But it was the second show’s set time that made me shiver me timbers. The gig was the next night at the seemingly prime time of 8 p.m., which under normal circumstances would’ve made me happy. But that particular time slot scared the shit out of me for one reason: we were playing at the same time as KISS . . . on the KISS Kruise.
Isn’t this great?
When I asked the Kruise director (he wasn’t as cute as Julie McCoy) why on God’s (gave rock ’n’ roll to you) green earth they would book a band to play opposite KISS on the KISS Kruise, he explained that the theater they were playing only held fifteen hundred people and there were almost three thousand on the ship. So those who weren’t able to get in to see KISS would be ready, willing, and able to rock with Fozzy instead, right?
Wrong. What he didn’t tell me was that there were big screens scattered throughout the ship showing a live stream of the KISS concert as they played their classic album Alive! in its entirety. Duh! Who in the hell was going to show up to see us play? Maybe not even me, as Alive! was one of my favorite albums, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to miss that for my own Fozzy show.
But instead of caving in under the crushing disappointment (and slight embarrassment) of playing in front of the 112 people who showed up on the main deck that held about 2,500, we decided to make the best of what we’d been given and make our Fozzy gig THE place to be on that ship at that time.
I didn’t care that KISS was hosting us; we wanted all 112 of those people to have the time of their lives and go back home thinking that even though KISS were the kings of the mountain, Fozzy would be the next ones to take the oath.
We went into that show with the attitude that we wanted to give KISS a Destroyer of their own and blow them out of the water, pun intended.
And those few people who chose to spend their night with us were rewarded with a hotter than hell rock show, for sure. We worked that tiny crowd just as hard as if we were rocking them in Madison Square Garden (which was the mindset of KISS themselves in their early club days). It ended up being one of my favorite shows we’ve done, made even more memorable by the fact it was Halloween night. So there were quite a few rockers in the crowd dressed in costumes, including me wearing Paul Stanley’s 1973 Bandit makeup, and another dude dressed up as a toilet. Have you ever seen a commode moshing? It’s quite the sight. Thankfully we weren’t the shits, as we tried to wipe the floor with KISS (see what I did there?). And when the last song ended, we had gained an additional 112 lifelong Fozzy fans.
Evidently those 112 people wasted no time telling everyone how much fun they had at our show, because when I saw Doc McGhee the next day, he told me, “I heard you guys had a great show last night.”
“Really? Where did you hear that? There was hardly anybody there.”
“We’re on a cruise ship, Chris. Word gets around pretty quickly.”
Good point.
The bottom mainline was we had made the best of what we were given that night and the good news traveled fast.
“Wherever you are, that’s the place to be,” Damone had said, and on that night the place to be was at the Fozzy gig on the KISS Kruise.
Isn’t this great?
CHAPTER 2
THE
JERICHO
PRINCIPLE
BELIEVE IN YOURSELF
OR NOBODY ELSE WILL
I just feel I can be anything that I might ever wish to be,
and fantasize just what I want to be,
make my wildest dreams come true . . .
—IRON MAIDEN, “WILDEST DREAMS”
(Adrian Smith, Steve Harris)
Rock star or pro wrestler?
That was my quandary when I was fourteen years old. Both captured my imagination, and even though I didn’t have much of an understanding of what being a rock star or a wrestler entailed, I had a feeling . . . an instinct . . . that I could be good at both. The problem was they seemed as unattainable as the hottest girl in my high school, Roxanne Falk. I had a huge crush on her and at first she wouldn’t even give me the time of day. But after months of flirting, wooing, and charming, I’m proud to say I ended up making out with her on the dance floor at a social once. Yeah, I know I said ONCE . . . but it still counts!
Swapping spit with Roxanne was a great motivator for me, because it showed that with enough hard work and persistence, I could make even the most seemingly impossible dream come true. So after conquering (kind of) Falk Mountain, I set my sights on breaking into wrestling and music. But the only question was, how?
Now, keep in mind that in 1987 there was no Internet where you could learn about wrestling schools or find like-minded musicians to form a band with (thankfully, I found some in high school), so I was pretty much left to my own devices. Recently, I read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography and he told the story of how he decided as an young teenager (about the same age as I was at this time) that he was going to be the greatest bodybuilder ever and the biggest movie star in the world. I’m sure when his buddies in the small town of Thal, Austria, heard about this double fantasy, they gave him the same reaction that my buddies in the small town of Winnipeg, Canada, gave me: mocking disbelief.
I’m sure if I said I wanted to be an astronaut and a pharmacist or the premier of Manitoba and a rodeo clown, my friends probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. But to say I had dreams of playing rock ’n’ roll AND being a WWE champion made me look like Donald Trump’s hair in a windstorm . . . really stupid.
I remember swimming at my friend Scott Shippam’s house in the summer of 1989, and after a rousing sing-along of his mantra “Give ’er, give ’er, up Ship’s river!” a dude named Pete LeDrew gave his unsolicited opinion about my ambitions.
“You don’t really think you’re going to make it in wrestling, do you?” he said with a smirk. “I mean, you’re way too small.”
I stared him in the eye and then pushed his head under the water until he drowned. I spent ten years in jail for manslaughter and the day I got out, I enrolled in the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp.
Actually, I didn’t do a damn thing except tell him that I thought I could make it. But his doubts made me feel self-concious and even worse, hatched a worm of doubt inside my head. And I didn’t like that at all.
Pete LeDrew wasn’t being malicious, nor was he alone in his opinion about my chances for success. It’s just that my dreams seemed so far-fetched to the people that knew just plain old Chris Irvine; and I heard variations of Pete’s presumptions multiple times that summer. It seemed like everyone I knew felt I didn’t have the size to make it in wrestling, nor the talent to get into music. Everybody that is, but me. Those negative Neegans were making it sound like I should smash my head in with a barbed-wire bat for having the audacity to believe in myself, but I didn’t care. I was too busy reaching out to wrestling schools and writing songs to give a fuck.
You see, I NEVER thought I was too small or not talented enough to do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t appreciate anybody who felt differently. The way I saw it, you were either with me or against me in my quest for fire, and if you were against me, well, you were a muttonhead and I really didn’t have any use for you anyway.
I told the story in my first book (the wildly popular New York Times bestseller A Lion’s Tale) about having a whole church full of people laugh at me when my pastor told them I was moving from Winnipeg to Calgary to pursue my dream of becoming a wrestler. That incident scarred me, and I never returned to that church again. (Bitter Author’s note: I’ve been back to Winnipeg dozens of times over the last twenty-six years, but I still haven’t stepped one foot into that place. I guess it’s always going to have negative connotations for me.)
Once I got out of Winnipeg and moved to Calgary to start training, things changed. I found once I stopped talking about getting into wrestling and actually started doing it, the haters and skaters dwindled. That was another lesson learned that could almost be its own principle: stop talking about doing things and actually start doing t
hem.
My belief in myself has never wavered, except that is for the times I’ve been stricken by The Jericho Curse. If you’re not familiar with that, well, you should go back and read my three previous New York Times bestselling books, Junior!
Long story short, throughout my wrestling career, whenever I started with a new company I always got off on the wrong foot. Whether it was in Mexico, Japan, Germany, ECW, WCW, or WWE, it always seemed that my first appearance in the company was a disaster. That’s probably why I’ve wrestled exclusively for the WWE for the last seventeen years. I’m too scared to go anywhere else!
But despite debuting in every new promotion on an all-time low, I refused to let the disheartening debuts crack the core of who I knew I was inside. It sucked to stink out the joint whenever I first appeared fresh-faced and untested in a new company, but deep down I always knew I would get over it and make it to the next level.
After my first weekend in ECW, when Paul Heyman mysteriously “lost” the tapes of my first-ever ECW TV match against Rob Van Dam, I had a sneaking suspicion that those tapes were actually fine and el dandy, but Paul didn’t want to air the match because it sucked. I never asked, but it was nearly enough to crush my ego. I mean, it had taken almost ONE YEAR to get booked in ECW, and the first TV match I had was so bad it was erased from existence? That’s not good.
But I knew that I would do better, so I held my head high and promised myself the next time would be different. And it was, as the next weekend I tore the house down with Mick Foley in Queens and again the next night against Taz in the ECW Arena. It had taken me a minute, but I regained my stuck mojo pretty damn quickly . . . albeit after letting myself and my peers down first. Unfortunately for me, the Curse bit me in the ass again when I started a new company a few months later.
After my first WCW match with Mr. J.L. at a TV taping in Dalton, Georgia, booker Terry Taylor walked past me and snorted with disgust. “Are you sure you have any clue what the hell you’re doing?”
Wow, nice confidence builder. I was nervous enough already, and that little quip almost killed me right there. It sucks to have a stinker (or an “abortion” as we call it in the biz) and get chewed out by the booker, but it’s even worse to have to come back to the dressing room and face your fellow performers.
When I walked back into the locker room, most of the guys suddenly found something very interesting about the toes of their boots, and kept their heads to the floor. I guess it was either that or look me in the eye and laugh, as they were so embarrassed for me. Thankfully, Eddie Guerrero pulled me aside and gave me a pep talk.
“I know that wasn’t the real you. You’re nervous, and as a result you didn’t look very good out there. I’ve seen you work, I know you can do better. Next match, just take your time and be Chris Jericho. That will be more than enough to get over with the fans and to impress everybody here.”
His words stuck with me during my next match with journeyman wrestler The Gambler, and with the help of his advice, we had a good match and the Curse was vanquished once again. Thanks, Eddie.
By not panicking and following my instincts, I proved to Terry Taylor and everyone else in WCW that I did in fact have a clue what the hell I was doing.
But that wasn’t the end of the Curse. After my mediocre first match with The Rock on Monday Night Raw, Jeff Jarrett asked me how I thought it went. That’s the telltale sign in wrestling that the person asking the question thought your match was the shits of the drizzling variety. I knew the match wasn’t good, but when Jeff asked, I replied, “It wasn’t bad, but it will be better next time.” It was the first thing that came into my mind and it was the truth. Once again I knew I could do better, although it’s up for debate how many others in the WWE locker room circa 1999 agreed with me. But it didn’t take long for them to change their minds. Once I got my wings and figured out how to adapt to the WWE way of doing things, I had great matches with almost all of them, including The Rock. He became one of my favorite opponents and we headlined multiple PPVs together, exchanged the world title a few times, and even had what he claims to be his favorite match ever at a live event in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Even though I started performing up to my potential and earned the respect of my peers, I still wasn’t immune to the odd abortion here and there, including a match against Raven on Raw a few years later. It was one of those nights, and even though we’d had great matches in the past, that time it just didn’t click and was embarrassingly bad.
In the early 2000s, they would set up a TV in catering and air Raw the next day before the Smackdown tapings. I was hanging in the back of the room when the Raven match came on, and I’ll never forget Steve Austin laughing in disbelief and throwing his baseball cap against the wall in protest of how rotten it was. If I could’ve pulled the TV plug out of the wall, summoned a battalion of skeleton zombies to attack the arena Evil Dead 2 style, and opened the earth to swallow the place whole, I would have. But alas, I was just a mere mortal (and the proprietor of a crappy match) and was forced to deal with the roasting like a real man. So I did the most honorable thing a real man could do: snuck out the back door with my lion’s tale between my legs before anybody spotted me.
I skulked down the hall with the braying of Austin’s guffaws still ringing in my ears, and remembered something that Vince McMahon told me when I first came to the WWE: “Nobody bats a thousand, Chris.”
That statement made perfect sense and was similar to what the great Mexican luchador Negro Casas told me after I majorly screwed up the finish of our main-event match one night. “You can’t change today. You can only learn and change tomorrow.” Sage advice indeed.
You can’t always hit a home run, but when you strike out, remember the times you did nail it out of the park and let the confidence of that experience buoy your mentality. I haven’t always made the right decision or done the right thing, but I gave it my all every time, and never stopped believing in myself.
Although to this day, if I listen really hard on a cold windy night, I can still hear the howls of Stone Cold Steve Austin booming inside my head.
CHAPTER 3
THE
KEITH
RICHARDS
PRINCIPLE
FIND A WAY TO
MAKE IT WORK
Making it work takes a little longer,
making it work takes a little time . . .
—DOUG AND THE SLUGS, “MAKING IT WORK”
(Doug Bennett)
I really don’t like it when I ask someone to go somewhere and they say something like “Ummm, I’d like to go but I have to work tomorrow” or “I want to go but I don’t have a friend to go with.”
Blah blah blah.
If you don’t WANT to go that’s fine, but if it’s something you really want to do then don’t give me any excuses. Have to work in the morning? Then drink an extra cup of coffee if you’re tired. Don’t have somebody to go with? Go solo and make friends.
It’s easy to think of a hundred reasons why something won’t work, but I’d rather find the reasons to MAKE it work. If you want your dreams to come true, stop thinking of excuses and start making realities. This is the way I’ve always lived my life, and that credo remains my golden rule to this day.
When Fozzy was offered the chance to support Motörhead in 2005 at their thirtieth anniversary show in Los Angeles, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. It was a huge chance for us to play with one of the most legendary bands in rock ’n’ roll history, and just being on the same bill with them would put us on a different level.
The problem was we weren’t touring at the time, and it wasn’t exactly an easy trip to Los Angeles for an Atlanta-based band. It’s expensive to fly to the other side of the country for a one-off show, and there were a dozen reasons why we should have declined the offer. But there was one simple reason to say the heck with it and find a way to make it work: we wanted to do the gig.
So we did it.
We pooled our resources and frequen
t flyer miles, called our West Coast endorsers to set us up with gear so we wouldn’t have to pay any shipping costs, took care of the financial details, and the next thing you know, we were rocking the stage as the opening band for fucking Motörhead!
Now, I can’t say that we tore the house down with the fans (most of them stood staring at us like we had cocks for noses), but we created a relationship with Motörhead and left a good impression on them. So much so that guitarist Phil Campbell played with us onstage at the Whiskey a Go Go in LA and the Bloodstock festival in England, and even played the solo for “She’s My Addiction” on the Sin and Bones album, at his request.
Lemmy saw our set that night and liked our “good fuckin energy,” which started a friendship between him and me that lasted until the day he died. So many great things happened as a result of us going out of our way to play that show, even though it would’ve been way easier to just stay home and save the money. But we found a way to make it work, and we were glad we did.
One of my favorite movies is the original Dawn of the Dead (the remake is pretty badass too), and there’s a great scene towards the end when Ken Foree’s Peter is trapped on the top floor of a building, surrounded by zombies. Even though a chopper awaits to take him to safety on the roof above, he’s tired of fighting and doesn’t have it in him to get through the maze of the undead. Broken, beat, and scarred, he puts his revolver up to his forehead, but before he can muster up the will to pull the trigger, he sees a clear path through the mass of walkers, shakes himself out of his suicide pity party, and makes a run for it. He fights his way through the pack, races up a ladder to the roof, and climbs in the chopper to safety just as it takes off!
That scene is the perfect example of what I’m preaching to you today, Constant Reader. Peter could’ve just rolled into a ball and waited to get eaten alive by the flesh-chomping zombies, but instead he beat the odds and survived. There’s a lesson there: it may not be easy, but you can always find a way to make it work. Even if we’re talking about the struggles we face every day, it’s worth it to battle through the zombies to get what you want.
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