Cheeseback
So I post my blog entry, go out to the Karaoke bar for a glass of merlot at a Rick Astley song, and when I get back, Richard Cheese has responded.
As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.
i think you should include the REASON why we don’t allow our show to be filmed: we don’t own the synch rights to the songs we perform, so we do not have the right to be filmed performing them. if someone films us doing so, we get held responsible and liable.
Don’t think this is a minor point. The music industry has sued a 12 year old girl, an eighty year old woman and a laser-printer in a campus office for downloading music illegally. Cheese has every right to protect his livelihood.
He also adds this:
i didn’t “spit a glass of water” out into the audience. Â This implies that a full glass of water was sprayed, which it was not.
Quite so. It was about the same amount of liquid in a typical spit take (see the work of Danny Thomas or John Ritter for reference) which is roughly half a swallow. Point taken, sir.
He also adds that he does the camera confiscating thing at a lot of his shows, whenever someone is watching him through a device instead of just, you know, watching him. He says he’s never broken a camera or damaged a cellphone in the five years he’s been doing the act. And contrary to what I’ve read around the ‘net, he didn’t wreck any hardware the night I was there. I was pretty close, and I’d have heard the crunching.
As a side note, Cheese also pointed out that I left out the word “like” in my previous entry, as in “a voice LIKE Steve Lawrence.” I have corrected this. One other thing I left out because it simply wasn’t apropos: the guy does an eerily accurate impression of Bjork. Seriously, it’s creepy. Check him out live sometime. But for God’s sake, remember that the only round glass thing between you and him should be a highball tumbler.
-daniel k.