Stand-up comic and heavy metal enthusiast Jim Florentine recently started a stand-up tour on August second and will finish early into the Winter season. Aside from the tour, Florentine has also been keeping himself busy with a new comedy special entitled You Can’t Please Em All, attending concerts around the world, and much more. Florentine spoke with Metal Express Radio about the challenges of doing comedy at a concert, his experiences on That Metal Show, attending Back to the Beginning, and more. Check out the chat below!
Metal Express Radio: Over the last few months, you’ve kept yourself plenty busy. You’ve been traveling around the world, going to shows. You have your own tour that just started August 2, and you’re still at it terrorizing telemarketers. How’s everything been going?
Florentine: You know, I love it. I like keeping busy doing tours, doing stand-up, and making prank calls. Especially during the summertime I love going to concerts, it’s the perfect season for it.
MER: You’ve performed in comedy clubs doing your stand-up routine, and you’ve done some notable metal shows like Metallica’s Orion Festival. How would you compare performing at a metal show as opposed to like a comedy show?
Florentine: Yeah, it’s completely different. It’s tough cause comedy really doesn’t work all the time at a concert because everyone is there to hear music. When you’re doing comedy, everything’s got to be perfectly set up the lighting, the sound, you have people right on top of you in a small room with low ceilings. Sometimes it is fun to get out there, if you got the right kind of jokes, you could pull it off, but it’s definitely not easy doing comedy at a rock show.
MER: Has there ever been a particular show where you knew you kind of had to work on winning the audience over?
Florentine: Yeah, it’ happens a lot even at a regular stand-up show you got to figure it out, it’s almost like you’re an NFL quarterback at the line of scrimmage and you see the defense, maybe you change the play or you’re looking at it like what you’re going to do next.
MER: Is there anyone that you hope to open up for one day that you haven’t?
Florentine: Not really, like I said the bands are tough to open for to begin with. So, it’s not really an ideal situation.
MER: You’ve always shown love for all bands from everywhere between obviously the veterans like Black Sabbath and Metallica, but you’ve also shown support for bands like Shadows Fall and Hatebreed that came from that new wave of heavy metal has there been any other newer bands that have caught your attention lately?
Florentine: Not really, I don’t really seek out new music unless it comes across my radar. There’s so much old stuff to listen to so I just kind of stick with that.
MER: Thinking back to your days on That Metal Show, who was your favorite guest to interview?
Florentine: Lemmy Kilmister (Motörhead) was on it a couple of times he was great, Slash (Guns N’ Roses) we had on twice. Each episode was always great, I always had questions I wanted to ask these guys for years, it was great I was able to do that on a show, and I didn’t even have to do any research.
MER: You’ve always paid tribute to Metal legends with your album titles such as Cringe ‘n’ Purge, and also gave a nod to Black Sabbath with the artwork on Terrorizing Telemarket’s 4, do you always try to incorporate that kind of theme?
Florentine: Yeah, I usually do that. Like I did Simple Man, it was one of my comedy specials. That’s a Skynyrd song. Two specials ago was called Bite the Bullet, that’s a Motörhead song. One of my albums, Get the Kids Out of the Room, was like take off of AC/DC’s Ball Breaker album cover. I always like to throw that in as a little nod. It always depends what I’m talking about on stage, if it fits the special.
MER: Going back to That Metal Show, there was a handful of times where you had a bit where you and Don Jamieson would go out and mess with people at certain concerts, there was once a Van Halen one at Madison Square Garden, as well as a Motörhead one in Europe. Was there ever a time where there was a really close call with a fan’s reaction to your jokes?
Florentine: No, we could kind of feel it out, same with the comedy clubs when we’re picking on somebody, if they’re getting mad, we know when to move on. But we never had that with That Metal Show.
MER: I can recall the Van Halen one, you had one fan stressed out thinking he was talking to the band backstage. When he asked about Michael Anthony (Van Halen’s original bassist) not touring, you had him thinking he upset Wolfgang Van Halen who was their bassist as if it were a dig at him.
Florentine: Oh yeah, we got that guy good! We had him convinced the band didn’t want to play anymore, I love doing that kind of stuff.
MER: And also, that Motörhead show, that fan you guys were talking to had a similar style hat that Lemmy was wearing, you convinced him Lemmy forgot his hat and asked if he could wear his in which the guy gave up his hat. I think you got him to take his underwear off too haha.
Florentine: Haha yup! We got him to take his underwear off too, it was crazy!
MER: Is there anyone you wish you got to have on That Metal Show that you never did?
Florentine: You know we never had Ozzy on, that would have been great if we could have had him. We had everybody else from Sabbath on, but not Ozzy. David Lee Roth, I wish we could have had on too.
MER: What are some of your favorite metal album’s you would suggest to someone just getting into the genre?
Florentine: Tough to answer that, if it was Motörhead I would say throw on the Ace of Spades album, if it were Metallica i would say start with Master of Puppets and go back into their catalog from there.
MER: Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to throw in?
Florentine: My new comedy special is on my YouTube channel, it’s called You Can’t Please Em All, it’s on www.Youtube.com/jimflorentinecomedy, its up there for free for people to watch. It was on Amazon Prime for a while, so I put it up on YouTube.
MER: You’ve always been big on talking about your concert experiences, what are some of your favorite shows to talk about?
Florentine: Black Sabbath’s final show Back to the Beginning, that was the best concert I ever went to, the lineup, the vibe of the show, no one knew what was going to happen to Ozzy seventeen days later. Just seeing the original four members of Sabbath in their hometown, seeing Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Metallica, Pantera, Steven Tyler, Sammy Hagar, Jake E. Lee, that was my best concert ever.
MER: I’m glad that you mentioned that. I saw before the show that you and Jim Norton went to go visit the house which is featured on the artwork of Black Sabbath’s first album. Since the news of Ozzy’s passing, I’ve seen you post a ton of memories of Ozzy so obviously he has a special place in your heart as he does with myself and the whole metal community.
Flortentine: Yeah, he was a huge part of my childhood growing up. Over the years I’ve seen him about 25 times between his solo stuff and with Sabbath. It was tough losing him.
MER: Being an old school metal fan and being so involved with the scene as you have been, Nicko McBrain isn’t touring with Iron Maiden anymore, Slayer are only playing select shows here and there, and metal has suffered some heavy losses over the last few years, what are your thoughts on the changes with time?
Florentine: You know these guys aren’t going to be around that long it can happen anyway when a band is done even when I was in Europe for the sabbath concert a few days later I went to see AC/DC in Germany I saw them in Boston in May and I wanted to at least see them one more time and it was probably the last time I’ll get to see them Brian Johnson is what 77 years old and they were still great. I’ll hopefully go see Maiden and Priest one more time, that’s just life everybody is getting older.
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