Over 50 people came out Saturday to the Maintenance Shop to see Chicago’s Box-o-Car and Iowa City’s Fool’s Journey — a decent turnout for a holiday weekend.

Formerly based in Ames, when most of Fool’s Journey’s members attended high school here, the band gave the mostly non-zealous crowd their damnedest.

Fool’s Journey cruised through its one hour set with respectable applause, but no one in the audience ever made it from bopping their head or tapping their feet to actually getting up and dancing around.

Fool’s Journey’s first appearance at the Shop certainly had the low-key vibe the Iowa City boys hadn’t seen since their high school days.

Saturday marked Box-o-car’s first M-shop performance as well, but it didn’t fare nearly as well with the crowd as Fool’s Journey did.

By the time Box-o-Car had run through its first three songs, over half of the attendees had disbanded into the cold winter night.

Not that it was a bad show. Box-o-Car’s set was strewn with a menagerie of guitar pedals that literally kept the band’s guitarists on their toes and afforded their sound some variety.

The lead singer had the stage presence of a heroin addict freakin’ for a fix. Running around the stage, caressing his sweaty mic stand and kicking at the crowd, he looked like an ’80s glam rocker.

Unfortunately for the band, his energy was spewed in vain, for the dark pop rock continued to empty out the room until they called it quits an hour or so later.