“The drumming, the luminescence, the shamanic, psychedelic component — that was a response to the modern age,” says Wink, co-founder of Blue Man Group.
Lindsey Best
On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on a one-lane street of tenements fronted by fire escapes, the recording space known as Loho Studios hides behind an unmarked door. Artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams and Patti Smith have cut tracks there.
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But none of the studio’s previous clients played the kind of instruments found at Loho these days.
A waist-high, 8-foot-long organ looks like a character from the film Alien, made of PVC pipes coiled like white snakes, yielding different pitches. A 5-foot-wide wheel is spiked with Boomwhackers — multicolored, tuned percussion tubes. A customized zither bears 98 strings. A drum sequencer looks like a conveyor belt.
Loho Studios today is a recording laboratory for Blue Man Group, the creative collective and production company that in 2016 celebrates 25 years of musical and theatrical invention. The troupe has transformed its signature character — a hairless, earless, neon-blue man who regards artifacts of the modern world with childlike wonder — into a thriving business.
Back in 1991, the founding trio of Blue Man Group — Chris Wink, 55; Phil Stanton, 56; and Matt Goldman, 54 — discovered a performance home in the Astor Place Theater, on a landmarked block of the East Village. (The three still live nearby.) There, a Blue Man troupe continues to draw audiences, who duck the Day-Glo paint that spatters from the trio’s drum skins into the front rows.
In the quarter-century since its debut, Blue Man Group has infiltrated popular culture, on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, Arrested Development, Scrubs and in a witty series of ads for computer company Intel. New York natives Wink and Goldman, and Georgia-raised Stanton (who no longer regularly perform in the show) have seen Blue Man Group become a steady live attraction, with ensembles based in Boston, Chicago and Berlin. One troupe performs regularly at the Universal Orlando Resort. Another is playing cities across North America through June, reaching smaller markets from Eugene, Ore., to Reading, Pa. An international tour opened in Singapore in March and proceeds to New Zealand this month. A visit to Manila in the Philippines is planned in the fall. And the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas is the latest venue to welcome the azure, bald-headed characters in an extended engagement.
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Since 1991, the Blue Man Group show has toured 15 countries and reached 35 million fans.
While known first as a theatrical troupe, Blue Man Group has plenty of music cred. It has collaborated with Dave Matthews and Tiësto. It has released two studio albums, the Grammy-nominated Audio in 1999 and The Complex in 2003. It performed with Moby and Jill Scott at the 2006 Grammys. And in April, the group will release its third studio album, Three, through Rhino Records. Its 14 instrumental tracks were recorded at Loho Studios with the assistance of Blue Man Group music director Chris Dyas and creative director/music supervisor Jeff Turlik.
Of the three Blue Man Group founders, Goldman now is focused on running the Blue School, a private K-8 school in Lower Manhattan whose stated mission is to “reimagine education for a changing world.” Stanton and Wink are co-CEOs of Blue Man Productions, the privately held parent company of the show. They spoke with Billboard about how these performance artists have turned their world — and ours — neon blue.
Where did the Blue Man concept come from?
WINK We started the show right after we read Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, the guy who started TED [the global conferences focused on technology, entertainment and design]. We wanted to create an experience where there was a collision between technology and modernism, the timeless and the universal. The drumming, the luminescence, the shamanic, psychedelic component — that was a response to the modern age, with a nostalgic yearning for primal connection.
We weren’t alone in that artistic impulse. Back in ’88, we were feeling that, and so were people out in San Francisco, who were getting Burning Man going, and the people in Buenos Aires who did De La Guarda [mixing a circus and performance art].
When Blue Man Group was created, what music were you listening to?
WINK Alternative rock, Pink Floyd, world music. We had an appreciation for Latin drumming, the energy of hip-hop, the rage of punk rock, the meditative quality of new age. We also liked some element of techno back then, Kraftwerk and some of those threads that became infused in EDM.
Some of the best-known segments of the show involve Blue Man playing with food of dubious nutritional value: cutting Twinkies with a knife and fork, using Cap’n Crunch as a percussion instrument and launching Jell-O at the audience. Why choose those products?
STANTON I think we’ve always been attracted to the kind of things that seem to sum up something about America, just by presenting them. You don’t have to say much when you pull up a Twinkie or spend a lot of time pointing out that it doesn’t have any nutrition. We all kind of know it. Just being onstage with a Twinkie puts a frame around it, the way Andy Warhol put a frame around things. And we all kind of laugh at it.
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Have you ever heard from any of those brands?
STANTON No. If I were them, I would see it as sort of a sweet, satirical nod.
What does it take to be a Blue Man?
WINK We’ve had females play the role; we’ve had people of different ethnic backgrounds. It really comes down to being able to drum, to act and to catch stuff in your mouth.
Has the show stood the test of time as it was originally intended, or is the concept just very nimble?
WINK One thing about this project is that the concept is flexible. We always change the show; we update the details, the pop cultural and technological references.
With all your various business ventures, why record a new album now?
WINK We try still to be artists, even though we’re a company. We approach albums like we approach our show, releasing them because we feel we have to make music. There’s not a Billboard chart that I’m aware of for interesting, instrumental, Moby-influenced fusion music. We’re making it because we think it’s a big part of who we are.
STANTON This album has been really fun, because personally and professionally, we’ve gotten more interested in electronic music. There was a time when I didn’t really pay much attention to it, but I’ve been following it over the last several years. It has really come into its own; it has such humanity now, and such expressiveness.
What’s next for Blue Man Group?
WINK We have more luminescent toys; we have video clothing we’re going to be putting into the show. We want to create some live performances and video around the songs on the new album. There are other places in the world we’d like to take the show.
STANTON Other than the big festivals and clubs, no one has really made electronic music very theatrical yet. So stay tuned. There might be some way to try to do that.
Is there a day that goes by when you don’t think about Blue Man?
WINK I have kids, and I’ve learned that they have a rich world that doesn’t include Blue Man every step of the way. What I’ve learned from Blue Man is that I should be more present wherever I am. So if I go on vacation someplace and there’s a sunset, and if I’m thinking about Blue Man, then I hope whomever I’m with would slap me in the face and tell me to f—ing watch the sun.
This story originally appeared in the April 16 issue of Billboard.