The line wrapped around the building and stretched down Montgomery Street Tuesday evening outside the OnCenter. Inside, the convention center began to fill with a crowd dressed in neon colors, wacky hats, colorful beads and plastic sunglasses.
The Club Life College Invasion tour [10] headlined by DJ Tiësto had arrived, bringing with it over four hours of vibrating electronic house music, strobe lights and pyrotechnics.
Tiësto, widely regarded as the world’s biggest DJ, was originally scheduled to play with Swedish electro-house duo Dada Life [10] at the OnCenter in October, but postponed his tour due to a back injury [10].
Opener Quintino [10] got the crowd going at the start of the evening. Like Tiësto, Quintino is a DJ and producer originally from the Netherlands. Known for hits like “Epic,” [10] Quintino has played over 250 shows this year [10].
Originally scheduled to start at 7 p.m., the concert got off to a slow start. Once he started, however, Quintino had the nearly-sold-out crowd cheering, jumping and moving their bodies to his beats and mixes of hits like Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness.”
Australian-born, Los Angeles, Calif.-based producer DJ Tommy Trash [10] took the stage around 9:20 p.m. as Tiësto’s second opener. People stood sweating, pressed together shoulder to shoulder, but it didn’t stop their incessant jumping, arms raised as they danced to the music.
The excitement escalated throughout the night, with each DJ playing his most contagious beats for nearly 90 minutes. It was impossible to stand still; the continually fist-pumping crowd was always moving to the beat of the powerful bass or being pushed around by the constant stream of motion. Many even tried to crowd surf, only to be defeated by OnCenter security.
Tiësto finally came on around 10:30 p.m. to an ecstatically cheering audience, shaking the crowd with hits like “Maximal Crazy” and “Chasing Summers.” Many audience members, with the help of friends, began climbing onto one another’s shoulders in order to catch a better look at the acclaimed DJ.
Music wasn’t all Tiësto offered. The strobe light sequences that accompanied his music transformed the entire convention center into a hypnotic fireworks show of neon lights.
Around 12:30 a.m. Tiësto thanked his opening guests Quintino and DJ Tommy Trash and the audience. He was about to play his last tracks, which included “Like This, Like That” and a remix of Zombie Nation's techno hit "Kemkraft 400," which made the crowd go wild.
The night ended with a rain of white confetti reflecting the shine of the strobe lights and an exhausted crowd.
