We paid $11.00 per ticket (food at the venue cost more) for our seats at the Rays game. Without knowing it when we bought the tickets, the game on the 11th included free admission to a Smashmouth concert afterward (you may know Smashmouth from one of their hit singles, like All Star). Since Steve and I are cheap, we decided to stay after the Rays’ game to see the free Smashmouth concert. It took them a while to get everything set up, but once the concert finally started, um, we realized why Smashmouth is playing cheap gigs after Rays’ games. The “music” was really loud, all sounded the same, and was not very good. To boot, they should have spent more time setting up because you couldn’t hear the vocals at all, just loud electric guitars. It was so loud and powerful my seat was vibrating. Within seconds, the exodus began. All the Rays fans who really came just for the game but decided to see what Smashmouth was all about started to leave. I tried to capture the remarkable exodus with my cellphone’s crappy video camera:
All those wispy shapes you see walking to the right are people leaving. If you look closely, there are only people walking to the right, up the stairs toward the exits. It was actually quite amazing to see so many people leave within minutes of the band starting to play. Steve and I stuck it out for about 15 minutes then, deaf and numb from the blare and vibration, we became one of those wispy ghosts and floated out of Tropicana Field.
Here’s a photo of the venue. The concert was general admission and they let people onto the field. We moved down to one of the lower sections to see the concert.
