Families, hipsters, professors and stoners were out in full force at the Sunday night Arcade Fire concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.

The diverse audience – indicative of Arcade Fire’s wide appeal – lent itself to great people-watching in the hours before the show and contributed to what has to have been one of the nicest rock concert crowds ever experienced. The civility with which people negotiated spots in the pit was mind-blowing. It was as if the beautiful setting of the Greek Theatre or perhaps some transplanted Canadian ideals (a la Arcade Fire’s homeland) chilled out the crowd.

Or maybe it was the effects of the ever-lingering thick cloud of marijuana that prompted front man Win Butler to comment, “Me and my brother grew up in a Mormon family, so we’ve never intentionally gotten high, but we always look forward to coming to Berkeley as there’s so much smoking going on, we get it secondhand – Thank you guys for that!”

The crowd warmly received opening band Calexico, who offered up a genre of music that could best be described as “cowboy rock.” With one song starting on a flamenco-inspired malaguena riff and several other songs offering catchy Spanish chants that the crowd diligently attempted to echo, Calexico was to rock music as TexMex is to border food. The music felt distinctly American but with many South American-, Spanish- and Mexican-inspired flourishes. The band’s lead singer successfully engaged the crowd in some mimetic cooing on one of the last songs of the set, and the band exited the stage to rapturous applause.

Following the south-of-the-border beats, Arcade Fire opened to the great surprise of the audience with “Neighborhood #1 Tunnels.” There were so many people singing along – it was difficult to hear the band over the singing crowd in the pit – that I suspect that the few absent-minded attendees who did not know the lyrics were mouthing along anyway to go with the flow. The steady pulse of the drum was visually complemented by the in-rhythm falling of snowflakes on a JumboTron behind the band that alternated between shots of the audience, pre-filmed footage and multi-layered shots of the band.

The band played nearly its entire first album “Funeral,” a few favorites from its sophomore follow-up “Neon Bible” and six songs from its latest effort, “The Suburbs.” The crowd roared for nearly every song, including the new ones. Providing the necessary level of spectacle, Butler surprised the audience by climbing into the upper limits of the audience during “We Used to Wait,” and heads were banging to the anthemic “Rococo.”

Each member of the band was continuously switching instruments throughout the night. Front woman Régine Chassagne notably sang and twirl-danced with the attitude of a mate rejecting or egging on a partner during bird dance-courtship. This was only for a few songs in the middle of the set, though, before she switched back to playing drums, accordion and hurdy gurdy (a big medieval instrument you have to spin, which produces the constant sound of a bow-based instrument).

But perhaps the most entertaining and impressive person on stage was the keyboard-drum-glockenspiel player whose glockenspiel playing left most people under the impression that he was doing a tribal dance as he rhythmically and violently extended his arms all the way over his head between hitting each note. Will Butler, the younger brother of front man Win, also managed to beat his drum so hard that you could clearly see specks of wood flying into the air. After nearly depleting his drumsticks during “Neighborhood #2 (Laika),” Will Butler climbed up 30 feet of scaffolding on the side of the stage only to start beating the scaffolding with his drumsticks.

The highlight of the night, however, came at the end of the band’s encore, when Arcade Fire played the classic and fan-favorite “Wake Up.” Before starting the song, Will Butler complained to the crowd that he “wasn’t going to jump in if they couldn’t even help one kid crowd surf.” This comment sparked a wave of crowd surfing that left security at the show trembling in fear and the band laughing in joy and surprise (Arcade Fire concerts do not typically spawn punk rock-level crowd surfing, or crowd surfing at all for that matter). People left and right were being launched up over the crowd every five seconds throughout the show. Meanwhile, those standing were powerfully chanting the words and “ohh”s of the chorus for all of Berkeley to hear. This lucky reviewer crowd surfed in the last two minutes of the show to just in front of the stage, where I goofily waved at the band and, in turn, was tossed a tambourine (from a laughing Will Butler) which I victoriously shook until the band closed the song and left the stage, leaving the audience in complete, blissful joy.

And yes, I am perhaps biased for having the fanboy moment of the year.