Recording Le Dinner Debonair was anything but a piece of cake for Mikey Rukus.
Le Dinner Debonair was a segment from 2021 with Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Chris Jericho that took the world of AEW deep into the world of Sports entertainment with a complete musical number.
Now, Mikey Rukus, in an interview with Sean Ross Sapp, is pulling back the curtain and exposing some of the struggles that came along with recording their own take on Frank Sinatra's Me and My Shadow.
“When you get a chance to jump in the middle of that and just step back and see how it all plays out, it’s pretty amazing,” Mikey begins. “We actually had another—I don’t know if I’ve even shared this before. Le Dinner Debonair, that segment with Jericho and MJF. We had gotten clearance from Frank Sinatra’s estate to use their track. However, with that track being recorded so long ago, there was no instrumental.”
As it turns out, Mikey actually uncovered that the karaoke track they were going to use was not actually licensed
“Production was asking if I could rip the vocals from it,” he continued. “I have software that can do that, however, it destroys the integrity of the recording. Especially something that was recorded back then. So I went looking at different karaoke tracks, seeing what we could pull. Turns out, those karaoke bars—the tracks didn’t have the license.
“So I kind of opened up a can of worms there. In the midst of all of this, I said, ‘I know we’re gonna need this.’ So I stayed up over the weekend prior note for note recreating the whole thing. Somewhere in the midst of it, when they cut the scene, the wrong track got put in. For whatever reason Jericho didn’t hear my version of it until, maybe, an hour before Dynamite.”
All of that led to a massive time crunch which would see the segment get loaded up into the truck 15 minutes before it aired.
“So I get a call, and there’s a whole bunch of calls happening. I get a call from legal that says, ‘We can’t air this segment. What can we do?’ I said, ‘I got the track. Tell them to send me the video; I’ll make sure it’s synced up. I’ll send it back to Nashville. Loaded it up, it was in the truck maybe fifteen minutes before the segment airs.’”
Talking about licensing tracks, Mikey said it all comes down to who has ownership of a certain track and everything has to run through Tony Khan.
“A lot of it has to do with the licensing side, who has ownership, and basically asking for permission. If remixes happen, we have to get permission beforehand. If they want to bring their own music, the buck stops with Tony. Tony’s the head of all the creative. So when they bring an idea to him or to me—I always tell them to talk to Tony first—because we’ve had situations before where I had multiple wrestlers I was working with all at the same time. Somebody would jump in and was like, ‘Hey, can we change this?’ ‘Yeah, we can change it,’ and then all of a sudden it plays and I get a text from Tony, ‘Hey, can we change that back?’ and I was like, ‘Oh! My bad.’ Again, it’s a case-by-case basis. It comes down to ownership, who has the publishing, and who controls that. If there’s a remix on the table then we go ahead and reach out to them and see what we can do,” Mikey said.
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