“Sorry, Jack Johnson tickets are sold out.”

This is a phrase Laura Harms had to repeat many times yesterday.

Harms, who is the guest rooms manager at the Memorial Union, is in charge of ticket sales at the MU Ticketmaster. And she, along with the rest of the Ticketmaster staff, had a hectic morning.

At 10 a.m. tickets for the Johnson concert went on sale.

By 10:22 a.m., they were sold out.

“The show sold out in about 20 minutes,” Harms said. “I have been here for five years and that is the fastest I have ever seen an M-Shop show sell out.”

Gretchen Schultz, senior in entomology, nabbed the second-to-last pair of tickets available.

“I waited in line for 20 minutes,” she said.

“The line was backed up all the way down the stairs to the revolving doors [on the West end of the Memorial Union]. Some of the people around me were saying that they’d never seen a line that long for a show.”

Ticketmaster and the Maintenance Shop both have been bombarded with phone calls since the day the news dropped that Johnson would be making an appearance in Ames.

“Every single day people were calling the M-Shop trying to find out where and when to get tickets,” said M-Shop Director Squire Boone.

Johnson is a budding musician who brings a fresh blend of beachy blues, folk and funk to the singer-songwriter scene. The Hawaii native has been compared to everyone from the Dave Matthews Band to Phish.

Oct. 21 won’t be Johnson’s first Ames visit. Earlier this year he opened for Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals on the Stephens Auditorium stage in front of a near-capacity crowd.

“I think the fact that he recently opened for Ben Harper really helped the ticket sales,” Boone said.

But Johnson wasn’t the only highly anticipated songsmith that had prospective concert-goers lined up.

Tickets for emo-punksters Alkaline Trio also went on sale yesterday at 10 a.m. Tickets for that show are nearly sold out, too, Boone said.

Keith Rich, a junior at Roland-Story High School, skipped class yesterday to land a few Alkaline tickets for himself and his friends.

“When I heard they were coming, I almost peed my pants,” he said. “I didn’t want to miss out on that.”

Alkaline Trio is one of Rich’s favorite bands.

“I’ve seen them twice now – once at Warped Tour and once in Minneapolis – and both times they blew me away,” he said. “All of their CDs are incredible.”

Both the Jack Johnson and the Alkaline Trio shows are big draws for the M-Shop.

“We’re really fortunate to get them in a place this small, which is unfortunate for those who didn’t get tickets,” Boone said. “But it’s really fortunate for those that did, because they will probably never play somewhere this small again.”