The lawyers for the Doobie Brothers are threatening to sue Bill Murray for using one of the band’s songs without permission in ads for the actor’s line of golf shirts, but they’d be totally cool with him using the song if only his shirts weren’t “so damn ugly.”
That’s just part of the hilarious legal notice the rockers’ legal team sent to Murray on Wednesday in a formal request to get him to “Listen to the Music” and actually pay up.
“We understand that you’re running other ads using music from other of our clients. It seems like the only person who uses our clients’ music without permission more than you do is Donald Trump,” attorney Peter Paterno writes at one point.
He continues: “This is the part where I’m supposed to cite the United States Copyright Act, excoriate you for not complying with some subparagraph that I’m too lazy to look up and threaten you with eternal damnation for doing so. But you already earned that with those Garfield movies. And you already know that you can’t use music in ads without paying for it. We’d almost be OK with it if the shirts weren’t so damn ugly. But it is what it is.”
As it turns out, Murray and his brothers launched a line of golf shirts called Zero Hucks Given, and the lawyers recommended that because commercials for the shirts have used the Doobie Brothers song “Listen to the Music,” as well as other songs, without permission, the line should actually be called “Zero Bucks Given.”
The letter was sent to Murray and William Murray Golf from the office of King, Holmes, Paterno and Soriano LLP. And yes, it’s very real. You can read it in full below.
The lawyers are clearly “Caddyshack” fans as well, as they signed off by tweaking Murray’s famous line from the 1980 comey, “In the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Au revoir, Golfer. Et payez!”
Bill Murray / Doobie Brothers Letter.pdf
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.
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