On August 29th, 5SOS kicked off their North American tour (or at least the US portion) at Mohegan Sun Arena. My Mom ended up getting offered free tickets so she tagged along with me for the show. It was the evening before my 20th anniversary of my first concert – Hanson. It was funny to see that even though 20 years have passed, the way the teenie boppers act at shows has not. Singing along in line waiting for the doors to open, screaming when the doors do open, freaking out when the band members remove jackets. Although there were some noticeable changes with technology – cell phones were barely a thing 20 years ago and if you wanted to take photos it was on a film camera so you had no idea what you had taken until the next day – IF you were lucky enough to go to a one-hour photo place and not have to mail your photos out to be developed. And videos? Forget it. No snapchat, no instagram.
I really was only familiar (or so I thought) with 2 of 5SOS songs – and of course they were the two that I saw on the setlist were going to be for the encore. 2 girls ended up being the only ones standing in our area and completely blocked us – but slowly the older “high rollers” who also had tickets in our row started leaving so we scooted down after about 5 songs and were able to see the band on the stage and not just the girl in front of us singing into her cell phone as if it was a microphone. (I mean, at least if you can’t see the band the girls you can see were mildly entertaining?)
I found it funny that when the show started I noted that security was at the bottom of every section making sure that people weren’t going to sneak down to the GA Floor – and then a few songs in one of the band members told anyone who wanted to come down to the floor to come down. Massive amounts of girls made their way down the stairs only to be turned back around once they got to the bottom by security. Perhaps security and the band should have been put on the same page before the show! lol
The Aces opened the show and they were an all girls band from Utah and they actually were not that bad at all. I enjoyed them.
It was a fun show, it was fun to watch the crowd when I couldn’t see the band, but I definitely had to have my earplugs in the whole time. It’s been a while since I had been in the middle of such a young, loud crowd!
