The Roanoke Valley has a decent mainstream rock audience. That explains the 4,558 heads  in the Roanoke Civic Center Coliseum on a Wednesday night for a four-band package show.

But headliner 3 Doors Down seemed in danger of losing the crowd for a big portion of its set. At times, the 10,000-capacity room was as quiet as one can imagine for a hard rock show, even at midweek. Toward the end, though, the Mississippi band started cranking out the familiar tunes, and the audience came back to life in time to go home.

The first half of its  75-minute set was missing an air of authenticity, largely due to the too-commercial nature of such numbers as “The Champion In Me” and “Citizen/Soldier.” The latter featured a big-screen background of movie-style war scenes dating back to frontier days. Both song and video seemed like a long military recruiting commercial.

After the mid-tempo “It’s Not Me” and “Landing In London,” the band spent too much time between tunes, and singer/frontman Brad Arnold wasn’t one for much patter. The room would go relatively silent, save for random rockers’ screams.

With “Train” and “Let Me Be Myself,” the crowd began to respond again and stayed engaged through the rest of the set, including the inevitable encore of the band’s biggest hits, “Kryptonite” and the patriotic “When I’m Gone.”

In the end, people were streaming out before the last band member had even left the stage. It wasn’t that the band wasn’t tight and professional. Maybe it was just boring. Maybe 11:10 p.m. was late for a lot of folks. Maybe it was a combination of both.

Of the four acts, second-on-the-bill Hinder knew best how to rock the crowd. Its 50-minute set included its biggest hits, “Lips of an Angel” and “Get Stoned,” both from its 2005 album, “Extreme Behavior.”

The five-piece band, looking like punks out of a sleazy rock dive, harkened back a couple of decades with a vibe that recalled such blues-infused melodic rock  as Cinderella and Aerosmith, minus most of the cheese. Singer Austin Winkler had the requisite metal scream and stock Jagger-lite moves, keeping the crowd interested through such party anthem material as last year’s “Up All Night.” In an odd distraction, Winkler brought out an American flag to drape over his microphone stand for the broken-hearted lament “Better Than Me.”

Later, the band began draping its stands and guitars with bras tossed from the floor, though by the time the fourth exact same-looking white bra landed onstage, it seemed clearly to be a ruse.

Theory of A Deadman delivered its sing-along hit, “I Hate My Life,” No. 7 on the mainstream rock chart. The crowd responded — and why not? It sounded like a Kid Rock toss-off. In fact, it sounded a lot like Rock’s “Only God Knows Why.”

Singer/guitarist Tyler Connolly came up flat for high notes on the Motley Crue-ish “Bad Girlfriend.” The band, though, was solid, down to the back-to-back-to-back, guitars-behind-heads “wheedley-whee” of a finish.

Opener Black Stone Cherry was also missing the originality to match its instrumental chops and vocal harmonies. Its best song, “Lonely Train,” pulled off the odd feat of combining Alice In Chains-style grunge with the chug of old-school Blackfoot. But vocalist Chris Robertson dragged down the effort with such cliche lines as “You can’t judge a book lookin’ at the cover.” Really, dude?

Franklin County hard rock band Madrone played a short pre-show set in the venue’s outdoor court. The power trio pounded and slashed through some interesting rhythms and chord changes.

Singer/songwriter J.D. Sutphin’s lyrical and musical ideas are strong. If he can bring a wider variety of tempos to his music, his band could get a shot at regular work inside the kind of sheds that 3 Doors Down inhabit.