “I Like to Dance” with Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” Hot Chelle Rae recently completed the music video to “I Like to Dance,” which features a cameo appearance from “The Hills” star Stephanie Pratt.
Hot Chelle Rae only performed for an hour, but they made every minute count. Their slick pop-rock sound was like candy for the ears. It was sweet from beginning to end.
For a number of students, this fall concert was their first.
“It was fun. I liked how we were all close to the stage. I was surprised [SPB] got such a well-known band to play,” freshman Kate Losquadro said.
For freshman Jill Williams, Third Eye Blind was the perfect band for the concert.
“It was so much fun to actually see a band I liked growing up,” she said. “But hearing all the old songs was also my favorite part.”
Third Eye Blind performed a number of new songs from their latest album, “Ursa Major,” but it was during the performances of their classic hits when the room erupted into roars.
The venue was one collective sing-a-long during “Jumper” and “Semi-Charmed Life.” Even though the crowd sounded like horrible, drunken karaoke singers, lead singer Stephan Jenkins could not have sounded any better or clearer during the performance.
“A concert like this is just unbelievable, unheard of really, especially for Quinnipiac,” Doyle said. “You know, it’s a completely new feeling toward everybody who has ever experienced the night to see it and look around and it’s completely packed and everyone there is dying to see the show.”