Jim Bianco
I Got A Thing For Jim Bianco
Catching up on my stockpile of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,1
I found myself on the receiving end of a musical version of a shock and awe campaign when Jim Bianco and his band performed I Got A Thing For You.
Bianco has quietly gathered an adulating audience through the Hotel Cafe Tour, SXSW, club appearances, the appearance of his music on TV soundtracks, and his CDs (Well Within Reason, Handsome Devil, Sing), without receiving widespread recognition.2
He operates from that ambiguous platform called folk-pop, which allows him to give voice to his own twisted version of irony and humor. That point of view also manifests in other formats. Bianco, for example, opens his biography on his own web site by noting,
It seems to me that, these days, there are more singer/songwriters out in the world than there are normal, well-balanced people. Rock n’ Roll is everywhere. Everybody and their brother has a guitar, a website, a Myspace page, a CD, a venereal disease and a video. So as I sit down to write my Bio, it feels a bit like I’m meticulously handcrafting a piece of sand to take to the beach.
I’ve included the video of the same performance on the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson that I saw. There are, however, several other versions of I Got A Thing For You on YouTube alone, one of which was created by Bianco setting his music to the movements of exotic dancer, Courtney Cruz (I Got A Thing For You With Courtney Cruz). Also showing in the embedded players below are Goodness Gracious Me, the lyrics of which Bianco describes as “filthy, totally over the top, and shamefully rooted in the loins of the male libido,” and an acoustic version of Painkiller, a song featuring an altogether different perspective on that fundamental liaison between a man and a woman.
Jim Bianco Videos
I Got A Thing For You – Jim Bianco (Craig Ferguson Show)
Goodness Gracious Me – Jim Bianco (Hotel Cafe Tour)
Painkiller – Jim Bianco (Acoustic, solo version done in his kitchen)
Bonus: Jim Bianco In Concert
Listen to the NPR broadcast of Jim Bianco at Wiggins Park in Philadelphia (July 11, 2008)
Credit Due Department: The photo atop this post was taken by Byrony Shearmur.
- Craig Ferguson is more than worthy of a post or two himself, although I suspect he may be one of those worst kept secrets in show business. For now, I’ll just make the potentially pertinent point that he began his career in entertainment as a drummer in a punk band called “The Bastards from Hell.” (later known as “Dreamboys”), who performed regularly in Glasgow from 1980 to 1982. Ferguson routinely pronounces the band “pretty bad.” In an interview with Brad Deck for ArtVoice, The Unlikely Hero of Late Night, Ferguson elaborates, “I was the drummer [for The Bastards from Hell], and I drummed with a lot of different, really crappy bands. The only person I drummed with you might have heard of was — are you familiar with the Velvet Underground? … well, Nico had worked with the Velvet Underground. When she was touring in the UK, I was her drummer. It’s not difficult to play drums along with a heroin addict. You can pretty much relax and just go with the flow.” All right, I can’t help myself; after leaving the band, Craig Ferguson performed stand-up and improvisational comedy under the stage name, “Bing Hitler.” He has also been an actor on stage, movies, and TV, a screenwriter, a director, and a novelist, publishing Between the Bridge and the River in 2006.↩
- His music is also said to be popular in another niche venue, strip clubs, which is also reminiscent of Leonard Cohen.↩
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