I decided to go out to the All American Rejects, Fall Out Boy and Blink 182 concert last Sunday at the Ford Amphitheater. I went the box seat route and that made the parking a breeze. I passed hundreds of cars sitting on the highway which all appeared to be waiting for a very long time to enter the crappy standard lot. The last time I went to a concert and parked in the normal lot and it took 1 hour to park and another 1 1/2 hours to get back out of the lot.

The concert started off with the white rapper that does the College song. Can’t remember his name, so must not have made much of an impression. He was jumping around the stage like someone having a seizure. It was amusing at least.

The first real band to take the stage was the All American Rejects. The lead singer came on in a wheelchair with a huge cast on his right leg. They had a girl from the audience pushing him around the stage while he sang. The performance was good but he was obviously pretty out of it from the pain medicine he was on. He messed up and forgot the lyrics a few times. The best part was that he kept repeatedly telling everyone that he doesn’t lip synch like the damn Jonas Brothers and other crappy bands that are fake.

Fall Out Boy came on next. The crowd went wild and they put on a great show. The music rocked. They had a guy come up that had a huge tattoo on his stomach that said “Dirty”. The band had him chug eight beers during one of the songs. He threw up about 4 times on stage but managed to down all the beer. Pretty damn funny to watch this dude throwing up on stage.

At about this time the entire audience was sweating from the sweltering heat. A wonderful hot and muggy Florida night. The heat is definitely a bad part about the amphitheater.

Blink 182 came on stage next to a deafening roar of the audience. The put on a really awesome show. They interacted with the audience a few times. One was to tell us that they were not looking forward to going to the Alabama show. They feared that the concept of counting to 4 would be way to hard for the Alabama audience. The highlight of the show to me was the encore. The crowd was screaming so loud I could feel them for about 10 minutes to bring the band back out.

The encore started with Travis Barker, the drummer, strapped into his drum chair. The entire drum set was then raised into the air about 10 feet on this platform and he began banging out an awesome solo. The solo was really intense but got even better when the platform started to rise and dip. They had him going forward at about 30 degrees and then back and then to the side. He kept rocking it out while they made the whole platform go crazy. To make it even more intense, the middle of the platform actually started spinning in circles. So this guy was rocking the drums up 15 feet high, drum set spinning around a full 360 and then the platform leaning at crazy angles. That is one amazing talent and the highlight of the entire night.

The concert ended with streaming being blasted onto the audience and lights on. I got into my car and out of the stadium and back to the hotel in less than 15 minutes. To put that in perspective, I ran an errand 30 minutes later and drove by the stadium and the cars were lined up all the way around the stadium rolling at about 2 mph. (Long story short, pay for the VIP parking because the amphitheater parking sucks)