Song stylist serves up sleazy slice of Cheese

A couple of weeks ago, the place to be in Vegas was the Joint at the Hard Rock. There were women in evening gowns with feathered boas and their gentlemen companions in dinner jackets. There was even a fellow in a mohair suit. But this wasn’t George Clooney’s idea of reviving the elegance of the old Vegas Rat Pack; many of these revelers were proudly pierced and tattooed.

These were all members of the die-hard following that attend every Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine show here. Cheese, who likes to be called Dick by audiences, has been playing Vegas for years, and when I checked out a sold-out show over New Year’s weekend at the Hard Rock’s steakhouse, I was pleased to discover that his gimmick of offering lounge-style versions of today’s hits has lost none of its snark or bite. Cheese can slide between Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” as though they were meant to be performed together.

To him, they were. “These are today’s great love songs,” the pear-shaped 42-year-old says of his material.

By Cheese’s estimate, the group has done about 50 shows in various Vegas lounges over the last eight years. The most recent show took the band out of the lounge onto the larger stage of the Joint because it was being taped for a concert movie. The purpose of the movie is not yet clear to Cheese: “If you are reading this and you are a producer in L.A. with $300,000 to invest in a movie, well, that is not enough. But if you have more then $300,000, you can call me.”

Though Cheese plays in L.A. and elsewhere, the setting in Vegas was a no-brainer for the film. His act was made for Vegas. The draw of more than 600 people at the Joint willing to pay to see a lounge band was impressive proof. So impressive that Cheese is now negotiating a permanent lounge show. It is way past time for that.

For years, Cheese has been the rare lounge performer whose shows are ticketed instead of the free entertainment traditionally offered. Actually, it is surprising how slow casinos have been to pick up on the potential for his act.

That is probably because despite the one-trick-pony concept, Cheese is doing such an original act. Cheese has an updated repertoire and totally road-tested shtick that allows him to move easily between hard-core punk, grunge, techno, gangster rap and “American Idol” styling, all while staying in character. Dick Cheese may give songs a factory treatment, but he is not doing it using an assembly line. Cheese lands in that weird space between stand-up comedy and performance art that usually results in my favorite entertainments in Vegas. He is Vegas entertainment mocking Vegas entertainment; yet, beyond that, he is showing that Vegas entertainment is what even the most committed and politically charged music winds up becoming in the end. He opened his show at the Joint with a lounge take on Radiohead’s “Airbag.” The audience loved it.

And casinos do not ignore contemporary music; they just don’t get it. I recently heard a real lounge band at the luxurious Bellagio offering a cover of one of the real Rage Against the Machine’s Marxist anthems as a straight impersonation of the song. Cheese and his audience all know this sort of thing requires instead an ironic ‘90s wink, while realizing that in ’08 even that wink is the pose of music geeks.

This is hard to explain until you try to grasp how wrong and funny and yet totally fitting it is that Cheese does a great Vegas lounge cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me.” I don’t want to give the idea that seeing Richard Cheese is an intellectual experience. He is wonderfully vulgar and not above slapstick.

His latest release, “Dick at Night,” finds Cheese bringing his lounge treatments to TV-show theme music with mixed results. But his classic earlier discs like “I’d Like a Virgin” and “Aperitif for Destruction” are worth seeking out. He is also working on his next release: “Back in Black Tie.”

On the discs, the gimmickry can wear thin and feel a bit like a marathon Dr. Demento show. That is because as much as the songs, the true power of Cheese comes from his lounge-lizard persona. He has avoided appearing like an old “Saturday Night Live” routine; Cheese has created a new lounge lizard, one aware of his own sleaziness, totally fitting for the new wave of Vegas entertainment.

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