At Deer Lake Park on Sunday, July 29

If you're the type who lives and breathes music, occasionally an MOR band or album will come along, inexplicably go multiplatinum, and in the process almost crush your soul. You'll think about the phenomenally talented acts you have seen play to five people in a dingy bar and then you'll think "John Mayer sold more than two million albums last year" and you'll kind of want to die. "Who is buying those albums?" you'll ask yourself. And, because the fates are as cruel as the charts, you may end up getting your answer, as you watch hordes of fans turn out to see the Fray play Deer Lake Park last Sunday night.

Even if you haven't heard of the Denver, Colorado, quartet, you've probably heard it. The Fray hit the jackpot when the title track of its 2005 debut, How to Save a Life, was featured both on TV hospital comedy Scrubs and on the hospital drama-cum-hunkumentary Gray's Anatomy , with the latter using the earnest piano-rock song in its 2006 promo spots. Doctor! Doctor! Come quick! We have a modern rock band with a horseshoe stuck up its ass!

While we're all hopefully past the point of begrudging a group a meal ticket from a well-placed spot on TV, the Fray seems to exist only because of its ties to an enormously popular show–a fact made evident by the audience's reaction to its live performances.

From the moment the band hit the stage, launching into the midtempo radio rocker "All At Once", the crowd–mainly female students and vanilla-looking couples–seemed un­interested, preferring to chat idly and take endless craftily angled, Facebook-ready digital pictures of themselves. As singer and plaintive piano man Isaac Slade tried to rev the crowd up, a few die-hards gave halfhearted hoots.

"Y'all are crazy!" said Slade to the distracted throngs, explaining that at a recent two-night stand in Seattle he could hear women in the audience talking about shopping. It was hardly the kind of stage banter you'd expect from a band whose debut album has shifted more than two million units in North America alone.

But the Fray was bafflingly boring. From "She Is" to "Fall Away" to "Heaven Forbid", the songs were difficult to differentiate, morphing into one radio-friendly, overwrought, lyric-driven, modern-rock marathon, a sort of less-edgy Coldplay meets a less-rocking Counting Crows. Even when the group tried to make things interesting, its inability to engage shone through: the countrified new song "Dixie" ended up hurried and flat, and a joking cover of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" was neither funny nor well-executed enough to warrant inclusion.

The worst (or best) part of the evening came when the Fray played "How to Save a Life", a song that must surely haunt its dreams. The frat girls of Dubble Kappa Dullta ran toward the stage screaming, singing along with the chorus and growing embarrassingly quiet during the verses. When the song was done, nearly a quarter of the crowd headed for the hills, likely going home to watch season 616 of Friends on DVD. It's hard to blame them. They got what they paid for and left a show so bland that even my own notes were just vulgar drawings of the band in various permutations of sexual congress with each other.

As the Fray left the stage, before coming back for an encore of "Over My Head (Cable Car)", a wiseacre in the audience yelled "YEAAAHHH! Play that song about the doctors again!" You almost felt sorry for Slade and company, but looking around at their massive audience, you had to remember that each of the 5,000 people in attendance had paid a cool $61.50. Comments from sarcastic naysayers might hurt, but the Fray will be crying all the way to the bank.