As a record-breaking crowd pushed and shoved for a better view, a banner slowly unfurled at the back of the stage. Reading ‘THIRDEYEBLIND,’ with its trademark missing spaces, the crowd recognized the name and went wild.

The band soon took the stage and jumped into a rendition of ‘Losing a Whole Year’ from an album released when most of the audience was in elementary school (the band’s 1997 self-titled debut), but no one seemed to care.

It was the closing act to the fifth annual Juice Jam Festival, held near the Skytop Office Building on South Campus, a move from its previous venue at Standart Parking Lot near Lawrinson Hall. Sterling Proffer, co-director of University Union Concerts, said the 3,800 in attendance was the most ever for a Juice Jam show.

Third Eye Blind followed sets by Max Bemis, lead singer of Say Anything, and White Rabbits.

Alex Vispoli, a senior broadcast journalism major, was glad to see the band.

‘Considering that they were 10 years ago hitting their prime, it was pretty good to see that they still got it,’ he said.

Stephan Jenkins welded class to his on-stage energy, donning a large top hat for most of the performance and often taking his mike off of the stand to jump around the stage.

He knew his audience, welcoming the crowd back to school before yelling an appropriate ‘Can I graduate?’ and segueing into the classic high-school anthem ‘Graduate.’

‘Bonfire,’ a song from the band’s upcoming fourth album, was a low point. While it was musically on par with the rest of their material, the crowd seemed to have trouble getting into it. It seemed they were just there to hear to the hits.

Further missteps appeared later in the set, as the band sluggishly went through a long version of ‘Jumper.’ Arion Salazar’s extended guitar solo dragged the crowd down with its length and redundancy. Brad Hargreaves’ subsequent drum solo only compounded the problem.

After ‘Jumper,’ the band took strayed away from their standard format, with Jenkins playing ‘Deep Inside of You,’ alone on acoustic guitar, a good break from the previous song’s excess.

The set ended with their first big hit: ‘Semi-Charmed Life.’ With the easily recognizable line ‘I want something else,’ and those repeated ‘do’s,’ the entire audience was locked in lyrically. This song, like the rest of the show, was well-received because it was exactly what the audience expected: easily recognizable hits from a band already considered nostalgia.

However, the actual ending was a departure from their hit-driven performance, with Salazar attacking the final riff of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Audience members seemed to step back as they recognized the song but grew more comfortable as Jenkins did justice to Robert Plant’s vocals. It was an unexpected classic rock homage as the band that seemed to define rock in the late ’90s reached out to their ’70s predecessors.

‘The show was amazing, especially the whole ‘Stairway to Heaven’ thing they did during that one song,’ said Christina Miller, a sophomore interior design major.

‘Stairway’ also stood out to Matt Gay, a junior sports management major.

‘They put on a solid show, and the Led Zeppelin cover towards the end was awesome,’ he said.

After chants of ‘one more song’ from a grateful audience, Third Eye Blind performed ‘1,000 Julys’ as an encore.

Like Jenkins, Max Bemis played acoustic versions Say Anything’s hits, but he alone was the show. The set-up was sparse: an acoustic guitar, a microphone and an energetic frontman, who often sang with his tongue sticking out.

Although he took an enormous amount of time tuning his guitar onstage-even once giving up and playing ‘Belt’ with an out-of-tune high ‘E’ string-he was able to get a remarkably full and complex sound out of his guitar.

Bemis spliced new material into the set, while hits like ‘Alive with the Glory of Love,’ ‘Woe’ and ‘Wow, I Can Get Sexual, Too,’ had fans and new listeners alike crowding the stage and mouthing the words.

He explained that he was playing alone because Say Anything hasn’t been practicing enough as a band, and the absence showed. While an acoustic version of a characteristically electric song can put a new twist on an old hit, Bemis’s 40-minute set became tiresome in spots.

‘It was a really solid acoustic set,’ said Max Hendren, a junior advertising major. ‘I would have liked if the whole band was there, but he plays really good acoustic,’

Samantha Worrilow, a freshman advertising major, also enjoyed the set, but would have preferred a full band.

‘I liked it more with the band, because I’ve seen them live before, where everyone knows the words, and that was a little more my scene, but it was really good like this,’ she said.

Unfortunately, the White Rabbits received the smallest audience as the first act, causing the majority of Juice Jam attendees to miss their surprisingly strong set.

Landon Freedman, a freshman entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises major was filled with enthusiasm for the band after their set.

‘The White Rabbits were freaking amazing,’ he said. ‘I want to buy their CD. Do they have a CD out yet? I want to-I really want to buy it.’

With two vocalists and three members who seemed to play a combination of bass guitar, percussion and backup keyboards, each song was a different experience.

‘They got slightly better each time they played,’ said Leah Rocketto, a freshman broadcast journalism major. ‘Each song was a little better than the last, but they were still no Third Eye.’

Published on September 3, 2007 at 12:00 pm