Last night, Dan N., Dave J., and I went to see Jim’s Big Ego play in the Wolves’ Den on campus. I had not heard of them before yesterday, but I did recognize a few of the songs that they played and thought it was a cool set in general. However, I wanted to talk about two things they did that I thought were great. The first is that Jim (the lead singer and guitarist) sang parts of the Bill O’Reilly sexual harrassment scandal transcripts as an intro to a song—I think—called “Porno Plot,” which was just hilarious. The second aspect of their show that struck me as a great idea was something they called “napkin poetry.” For this bit, everyone was invited to write words, short phrases, or a line or two of poetry on napkins with markers and place them in a pile on the stage. The bassist—upright bassist—and the drummer jammed while Jim took the random napkin poetry and used it to make a free-form song, completely unique, and never to be performed again. The song, as you can imagine, was pretty incoherent; nonetheless, it was amusing and we were a bit buzzed so it really worked out well.
I didn’t find out until right now that Jim’s last name is Infantino, as in Jim “WTFMFWTFAYT?” Infantino. Had I known that last night, I would have talked to him after the show. Hmm.