The Conical Glass: Cheesy

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Cheesy

Last night, we went to Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco to see Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine. The group's shtick is that Cheese (real name: Mark Davis) is an old-style lounge singer, except all of the songs he sings are covers, the more inappropriate, the better: the Pussycat Dolls' "Dont Cha," the 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny," Nine Inch Nails' "Closer," etc. I have become pretty familiar with the Cheese oeuvre, since Joe is a big fan and has all his CDs.

Joe also loves "Weird Al" Yankovic, the undisputed king of song parodies, but I found Cheese's albums to be a bit one-note compared to Al's. After all, Al performs in the styles of everyone from Devo to Coolio to the Doors, whereas all of Cheese's songs are done in the same smooth, lounge-lizard style. (Here's a video of him performing a medley of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus.") Seeing him live, however, helped me "get" Cheese a bit more. His three-piece band, anchored by keyboard player Bobby Ricotta (a.k.a. Noel Melanio, an L.A.-based composer/arranger), is indisputably talented -- when one fan yelled Michael Jackson's name, for instance, they effortlessly slipped into "Billie Jean." And maybe it's just a sign of getting older, but the swingin' versions of some of these songs sound better to me than the originals. Take Disturbed's aggro-metal "Down with the Sickness," for instance -- Cheese's finger-snapping rendition puts a happy face on lyrics like "Madness is a gift that has been given to me... Get ready to die," poking a bit of fun at the often humorless headbanging genre, but also teasing out a pretty pleasant melody and beat.

Cheese also had a lot of fun interacting with the audience at the sold-out show, rearranging the front row so that a couple hot looking women were seated directly in front of him, and pacing around the room with his wireless mic, often stopping to chat briefly with audience members while the band vamped. If someone did something silly -- one guy made a loud ululating noise, and later, another one yelled out the word "Shots!" -- Cheese would stop the show until someone 'fessed up to the action, at which point he would poke good-natured fun at them. (The "Shots" guy actually did wind up buying a round of shots for the band.)

However, heavy are the shoulders that wear the tiger-striped tuxedo jacket; Cheese has announced that this is his "farewell tour" in his lounge lizard persona, though according to this fascinating Phoenix New Times story, he has made that claim before -- and, in fact, he suggested to the Bimbo's audience last night that he might be back on New Year's Eve. Life as the big Cheese is obviously a hard habit to break.

posted by 125records @ 4:54 PM

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