Blue Man Group

Before the Blue Man Group, Kevin and I went to the Spaghetti Factory. I hadn't been there in like 20 years.

The Pepsi Center. Kevin says that it was built to not only be a sports arena, but also to be optimized for concerts. The sound was horrible, in fact I'm thinking that it was even worse than the old McNichols arean that it replaced. It may have been because we were off-center in the stands, but Mike (who really digs concerts) says he's never had good audio in an arena.

First up for foreplay was this band who's name I forgot. It was ok.

Next up was "Venus Hum". It was hard to tell with the crappy audio, but I think they might have been good.

"I've got a few minutes before I have to play guitar again, so I'd better update my blog."

Last minute sales of flashy LED toys. The LED toys are the glowy necklace of the naughties.

Blue Man enterance.

Lots of people on stage.

Hey, there are blue men in this concert! Their schtick was that they were going by a manual of what to do to be a rock-star.

For example, get your audience to pump their fists in the air. I'm not so amused by a program telling humans what to do, but whatever...

Another one is to invite a guest vocalist up on stage.

A good shot of the blue men.

This one came out nicely.

Tracy Bonham.

Lots of techie stuff in the show. The drums up front have LED signs around the base with "?"s scrolling up them, sideways.

A better shot.

Another rule: involve the audience.

Invite women up on stage to dance.

They also had a big, huge LED like sign in front of the stage, long and thin, and a bunch of these little LED sign pod-lets (illuminated blue here) that were all synchronized with the other signs. Things would go across them from the bottom signs up, and from right to left sort of thing, all synched. It was kind of cool, from a "that must be fun to program" standpoint.

Oh yeah, the outline men song.

The stage show was amusing, but the audio was just horrible. During one song in particular, it just sounded like noise, I couldn't hear any notes or instruments or anything. Except for the comedy parts where only one or two people were playing, it was pretty hard to make out the music. It was amusing, but I'd generally avoid the Pepsi Center in the future. I'd go see Spinal Tap there, that's about it.