The most important parts of Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine are their clothes with tiger patterns. Shame they must quit this year, due to Cheese’s voice problems.

Bumblefoot

Our first Artist, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, is an entertaining man. His ‘bumblefoot’ name comes from a bird infection he learned about while helping his wife studying for her veterinary exams. There’s nothing too impressive there, but the guy creates a neat gimmick when he plays his guitar: a giant foot, painted to the colors of a bumblebee, with wings that move when he uses the tremolo.

His gimmick is kind of ambiguous and closer to a concept, but the guy is relatively not serious, using shredding lines as the bases of songs like ‘Guitars suck’ or laughing at metal guitarists in ‘I can’t play the blues’ while he is a very proficient metal guitarist himself, which makes me say the balance tips in favor of small gimmicks at times.

He plays other interesting instruments, including a fretless guitar and a swiss cheese guitar. He’s played as Ron Thal for about 2-3 years, and then in 1998, he took the name ‘Bumblefoot’, which he still has today (he is supposedly releasing a new album in 2008). He is also playing with Guns N’ Roses, since the great Buckethead in left 2006. And guess who is our next musician?

Buckethead

Buckethead is another surprising artist. He released not less than 27 albums only in 2007 (source), is currently playing with 7 bands, has played with about 19 bands in total, and also leads a solo career. One of his best known songs is Jordan for those interested.

From his FAQ, you can also learn that he auditioned for Red Hot Chili Peppers, but was not taken:

One journalist’s account reported that the lead singer picked Buckethead up at the airport and found out that Buckethead had not heard any of their tunes. The audition proceeded anyway, and Buckethead played in his inimitable fashion (i.e., robot dance, hyper-metal licks etc…). When he finished the band applauded raucously. Flea confirmed that they auditioned BH saying that he was “sweet and normal,” but they wanted someone “…who could also kick a groove.” (source)

Despite being interesting for all sorts of achievements, his gimmick is that he is mainly known for wearing a mask and a KFC bucket on is head at nearly all times, and close to no pictures of him have ever been released. The only one I’ve found so far is the one that was featured on his wikipedia entry a few months ago (see the thumbnail below) with his real name: Brian Carroll. Buckethead seems to take his KFC bucket seriously: his artist names obviously derivates from it, but he also uses many chicken-related words in songs and albums he releases: Enter the Chicken, From The Coop, KFC Skin Piles or Secret Recipe, to name a few.

Richard Cheese

Mark Jonathan Davis is Richard Cheese who is a full gimmick. His whole career revolves around a single concept: playing popular rap, rock, metal, and pop songs in a swanky lounge music style. Even the stage name Richard Cheese is a joke, as it can purposedly be shortened to ‘Dick Cheese‘ (possibly NSFW).

He basically takes the same lyrics, same chord progression, but changes the style entirely. There’s no real need to explain when you can see the act itself:

Category: General