The Show is UP: Cheech & Wilson

We're finally offering up the elusive, strange conversations with the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and Cheech Marin. Hooray! Also, we mull a lot of news and much more. To your left, here's the results of my own personal application of this week's Top Secret Tourist Tip. Just a reminder that all the old tips are archived on the site here. Anyhow, hear the show by clicking on the date or right-click to download it and listen whenever you want. Or subscribe via iTunes here or via Zune here.

Dec. 4: Brian Wilson, Cheech Marin

We never know quite what to do when Steve emerges from his office after an interview and says, ‘Well, that sucked.’ Usually, he’s wrong. And tonight, we’re going to find out. This fall, Steve chatted with Cheech Marin and Brian Wilson and, each time, he was initially dissatisfied with the outcome. But in reviewing them later, decided the conversations were Strip-worthy after all, perhaps because of their weirdness. So, this week , we let ‘em rip.

In Banter: Viva McDonalds is a McDonalds, Copperfield's still great, the gingerbread house display is pretty cool, R is for what?!?! and Wynn's doing it Sinatra's way.

Show links:

See Brian Wilson’s website here
See Cheech Marin’s website here
See pictures of Steve and Miles’ dogs, originally named Cheech and Chong, here
Read about the first new smokefree casino in Nevada here
See the website of the Blue Moon Resort here
See Steve’s column about David Copperfield here
Get tickets to the David Copperfield show here
The MGM’s Mastercard promotion can be found here
The Encore website is here
Norm’s reportage about the Sinatra restaurant is here
Norm’s scoop on Wynn’s effort to buy the Guardian Angel Cathedral is here
Doug Elfman’s report on how hard it was to interview Brian Wilson is here

This Week's LVW col: A real magic trick

Poof! Here's this week's Las Vegas Weekly column.

A real magic trick
David Copperfield and the amazing disappearing allegations
By STEVE FRIESS

There is a moment during David Copperfield’s performance at the MGM Grand when the magician picks a pretty young woman out of the audience and asks for her help. He borrows her ring, does a few other misdirecting things and then makes the ring reappear tied to something in his back pocket.

To set up the trick, though, the pretty young female audience member must verify early on in the sequence that Copperfield’s back pocket is empty. That means she has to slide her hand into it, cupping his butt ever so briefly.

It is telling that as I gasped, the rest of the adults in the crowd merely tittered at the obvious sexual innuendo and went along for the ride.

Telling, that is, because about a year on from some potentially career-ending allegations of sexual misconduct with pretty young female audience members, Copperfield remains a shockingly popular draw and not by any means a sleazy presence that parents with children or even pretty young female audience members try to avoid.

And there’s a reason for that: He puts on a good show. A very, very good show. A show that, after having slogged though the dregs of Steve Wyrick, Hans Klok and now Criss Angel in recent years, restored my faith in the existence of good magic shows. But more on that later.

First, we need to re-examine the curious case that brought Copperfield so low that he canceled shows last year and has reformed himself from a media yapper into a media recluse.

Copperfield was accused in October 2007 of raping a 21-year-old Seattle woman whom he allegedly picked out of his audience and lured to his Bahamian getaway for a sexual liaison. The Seattle FBI was as leaky as a Circus Circus faucet about the case at the time, tipping off journalists to a raid on the magician’s warehouse near the Strip to seize a computer hard drive, a digital camera system and nearly $2 million in cash. A grand jury was investigating.

That was all so deliberately incriminating; our minds boggle at what could have been on a suspicious computer! The Seattle Times worked its sources at the local FBI office to produce a litany of TMZ.com-worthy tidbits. The accuser was an aspiring model who saw Copperfield’s show in the Seattle area and who then began to engage in an e-mail friendship of sorts with the illusionist 30 years her senior. He made good on his promise to whisk her off to his private retreat in Musha Cay, Bahamas, in July 2007, where she claims he struck her, raped her and threatened her to keep quiet.

After the story broke, various other women and former Copperfield stagehands emerged to allege that this was the magician’s modus operandi, that he scouts his audience for hotties to score with.

The thing that happened next is the most important, but completely unnoticed by The Seattle Times or anybody else: nothing.

Read the rest HERE

The Strip is LIVE Tonight @ 7:30 pm PT w/ Miley Cyrus' Pa

Join us at LVROCKS.Com at 7:30 PM PT for much more discussion of the MGM Mirage Reservations mess, the David Copperfield mess and lots of other news. Plus, our achy-breaky chat with Billy Ray Cyrus.

We're starting at 7:30 pm tonight because Miles is starting some wacky new exercise thing, so we'll discuss that, too. Join us live or download the podcast on Thursday!

David Copperfield's "Museum"

I've been working the David Copperfield story today, albeit with little success as there's very little available information beyond the fact that the Vegas FBI raided the magician's warehouse here on behalf of the Seattle FBI. The rest of the information out there -- that it has to do with a sex incident in the Bahamas and that the FBI left the warehouse with a large sum of money -- is all reported by the local TV and paper using unnamed sources.

That said, the warehouse is kind of in=teresting because on "The Strip" in December 2005, Copperfield declined to identify even where it is located. And here's the exchange about it that we had at the time:

Copperfield: I have a museum here, it's not for the public. It's a secret museum. It’s got all kinds of really cool stuff. That's become the place where all my stuff goes.

Friess: What's the purpose of having a secret museum?

Copperfield: Well, I'm a magician, so I do magic stuff and the museum and all of the stuff I have are dealing with secrets. If it were a public museum, it wouldn't be good for my fellow magicians.

Friess: It is funny because I did find it on your website, there was a lot of discussion of all the different items that you collected. Is there a point where it will be public? What will you do with all these things. And where are they? I was looking on the site to find out where this museum was and I really couldn't find out.

Copperfield: Exactly.

Friess: Because it's not there.

Copperfield: No, I don't keep this to myself. Scholars get to use it. People who are writing books on magic use it for research. And for the public, I've done lots of displays. The people from the Smithsonian design displays and take it out on the road. ... They take them to Washington D.C. or New York City or to L.A. to the Kodak Theater where they do the Oscars. I tihnk it's important to let the people experience it and that's what I'm doing.

Friess: It's called the International Museum and Library of Conjuring Arts. Interesting way of putting it. Conjuring arts. It has a sort of Harry Potter ring to it.

Copperfield: There you go. It didn't 5 years ago.

You can hear the entire discussion here or right-click here to download it and hear it whenever you wish.