Talk about a rebel yell!
Members of Bay Ridge’s hottest classic-rock tribute group, the Southern Comfort Band, is resisting incessant demands to stop using the same name as the slightly better known liqueur.
Lead guitarist Eddie Sarkis — best known for his covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers — received a cease-and-desist letter from the makers of Southern Comfort late last year insisting that he change his band’s name and Web site, www.southerncomfortmusic.com, by Sept. 16.
He has received several such letters since — all threatening legal action.
“I’ve been ripping them up,” Sarkis told The Brooklyn Paper, taking a few minutes to remind readers of the Southern Comfort Band’s next gig, on March 5. “I’m not sure if I’ll be fined, but I doubt it. We’re just a small group with a southern edge — south Brooklyn, that is — and it’s really no big deal.”
Indeed, with the September deadline long gone, it’s unclear whether the liqueur maker will go beyond the letter-writing phase and make a federal case of it.
But the manufacturers were serious — at least last year.
“The public associates the Southern Comfort brand and its products with music,” lawyer Jill Jacobs wrote in her Sept. 2 letter to Sarkis. “Your use of ‘Southern Comfort’ in your band’s name … is likely to cause the public to mistakenly believe that you are associated with, authorized by, or sponsored by Southern Comfort Properties when they are not.”
Previously, courts have upheld the rights of trademark owners in cases where other business names could confuse customers.
The former F-line Bagels on Smith Street was forced to change its name — cleverly, by reversing the F on its signage — after a Metropolitan Transportation Authority cease-and-desist letter, fraught with concerns that subway patrons would confuse the shop’s name with an MTA sponsorship.
But if Sarkis’s next show says anything, it’s that this bird, you cannot change (oh whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa).
Southern Comfort Band at the Leif Bar [6725 Fifth Ave. between 67th and 68th streets in Bay Ridge, (718) 680-0909] on March 5 at 9:30 pm (barring legal action, of course).
