We were fine with it, though this had gone beyond just playing the festival; it had become a war of attrition between us and the promoters. They knew the terms we had given them to appear on the festival, yet they kept trying to con us into doing it their way regardless. Also, we had already played Download (along with most of the other big festivals in the UK) multiple times, and they hadn’t asked us for anything more than to put on a killer show, so we felt like the precedent had been set: we were a damn good rock ’n’ roll band and should be treated as such. It’s not like they asked Rob Zombie to hang out in the field and operate the Ferris wheel before his set, so why did I have to wrestle before we played ours?
When we released Sin and Bones in 2012, once again Wacken wanted me to wrestle, and once again I said absolutely not. The organizers were baffled, and I felt at this point that we had worn out our willkommen. It was a drag, but I still believed that if we stuck to our guns, we would get our chance to play Wacken someday on our own damn terms.
Lo and behold, I was right.
As fate would have it, we were booked at Download that year for the second time, this time on the bigger second stage, and drew a ridiculous crowd of over twenty thousand Fozzy fanatics at the ungodly hour (at least for a rock show) of 12:30 p.m. We played one of the best shows of our career, and plenty of heavy hitters in the industry were there to take notice, including a bigwig talent booker who represented . . . you guessed it . . . Wacken.
He was so impressed with our music and stage presence that it wasn’t long after that we got an offer to play the following year’s Wacken festival, with a good guarantee, good stage positioning, and most importantly, no wrestling required.
By committing to our vision of who we were as a band and refusing to compromise said vision, we got what we wanted and then some. We had an awesome Wacken debut, in front of a great crowd of eight thousand who showed up even though we were clashing with Alice Cooper, who was playing on the main stage right beside us. The crowd went so nuts for us that three of our songs were included on the live video compilation of the festival, even though most of the other bands only had two.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that it’s hard to stay committed to your beliefs at times, especially when there’s a nice paycheck being dangled in front of your face, but that’s nothing compared to the difficulties of staying dedicated to the cause when your professional reputation is in question.
When I came back to the WWE in January 2016 after another fifteen-month hiatus from television, the plan was for me to eventually turn heel. I’d been a babyface for the last three-odd years, but with my frequent breaks away from the company, it seemed that each return brought me one step closer to overstaying my welcome with the fans. Plus, my Y2J act was getting stale and there was only so much more I could do in that role, so I knew the time was ripe to turn heel again.
I was actually looking forward to it, as there’s a certain comfort level I have as a heel that I don’t have when I’m a good guy. Case in point, I’m a six-time WWE world champion and every one of those has been as a heel. So with that in mind, I was excited to get back to doing what I do best . . . pissing people off.
The original idea was for me to turn right after the Royal Rumble, but then I started working with AJ Styles and Vince decided to stretch out our program for a few more months. He wanted me to stay babyface a little longer as a result, but even though my turn wasn’t imminent, I started doing subtle things to annoy the fans and plant the seeds for the heel turn that was coming up around the bend.
The first step was simple: stop wearing a shirt.
I’d walk to the ring wearing a blazer with nothing underneath or a vest with tight jeans and boots. I have no idea why this rubbed people the wrong way, but I started getting dozens of tweets daily with comments like CAN’T JERICHO AFFORD ANY CLOTHES? or I’M BEGGING JERICHO TO PUT ON A SHIRT. Those kinds of responses showed me I was getting under people’s skin, which theoretically isn’t a good thing when you’re supposed to be a babyface, but in the big picture was perfect. Then I added a scarf to the ensemble, and judging by the outraged reaction it received, you would’ve thought I was wearing a bra and panties made of babyseal skin to the ring.
I never would’ve guessed how much controversy a simple piece of fancy fabric wrapped around my neck could cause, and I received more negative feedback about that thing on a daily basis from the moment I started wearing it. The scarf has even become a staple of my act on live events, when I refuse to take it off until my opponent takes it off me, to the delight of the fans. It’s quite the crowd pleaser when Finn Balor or Roman Reigns prance around the ring wearing my stolen scarf, then take it off and blow their nose with it. Not fair, I say!
After the dodgy wardrobe choices, the next step to making sure people continued getting sick of me was shoving the stale elements of babyface Jericho down their throats. For example, overusing the catchphrases I’d been spouting since the George W. Bush administration worked like a charm.
Every week I would stand in the middle of the ring on Raw and say, “Welcome to Raw Is Jericho!” or “Would You Please Shut the Hell Up!” and of course, “You Will Never EEEVVVEEERRR Be the Same Again.”
All of those were top-ten hits on the WWE catchphrase charts fifteen years ago, but lamely spouting them out ad nauseam in the modern era made me seem flat and out of touch. Once again I started getting a ton of negative feedback echoing that sentiment, which to me was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it was cool to know that my plan was working, but on the other hand, it was hard to not scream from the rooftops that I wasn’t actually out of touch, but rather I knew exactly what I was doing! I was working everybody with my true commitment.
The night I returned to Raw in San Antonio in January 2016, I was involved in a segment with The New Day, one of the freshest acts to grace the WWE in a long time. I took extra pride when they started their rise to popularity, as I had predicted they would be big a year earlier and even had them on Talk Is Jericho when they were still a prelim act. Big E, Xavier Woods, and my old rival Kofi Kingston were hip, contemporary, funny, and had chemistry coming out of their Booty-O’s, so I was excited to be working with them.
When you’re dealing with an act as unique as New Day, who had gotten toy unicorn horns, a trombone, and a box of cereal over, you had to play along with them. I couldn’t go out there and no-sell their goofiness or try to be über-serious, because that would ignore what had gotten them over and essentially bury them.
I had to play along with their quirkiness, so I came up with the idea of calling them “Rooty Tooty Booty,” which doesn’t make sense and if we’re calling an ace of spades an ace of spades, is really fuckin stupid.
But the kicker is, I knew it was stupid.
It might have gotten over huge in the salad days of the Attitude Era, when fans were chanting whatever I wanted them to (“filthy, dirty, disgusting, brutal, bottom-feeding trash bag ho” comes to mind), but this one wasn’t getting much traction. Was it painful to lead a “Rooty Tooty Booty” chant with only 20 percent of the audience joining in? Of course it was, but that was the price I had to pay to keep the facade of my out-of-touch, slightly annoying character rolling.
Eventually, “Rooty Tooty Booty” died a much-deserved death, and I ended up turning heel on AJ Styles after a classic tag team title match with The New Day in Chicago. Suddenly, my character was rejuvenated, and on the strength of great matches and a slew of surprise late-career hit catchphrases like “Stupid Idiot,” “Drink It In, Man,” “The Gift of Jericho,” and “Quiet, Quiet, Quiet.” (Don’t even get me started on “The List of Jericho” . . . that’s for another book!) I even gave myself a challenge to get the word “IT” over. It took a minute, but after repeating it on Raw at opportune times over the next few months, I did that too. The critics and fans went from DEMANDING my retirement to proclaiming this run as one of my best ever.
But that “Stupid Idiot” era of Jericho never would’ve have been so success
ful had I not committed by planting those seeds early on as the fetid Y2J character. Even though it was hard having people question my skills and relevancy, I committed to the long-term story and endured the criticism, knowing what I was working towards. It’s like the story Paul McCartney told about rock critics in 1967 proclaiming the Beatles to be old news because they’d stopped touring and had outlived their welcome, while in reality they were secretly in the studio recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the greatest album of their career. They ignored the criticism, stayed committed to their art, and had huge success as a result.
So the next time I start a “Rooty Tooty Booty” chant, just shut up and play along, okay?
CHAPTER 12
THE
BRIAN PILLMAN
PRINCIPLE
DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT
I never played by the rules, I never really cared . . .
—SKID ROW, “YOUTH GONE WILD”
(Rachel Bolan, Dave Sabo)
Earlier in this palimpsest, you read about the impact that Paul Stanley had on me as a teenager. But as I was growing up and getting involved in the wrestling business, another performer who was just as big of an influence on me was The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels. I’d go so far as to say that when I started out wrestling, I basically copied him. I grew my hair into a sweet mullet and dyed it canary yellow like Shawn, wore ring gear that was as closely modeled to HBK’s as I could afford, and ripped off his trademark high spots move for move. But it didn’t take me long to realize that being a direct copy of Shawn, while fine for starters, would put me in a specific box and limit my potential for success.
So by taking a few of Shawn’s best qualities, adding some of Paul’s magic, and throwing them into a show business blender along with a healthy dollop of me, I now had something. I was never interested in being the “next whomever.” I just wanted to be the first Chris Jericho, because I knew if I wanted to make it, I had to do something different.
The late Brian Pillman hammered this principle home to me the one and only time our paths crossed at an ECW show in 1996—his last weekend with the company happened to be my first. We hit it off right away, and I’m guessing that’s partly because he knew I had trained in Calgary like he did, and partly because Chris Benoit was a mutual friend.
We sat in the corner of the dressing room/basement of the Lost Battalion Hall in Queens, New York, where Brian filled me in on his upcoming plans to go to WCW and start the new-age Four Horsemen (who would use a “two arms crossed in an X” gesture instead of the iconic “four fingers up” sign) with Benoit and Dean Malenko. He asked me if I would consider being the fourth member and I told him I’d check my busy skedge. Actually, I said, “Absofuckinlutely!” because I would’ve given up everything and done it in a second. Unfortunately, I never saw Brian again nor heard another word about the new-age Horsemen, so I assume the angle was dropped.
But what I remember most about our conversation was Brian telling me about his decision to reinvent himself as the “Loose Cannon,” a subtly crazy hothead who would lash out in uncontrolled outbursts at random. It was a completely different persona from the squeaky-clean babyface he had embodied in the ring for the past decade.
I asked him why he felt the need to change things up, considering the amount of success he’d already had. He looked off into the corner of the room and murmered softly, “If you want to really make it in this business, you have to do something different. Something nobody has ever done before.”
Then to illustrate his point, he got up and wandered around the locker room asking people if they had an extra belt to hold up his jeans, because they were the wrong size. Nobody did, so he settled on a piece of rope (like a brown piece of twine that a hobo in a cartoon would wear) that he had “found” beneath one of the tables in the back room. He ran the rope through his belt loops, with bugged-out eyes and a satisfied, crooked grin. Then he walked around the room asking rhetorical questions and making random statements in his raspy voice.
“Have you ever seen the rain?”
“I noticed your shoelaces. Do you like mine?”
“Isn’t it great to be living in America?”
Brian didn’t say anything over-the-top crazy or offensive, but it was all very weird. And that was the exact image he wanted to portray, because he was doing everything he could to work the WWE and WCW brass into a bidding war. He ended up acting so wacky that he legitimately freaked out some of his peers (Bobby Heenan thought he was totally off his rocker), and even conned Eric Bischoff into giving him his WCW release to fool the fans into thinking the company wanted nothing to do with him. Brian then took that WCW release to Vince McMahon in Stamford, and in one of the biggest double crosses in wrestling history, used it to sign a lucrative WWE multi-year contract.
He built himself from a midsized, midcard, white-meat babyface to a believably dangerous main event heel in the land of the giants. And he did it by doing something that had never been done before.
Sadly, Brian passed away a few years later, so he didn’t reach his main event potential, but I never forgot his words. Whether it was a topknot fountain ponytail, different facial hair every week, wearing suits and speaking ten-dollar words in a slow voice, or sportin’ a vest with no shirt and a scarf, I always made sure to do something nobody else was doing.
But for me being original just came naturally, and long before I ever met Brian Pillman, I was trying to stand out in any way I could. In the early ’90s I painted my nails black, got both ears pierced multiple times, wore eye shadow with a rhinestone choker, put pink streaks in my hair, was one of the first wrestlers to wear kickpads in North America, and even rocked a color-coordinated black-and-white checkerboard suit that made me look like Rick Nielson on the gas. Nothing was too outlandish for me. I never really cared what anybody thought of me, because I knew that no matter their opinion, they would at the very least remember me. I mean, look how much traction I’ve gotten from wearing that stupid scarf!
I kept the same mindset when I was putting together ideas for my wrestling storylines. With every return to the WWE, I wanted to do something different, which caused my stature within the company to grow with both the fans and the office. As a result, I was allowed more input into my angles.
When AJ Styles debuted at the 2016 Royal Rumble, there was a huge buzz about him throughout the entire WWE Universe. Everybody was excited to see what he could do within the company . . . except the boss himself. Vince never gets too excited at first by new hires who have made their names elsewhere. Just like when I initially arrived in the WWE, all of the fanfare generated from AJ’s debut didn’t mean that much to Mr. McMahon. As with every performer who ever drew a WWE paycheck, until you stepped into one of Vince’s rings, nothing else you had accomplished during your career really mattered. The fans might have been thrilled to see what AJ could bring to the table, but Vince would believe it when he saw it with his own two eyes. That’s why I was excited to work with The Phenomenal One and help make his entrance into my company as smooth as possible.
I had the perfect opportunity the night after the Rumble, when I showed up in Miami for Raw and found out that AJ and I were working together for the first time ever. But when I heard that the match was only meant to be a one-night thing, I went to Vince and suggested that AJ and I start an angle that would culminate at the next PPV a few weeks later. He agreed, and after that PPV Vince was so impressed with our chemistry that he decided to stretch the storyline out all the way to WrestleMania.
Over the next few months, we constructed an exciting narrative filled with countless twists and turns along the way. AJ and I started as rivals, then eventually shook hands and decided to work together as a unit. But since this was the WWE, I knew that it would be hard to convince the fans that one of us wasn’t going to turn on the other . . . which was the exact plan. So when we beat The New Day in a nontitle match on Raw leading to a rematch for the WWE tag titles the following week in Chicago, I knew we needed
to come up with something that would convince fans that AJ and I were going to be around for the long haul.
So I had the idea of producing an AJ-Jericho team T-shirt that would go on sale exclusively at the arena in Chicago, leading the fans in attendance to think, Well, they have their own merch, so they must be sticking around for a while. I called the WWE merchandise team to find out the chances of producing Y2AJ T-shirts on short notice. (Cool Author’s aside: I know Y2AJ is a pretty brutal name and that’s why I wanted it used. Considering we were designed to be a short-term team, there was no reason to think of something better, but if we ever team again I promise we’ll think of a catchier moniker.)
I knew that doing a one-off shirt was possible because we’d made one for the Y2J twenty-fifth anniversary show a few months earlier, so I was surprised when the merch guys said they didn’t know if there was enough time to produce them. That didn’t fly for me, as I knew they could make it happen if they really had to, so in the fine tradition of Principle #5, I politely explained how important it was to have them ready. I hung up the phone and promptly called Vince, who liked the idea so much that he wanted them ready to sell online on WWE.com the next day, as well as in the arena the following week.
Armed with that info, I called the merch guys back and asked again if they could have them ready on time. When the dude told me they thought they could do it, I said, “Great, I’ll let Vince know! Oh and by the way, he wants them up on dot-com tomorrow.”
Needless to say, the shirts were ready to go the next day, and while they didn’t sell all that well, the desired effect was achieved. By merely seeing that the merch was available, the fans assumed that Y2AJ was a real team who was about to have a substantial run, not a couple of guys who were going to break up as quickly as they got together.
No is a Four-Letter Word Page 12