by Bob Mould
This was also the first time I’d ever had real bosses. But I have nothing other than the utmost respect for the guys in the business, especially two as decorated and successful as Sullivan and J.J. I admired their ideas and their nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, and it was a pleasure to sit and listen, waiting my turn, until I was asked for my perspective. I enjoyed running at this relentless pace.
I was there for four weeks before I started doing steroids. I was tired from traveling five days a week on no sleep, I was working and thinking so hard every day, and my brain felt as if it were about to explode. I remember riding in the car one day in Florida with my traveling crew and someone saying, “Bobby, you gotta get on the gas.”
I was like, “Really?”
“Here, take one of these, it’s all right, and tell me how you feel in an hour.”
It was a fifty milligram dose of Anadrol, a powerful oral steroid in the form of a small white pill. Anadrol is really hard on the liver, hard on your kidneys, but very effective for muscle and weight gain.
I took that pill, and within a few hours, I was ready to fuck a Coke machine. I thought, all right, this works for me. I went from the quiet, reserved, deferential guy to running right alongside the boys. I was better equipped for the job, the boys approved of my new attitude, and I continued using Anadrol, then Dianabol, for the duration of my time at WCW. I did steroids because I was exhausted and I needed to keep up. This was like war.
Relative to some people around me, I was taking a very light dose, but I felt I had to take them. I had to keep up. We’d get up in the morning and I’d have eight egg whites with salmon, then off to the gym, and then we’d have these sixteen-hour days. The amount of food I consumed was absurd. Whether at lunch in the arena catering halls or at the sushi restaurants, I would eat more food than the boys. It was a running joke: “Bobby, where in the fuck are you putting all that food?” I wasn’t putting on much weight, but now I could maintain a much higher intensity level. I might not have been gigantic, but I felt all of my six two around these guys who were typically 220 to 280 pounds. I was getting bigger than I used to be, both physically and mentally; I had more strength and endurance—the steroids helped to build my confidence.
They affected my demeanor too, but not so much as to change my basic personality. I didn’t bring any kind of crazy behavior home with me, but by late Thursday night, I was exhausted and Kevin didn’t want to hear any more about wrestling. He enjoyed watching but had no interest in hearing me talk about work. For the weekends, Kevin and I tried to have a semblance of a normal life, but most of the time I was either on my ass, completely exhausted, or on the phone talking business.
It was the kind of business where you needed to know everything that was happening. I was constantly on call. Sullivan would phone me and ask, “So-and-so is hurt, what do you think we should do, where can we go with this story?” You had to keep up, because at any given time, over in a corner of the dressing room, the catering area, or the hotel lobby after the show, some new cabal is forming to stage an uprising that could cost anyone their spot. All wrestling, all the time.
* * *
As head of creative at WCW, Sullivan hired Chris Benoit, who he respected as a performer, and in 1996, Sullivan concocted a story line where Benoit was having an affair with his wife, Nancy, who was now a character called Woman.
There’s a term used in the business: “He worked himself into a shoot.” Loosely, it means that the story that is written eventually becomes a real-life situation. In an attempt to make the story line seem authentic, Sullivan told Chris and Nancy to get so steamy that even the locker room believed it. All the boys would gossip, “I think Chris is really with Nancy.” Write it and it shall be so.
Sullivan—at this time an active wrestler as well as head of creative—was still cooperating with Chris on the job, even now knowing that they all had worked themselves into a shoot. Sullivan and Benoit are having these amazingly stiff, brutal matches. The last match was billed as “loser retires,” and Benoit actually broke vertebrae in Kevin’s neck. A couple years later, Sullivan was the boss at WCW; Benoit was still there too, and not only was he now married to Nancy in real life, but they were also getting ready to have a child.
Stupid injuries were getting more frequent in pro wrestling. Bret Hart, who was the champ in December 1999, had a match with our top box office draw, Bill Goldberg, that headlined the biggest annual pay-per-view show. Goldberg accidentally kicked Bret in the head and gave him a concussion (that years later may have contributed to a stroke). The next night on television, Goldberg was supposed to put his fist through the window of a limo; he had gimmicked his glove with a spark plug bit so that it would break the window. But the window wouldn’t break, so Goldberg smashed it with his fist, tearing an enormous gash down his entire forearm. He almost bled to death on live TV on top of this white limo, and then spent the evening in an emergency room receiving nearly two hundred stitches. Goldberg, WCW’s golden goose, would be out of commission for months.
The following week, head writer Vince Russo arranged a stunt that called for Bret Hart to speed around the large backstage area of the Houston Astrodome in a rental car. Because it was a cool moist night, the already smooth cement flooring had become very slick, almost like black ice. Given Bret’s impaired condition, this stunt should have never been allowed to take place.
Earlier that month, in front of all the writers and bosses, I had voiced my concerns about the relative safety of the work environment. Nobody heeded my words and now, in the course of eight days, two medium-risk stunts had gone wrong. I was pissed. After the skidding car stunt, which closed the show, I packed my notes in my work bag, walked up to Bill Busch and J. J. Dillon and said, “I tried to tell you someone would get hurt. I’m going home. I don’t want to be around here when something worse happens. Thank you both for the opportunity, but I can’t work here any longer.”
I went home, still under my week-to-week contract. The following Monday night, minutes before airtime, Gary Juster faxed me the format sheets, and I couldn’t believe how crazy the shows were getting. They were even planning to set the ringside area on fire at one of the upcoming TV events. Within the next few weeks, the out-of-retirement Jimmy Snuka dived off a twelve-foot ladder, aggravating Jeff Jarrett’s underlying mild concussion. Now WCW had lost their top three guys, including the world champ and the secondary champ.
Soon after, Vince Russo, whose risky stunts were the main reason I left the job, went home. Soon I got the call saying I could come back to work if I wanted. I showed up in Cincinnati the night before a pay-per-view and quickly realized we were in a sticky situation. Because so many key people had been injured, everything that had been laid out for this, as well as for subsequent story lines, had to be rewritten on the spot.
Twelve of us gathered in the conference room of a suburban Cincinnati hotel and rewrote the scripts. The main concern was how to address the world title, the holy grail of any wrestling promotion, and determine who would walk out of the building that evening as champion. The consensus was to give the title to Chris Benoit. And this was decided with Sullivan present, despite all the real-life heat and animosity between him and Benoit. Sullivan was the head booker, and he agreed that we needed to put the belt on Chris. Finally, this was what every hardcore wrestling fan had been waiting for—for years. It was also the first thing I’d suggested upon arriving at WCW in September of 1999, and now it was about to happen.
But even with this decision, Benoit and some of the younger wrestlers felt the old-timers were holding them down, Sullivan as booker in particular. Many of the company’s best technical wrestlers were in that younger faction, and I had been one of their biggest proponents. I was in an awful spot, torn between my belief in those guys and the loyalty I had for my boss, Sullivan.
The championship match took place the following night on a pay-per-view broadcast in Cincinnati. To give the match extra meaning, I suggested to Sullivan that we send the re
st of the wrestlers, faces and heels together, out onto the ramp during the match. Then when we award Benoit the belt, they’d all give him a standing ovation. Normally you don’t break the illusion by putting faces and heels together, but I said, let’s do it so people know this is important. Sullivan agreed.
Sid and Chris did a decent-looking fifteen-minute match, which Chris was booked to win with his finishing move, the Crippler Crossface, a move where the opponent is facedown on the mat and Benoit gets on his opponent’s back and does a choke plus an arm bar. Benoit won the match as planned, strapped on the world title belt, and the postmatch celebration worked like a charm. The crowd loved it.
Chris came back through the curtain with the belt, which meant he was now the face of the company. We’d decided he was the guy. Kevin walked up to Chris, shook his hand, and congratulated him. I was second in line to say, “Congratulations, Chris, you deserve this.” We shook hands, and he said thank you.
The next day Benoit showed up at the live TV event with eight of his fellow wrestlers. They went to Bill Busch and threatened to quit unless Sullivan was fired—“Either he goes or we go.” It was mutiny. We were trying to do the right thing, and Benoit and his faction didn’t believe it was for real.
Bill Busch sent them home. “If they don’t want to be here,” he said, “I don’t want them here.” Benoit left the belt with the head of the prop department, and away he and his friends went. We were left to rewrite the entire show just hours before airtime, including having to come up with a way to explain the world title situation.
Sullivan, in his infinite wisdom, had quietly planned for such mutiny. When he laid out the finish, he had told Sid, “Sid, you gotta do the job, you gotta do business for me, but I want you to do one thing. When he puts you in his finishing hold and you tap out and he wins, I want you to have your foot under the bottom rope.” By doing so, Sullivan had created a safeguard: if a wrestler’s foot is touching (or under) the ropes, the referee is supposed to break up the action. The submission, therefore, would have been null and void. At the time, Sullivan and Sid didn’t tell anybody. We went back that day and looked at all the camera angles and found the one where Sid’s foot was under the rope. Now we could show that footage to the audience and declare that Benoit didn’t actually win the title. Sullivan had clearly suspected he was about to be set up by Benoit and his compadres, so he made sure to protect the title.
Not only were the fans disappointed by this turn in the story line, but I was disappointed in real life. I was so upset that I couldn’t sleep for three days, and I wasn’t able to rest until J. J. Dillon and Kevin Sullivan sat me down and flatly stated it was business, and things would be OK.
There were even bigger problems though. The WCW show had been the flagship program for TBS since the 1970s, but ratings were sinking. More and more of the writers, producers, and wrestlers were beginning to question the creative direction Sullivan had charted for WCW, which took the long view that things would probably get worse before they got better. But television executives are not wired to look at programming in the long term—shows live and die by ratings. We were doing everything we could, but nothing was working. There was so much turmoil, and we couldn’t stop the bleeding. Some wrestlers became uncooperative, while others suddenly became “injured” and didn’t show up for work. We were shorthanded in the in-ring talent department, and the dwindling roster didn’t help our now suffering story lines.
At the end of March 2000, upper management replaced our creative team with a mishmash of previous writers and offered to reposition us in the company. I soon tendered my resignation. I was sad to leave my dream job and all the incredible people I had worked so closely with for seven months, but if I had stayed, I would have been exiled to corporate Siberia. I was luckier than most of my colleagues though—I had another career to fall back on. (Within a year, WCW was liquidated for micropennies on the dollar to the WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment.)
A little postscript: Remember the wrestler murder-suicide in 2007? That was Chris Benoit. He killed his wife, Nancy, and his son, Daniel, over the course of a weekend and hanged himself a day later. He was on incredibly excessive amounts of painkillers and steroids, his wife was on pills too, and even their seven-year-old son was found with traces of prescription drugs in his system.
Benoit’s childhood idol, the Dynamite Kid, used to do this move where he’d stand up on the top rope and just fall forward on the guy—what they call the Diving Headbutt. Benoit took that move and executed it almost every night. After his death, the autopsy revealed he had the brain of an eighty-five-year-old man, filled with protein deposits, much like with full-stage Alzheimer’s. The actual medical term is chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The layman’s term is punch-drunk.
Pro wrestling is serious business. There’s nothing fake about it at all.
CHAPTER 23
For a while after leaving WCW, I still watched the shows with a critical eye. But as the weeks went on, I started to lose interest; I knew the secrets, I had been in the eye of the storm, and the mystery was gone. I was settling back into life at home with Kevin, life in the gay neighborhoods of Manhattan and in my neglected and dusty recording studio on Washington Street.
I wasn’t on the road, so I was able to get back to the routines I had started in early 1999, the most enjoyable of which was my daily bike ride around lower Manhattan. I’d start on the West Side Highway at Canal Street, head down through the World Trade Center and Battery Park City, and around the southern tip of the island to the Fulton Fish Market. I would happily ride right through the fish slop, getting it all over my bike.
I had to get on FDR Drive for a bit, which was harrowing, then ride up through the East River Park. Every Wednesday morning at ten thirty, the police cadets were out jogging, which was sort of hot. I’d cut through Stuyvesant Town and westward across the island on Twenty-First Street. At Tenth Avenue I’d ride south to Chelsea Market and shop for the day. I’d put everything in the panniers on my bike and ride home. It was nine miles every day—rain or shine, snowstorms, it didn’t matter. I had a very intimate relationship with both rivers and downtown Manhattan. Stopping to take pictures, sitting on the piers—it was all a big part of my day.
As was electronica. It was a soundtrack that played everywhere I spent time: at the gym, at the Factory Café, and in the clubs. At gay restaurants like Cafeteria and Caffe Torino, the songs were “Believe” by Cher, “Beautiful Stranger” by Madonna, and club music from artists like Paul van Dyk. I was taking it all in, finding it so fresh compared to both alternative rock and hip-hop.
Rebel Rebel, a small Greenwich Village record store that specializes in electronic, independent, and dance music, was the glue that held my old and new lives together. In 1998, the first time I shopped the store, I acted low-key, but David, the owner, looked up at me and asked, “You’re Bob Mould, right?” He probably figured it out from the name on the credit card.
I spent a lot of time and money at Rebel Rebel, and in return they gave me a good education about electronica and club music. I even won over an employee named Brian, a likable lug from Milwaukee who’d mastered both stereotypical gay bitchiness and record-store-clerk elitism, rolled them up into one, and could lay it on certain customers. They knew the types of music I might find interesting and would play things for me in the store, not dissimilar to my early days as a wide-eyed music fan at Oar Folkjokeopus in Minneapolis. Once my ear tuned in to the differences and my brain starting responding favorably to certain styles, the hit-to-miss ratio of music they played for me went way up.
There was one song in particular that spoke directly to me and was the true beginning of my fascination with electronic music. The song was Sasha’s “Xpander,” which was released in July 1999. The song structure reminded me of the second half of Beaster’s “JC Auto”—not in the cathartic sense, but in its hypnotic effect, the feeling it gave of simultaneously free-falling through space and time while being called out by a higher voi
ce. It resonated with me and created a gateway to similar artists and music.
This style of music was so contrary to what I had spent my previous life listening to, writing, and performing, and I’m sure longtime fans were (and maybe still are) confounded by my love of dance music. It doesn’t emphasize aspects of traditional songwriting like sophisticated chord changes, literate lyrics, and extended melodies—in other words, the high bar my fans set for me. I wish I had some high-art explanation for this wholesale change in attitude, but after turning away from rock music, I was just excited about working with a new set of tools. The bottom line was, in order to have a new life, I had to have new music.
I went out and bought an expensive sampler, updated my recording software, and began teaching myself how to make electronic music. My new writing and recording process was a continuation of two realizations that had surfaced in 1998: that my home demos were as fully formed as my professional studio recordings, and that an untrained approach often yields unpredictable yet interesting results.
In the first eight months of 1999, I had been writing three different styles of music: purely electronic/ambient music, mechanical pop with more samples and less electric guitar, and traditional acoustic singer-songwriter stuff. After decompressing and recovering from the seven months of nonstop chaos that was WCW, I resumed writing and recording music in April 2000, and I had high ambitions. I had the idea of putting out three distinct albums at once. I had the blueprint for Modulate, which was to be a hybrid of guitars and electronics. There was the LoudBomb album, Long Playing Grooves, which was almost entirely electronic (LoudBomb is an anagram of Bob Mould). The third album was to be a collection of quiet rock songs called Body of Song.