"Fieldwork" at the Convention: Fall Out Boy Concert

[Teacher's note: The Drake students all have fabulous fieldwork here, from escorting Madeleine Albright to working on the Floor of the Convention to writing for the Denver Post to handling logistics at the hundreds of events that surround the Convention. Alexa, who writes here, will also be working at the Emily's List gala, where she'll see Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama. Jeff is on the Convention Floor (most coveted pass of all) every night, Meagan will be helping with audience control for the Jon Stewart "Daily Show", and even I, the teacher, get some moments in the sun. I'll be with Meagan and Jon Stewart Friday. Here's the word from Alexa's first event placement.]

by Alexa Pichert, Drake journalism

After being shuffled around a couple times by the staff members of Rock the Vote, we were finally all assigned jobs. My first job was to sit outside by the red carpet and direct the media where to go. The media couldn’t pick up their credentials until 8:30 and I was sent out at about 6:00 so this made me a perfect target for the homeless and any one else with strong opinions to come over and tell me their life stories or their political views. After three separate accounts of a woman’s life, whose business card said she was an international poet, one very angry man's rant about the world today and young people, and one man who spent several minutes trying to convince me he was with Bad Boy Entertainment and needed to get inside immediately under P. Diddy's orders, someone else came out to cover my spot and I went upstairs to find a new assignment.

On my way up the stairs Pharrell and the rest of NERD were coming down the stairs to do their rehearsal. They stopped and asked me where the stage was and I very smoothly told them I thought it was upstairs. They said it definitely wasn’t upstairs so I explained I really had no idea where anything was and ran off in embarrassed excitement. I barely had time to get myself together when I walked by Fall Out Boy near their dressing room. I’m not a particularly big fan of the band but it was still cool to see them.

After running around and doing several other random jobs for the Rock the Vote organization, we were allowed to go into the concert. I was surprised that there were so many open seats. We got to go way up front and there were a bunch of open spots still. Jakob Dylan, singer from the Wallflowers, opened; he had a good show but his music isn’t the type that pumps an audience up. (In general everyone seemed more interested in going to the bar to buy more drinks than listening to the performers.)

After a small break, NERD came on. They definitely had the best performance and got the crowd going the most. Again I felt bad for all the performers because it wasn’t the best concert crowd I had ever seen. This was probably because many of the concert goers were older men in business suits. Not exactly a crazy group to be at a concert. Although it was pretty funny to see them jumping around to NERD in their suits.

"If all of you are here because you want to Rock the Vote, I can't understand why you aren't standing up!" said NERD, who did a good job of getting the crowd up out of their seats and dancing. They even brought several audience members on stage during the performance.

Last was Fall Out Boy. At this point, I had been up since six in the morning and it was 12:30 by the time they came on. I’ve also never been a fan of their type of music so I just wasn’t feeling it and left after a couple songs. For those that do enjoy his music, it was probably a good show but I was over it at that point.

All in all the performers put on a good show but the audience needed to step it up.