by Mike Edison
“I’m gonna put you over, mate,” he told the kid, and handed him the strap. “Yer the new Texas Junior Heavyweight Champ.” The kid beamed. He was a good-looking Mexican boy, and the fans loved him. He had been in the business for less than a year and already he was getting a promotion. So what if it was 2:00 a.m. in a parking lot, and the boss was bombed and could barely remember his name? Obviously, this was how it was done, or what the fuck else would they have been doing out there?
The Warlord’s head looked odd. Blood shines black in moonlight, perhaps more so in Texas, and his skull shimmered with rivers of indigo from where the barbed wire had cut him. Earlier in the evening he had lost a gruesome main event. According to the match’s stipulation, and there always was one in Texas, he was forced to wear a crown of thorns fashioned from razor ribbon, forcefully jammed over his bald pate, to further humiliate him in front of an arena of bloodthirsty Christians. He looked as if his head had been stuck in a food processor, and he was the scariest thing the kid had ever seen.
The Warlord patted the kid on the back and gave him some stern advice. “This is the old Southwest Heavyweight belt, so don’t let anybody get too close to it until we can change it. If anybody asks, tell them you won it in a tournament in Mexico.” Up until that point, there was no such thing as the “Texas Junior Heavyweight Champ.” The Warlord, shitfaced and feeling magnanimous, had made it up on the spot. He stumbled and nearly fell back into the trunk of the Lincoln. I took his keys from him and carefully navigated us back to the motel, leaving the new champ in the parking lot, dazed. For a second there, standing in the Lone Star moonlight, his future looked bright indeed.
Running Main Event didn’t have a lot of perks, but driving around Texas with the Warlord rated high. Jonathan was one of the original Kiwi Sheepherders, a brutal New Zealander tag team who chewed through the South in the mid-eighties. His career was presumed to be finished after a horrible car accident that had destroyed his back and busted both of his legs. The Sheepherders recruited a new man, and eventually became stars, working as the Bushwackers. Against all odds, Jonathan rehabilitated to the point where he could walk with a cane. Hobbling around, screaming at fans, he began managing all the heels in San Antonio. Eventually he made it back to the ring and took over the business. This guy was as tough as they come.
When I first met Jonathan, he was booking the Southwest promotion under a new name, Texas All-Star Wrestling. Their headquarters was the rodeo ring in Gilley’s, the legendary “world’s largest bar,” a cavernous hall that smelled like stale liquor and cow shit (it burned down in 1989). “These are a violent mutherfucking people,” he would tell me, speaking of the Mexicans and cowboys who would get fucked up on beer and fill the place on a Saturday night. “I’m gonna give ’em what they want.”
The cards were filled with bloody gimmick matches from top to bottom. Dog collars and chains, steel cages, billiard balls dropped into tube socks—you’d see it all on one of his shows, climaxing with the Bloody Horror of the Barbed Wire Match. Every wrestler “got juice”— usually the old-fashioned way, by cutting their foreheads open with a razor blade secreted in their wrist tape. In a second there would be blood everywhere. And the fans would go crazy. There was always some hotted-up drunk who wanted to jump into the ring to defend the honor of a Lone Star Hero who had just been carved up by a filthy fucking foreigner like the Warlord—or worse, a mincing sissy like Exotic Adrian Street.
Exotic Adrian was the best of the post–Gorgeous George wrestlers working a swishy gimmick. He had incredible technical skills and could get unbelievable heat, especially in the South, prancing around like some kind of glammed-up freak show in pigtails and sparkly face paint. “I can hurt you so many ways you’ll find new ways to scream!” he would coo at opponents before snapping their spines and skipping around the ring in faux faggoty delight. Whenever Adrian worked there was always some testosterone case who had to be put down by rodeo security, who were bigger, uglier, and meaner than the wrestlers. They had to be. So were the fans.
I also spent time in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, shooting matches promoted by the old National Wrestling Alliance, which was still trying to work the Northeast and got as far as Vince McMahon’s backyard. Every show we saw there was fantastic, and you could count on lots and lots of juice. Tully Blanchard, one of the most gifted grapplers of his generation, was in a life-and-death feud with Magnum T.A. The Road Warriors, Animal and Hawk, would crush whoever stood before them. The great heel managers, Paul Jones and J. J. Dillon, always brought a full battery of ass-kickers. At the end of the night, Ric Flair, without question the Greatest Professional Wrestler of All Time, would defend his title, the title, in hour-long matches against Dusty Rhodes or Harley Race that were riveting from start to finish. It was the very height of the art form.
There has never been a wrestler so deserving of the accolades conferred upon him as Ric Flair. He is the Vladimir Horowitz of the turn-buckle, the Pablo Picasso of the pinfall. He is the Wayne Gretzky of the grappling world. There is nothing Ric Flair cannot do.
One of his greatest skills has always been his preternatural ability to “sell” his opponent. He could wrestle a toothbrush and make the toothbrush look good. He whipped crowds into a lather by begging for mercy—from men with a tenth of his talent. He is a testament to how great a sport wrestling is. He is an iron man. Every night his peroxide-blond hair would fill up with blood, his head would turn pink like a piece of bubblegum, and he would fall out of the ring, dripping gore, clutching the Ten Pounds of Gold—the coveted NWA Heavyweight Championship belt—and even though you knew he did this three hundred times a year, he always made you feel as though you were part of history.
And he was brilliant out of the ring. To be in a room with him was to know why they called it professional wrestling. He always carried himself like a true Champ. On the mat, he was a brutal egomaniac who would resort to anything to win, but after the match he was always totally approachable and generous with his time. When there were cameras or reporters around, he burned like a supernova. Any business would be proud to have a man like this represent them. I learned a lot from just being around him, soaking up the Championship Vibe.
Flair was always nice to me, as were all the wrestlers, with the notable exception of Dusty Rhodes, who was generally a dick. But no one ever made a motion to let me into the Secret Inner Circle until the Warlord invited me down to cover his personal brand of barbarism.
All of this goodwill meant nothing back at the office, where Shuggie was still demanding more and more for less and less. In addition to Main Event, we were now also doing a number of wrestling superstars picture albums—magazines of recycled photos and mini-posters, which needed a lot more love and care than you might imagine. As with a regular issue, I would have to draw up a “pagination,” or “map,” of the book, preferably with some sort of logical flow. Then I’d collect the material, which meant going through back issues and old files to find the best stuff (and stuff that hadn’t already been reprinted, which became increasingly difficult the more of these retread books we churned out), write headlines and blocks of copy for each wrestler (and make it seem fresh), have it run out into galleys, and, after proofing it, traffic it to Shuggie, who was the art department. All told, it was a big job for one guy, but I was building some chops, and the books kept looking and reading better and better. Even though Shuggie may not have cared about anything except getting product on the stands as cheaply as possible, I took a lot of pride in my work.
I also expected to get paid. Shuggie kept giving me new jobs, such as these picture albums, for which I was supposed to collect an extra check, and I was glad to do it, but he’d drag his ass paying me. I was pretty much writing the entire magazine by now, and he owed me a dropout’s fortune for all the photos I’d been snapping.
It is beyond me why he’d want to fuck around with someone whose new best pal was a drunk Kiwi called the Warlord. Hanging around with a bunch of ass-kickers in T
exas had done nothing to damage my self-confidence, and I was not going to be intimidated by a rat fucker like Shuggie. He was one of those assholes who think they can make you feel guilty for wanting to actually collect what you’ve earned.
“Why you gettin’ so angry? Didn’t I give you a job? You’re just a kid.”
This went on for a few weeks before I finally saw red. I am like Billy Fucking Jack, very slow to anger, but when I hit the boiling point, you do not want to be around. I had flattened the last editor who got in my way, and now I was going to drop this mutherfucker like a bad habit. Except when I tore down Jeremy, it was a work. This was real, what we call a shoot.
“If you keep bothering me, I’ll never pay you! I’ll fire your ass!”
“You can’t fire me. I quit!”
Didn’t you always want to say that? I’m so glad I thought of it. A little bit of sugar to help the medicine go down. Because my next move was to take a swing at his head with a T square I had grabbed from the art table. He looked like a thermometer about to pop.
I measured him for another shot.
“I’ll call security! I’ll call security!”
“Yeah, whatever.” What a coward. I thought for sure he’d fight back, but I really didn’t want his blood on my hands. “There will be a check here tomorrow for three thousand dollars, all the money you owe me, and then I won’t hire a lawyer, I won’t sue you, and I will walk away without killing you,” I advised him.
“You call first.”
That sounded reasonable enough. I tossed the T square aside dramatically and headed for a bar. The next day the check was waiting for me. I left the Empire State Building walking tall.
Producing Main Event had been a humbling responsibility. I took seriously my promise to each and every one of my constituents, be they Nobel laureates or toothless hicks howling for Hulk Hogan. I know they counted on me, even if I wanted to rip their hero’s lungs out with a pair of old ice tongs. But without that cross to bear, left with only a slacker day job peddling long-playing phonograph records to rockabilly nerds, I was free to get on with the care and feeding of Alec and Jim in Sharky’s Machine.
Like a champ, Speedy Gonzalez had come through with the deutsche marks for our next record. And with Kramer out of the picture, we traded up for Wharton Tiers to record us.
Wharton had produced outings for Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore and was an instrumental part of Glenn Branca’s swarm-of-bees guitar orchestras. I once saw Wharton playing on Branca’s “Night of 100 Guitars,” a free concert outside at the World Financial Center. There was an entire playing field of guitarists clanging away on hot-rodded electric six strings, each with its own amplifier. Wharton led the pack, pummeling a set of vintage Slingerland drums. The racket the guitars made was unbelievable, and Wharton was still about eighty times as loud as the herd, piledriving a modified Bo Diddley beat nonstop for nearly an hour.
He is also one of the most even-tempered men in the business and has a stellar rep for being a calming influence in the studio, where tempers can sometimes flare. But not even Wharton—with the help of Jimmy Carter, Dale Carnegie, and the Dalai Fucking Lama—could have brought peace to Sharky’s Machine. He told me that in all the years of running his studio, we were the only band who got into an actual fistfight during a recording session.
Jim could be a complete fucking diva. For all of his vast talent, there was too little professionalism and too much cheap booze, which fueled his whole Sensitive Artist trip to intolerable levels.
During the recording, Jim was carrying on as usual, whining, whimpering, and wasting everyone’s time trying to breathe subtlety into a song that sounded like a war between two broken lawn mowers.
At one point Alec just said, “Fuck him, just let him sing whatever he wants. It’s not like we’re gonna use any of this crap.” Alec didn’t realize that Jim could hear him through the talk-back mic. Jim threw down his headphones, stormed back into the control room, and delivered a vicious, openhanded slap to the side of Alec’s head. All hell broke loose. Too bad we didn’t get that on tape.
Not long after that, I made a spectacle of myself thrashing Jim in front of an audience of about two hundred people. It was the end of a long night of tedious opening bands playing indulgently long sets, which had pushed all of us to the breaking point, especially after hours of bored drinking. Just as we were about to go on, Jim refused to sing “Stray Cat Blues,” one of our strongest numbers. A raucous, mean-spirited Rolling Stones cover, it was a fail-safe crowd-pleaser. “I no longer relate to it,” Jim declared.
Oy fucking vey. What did I do to deserve this shit? Alec decided that we would just open the set with it. Once we started, what was Jim going to do? Neither of us predicted that he would spin on his heels and clobber me with the heavy end of an SM-58 microphone.
I leaped over the drums and flattened him. A crowd of concerned patrons pulled me off of him, and the show was officially over at the thirty-second mark, beating the old record set by GG Allin by a full five minutes. I felt bad about the whole thing for almost an hour.
Somehow, despite all odds, we made a good rock ’n’ roll record, A Little Chin Music. The cover was a graphic painting of a batter having his head torn off by a high, inside fastball. We delivered the record to Speedy and booked a two-month tour of northern Europe, with a two-week stay in Berlin, where we were already slated to record another album for his LSD label.
Speedy was a man who made things happen. In 1988, before the Wall came down, Berlin—West Berlin—was the craziest town on earth. No one there slept, Speedy least of all.
It is hard to imagine, now that Europe is one happy family, that West Berlin was just a dot in the middle of the Soviet bloc, penned in like a goat at a petting zoo. The Wall was a surreal, ominous presence. The people who lived there, at least the druggy under-thirty crowd that I was running with, had a seriously conflicted love-hate relationship with it: there was empathy for their Eastern neighbors, who lived in the long shadow of Communist oppression, but everyone knew that if the Wall ever came down, West Berlin would be besieged by East bloc refugees, lines for food and basic services would be crippling, and West Berlin would lose every bit of exotic gravitas that had made it the center of glamorous sexual decadence for everyone from Marlene Dietrich to David Bowie. We were there just months before the fall, and no one had any clue that things might not go on forever this way.
Every time you left West Berlin to travel beyond the Wall into West Germany, you would have to go through a series of checkpoints and passport controls—first, the American military sector (e.g., Checkpoint Charlie), then West German customs, then DDR customs (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a.k.a. East Germany). The East German border guards were master-race mutants, jackbooted and armed with oily black machine guns. Their uniforms, like their attack dogs, were designed, successfully, to inspire fear.
It was all very bizarre. On one side of the Wall were bars and cafés, and the Wall itself was covered in colorful graffiti. After a short stretch of a heavily mined no-man’s-land fortified with spiraling clouds of razor ribbon, there was a new country, a Soviet satellite where no one had any rights and everything was painted gray. Guard towers popped up like middle fingers every fifty feet.
Leaving West Berlin, to go to, say, Hanover for a weekend gig, you would also receive a time stamp, so that when you crossed the East German border again to reenter West Germany, it could be verified that you were not lollygagging and, presumably, collecting intelligence. But there was nothing to collect except the crappy East German toilet paper at the primitive rest stops. It was of such inferior quality that Cain and Abel probably had a better time of it with raw papyrus. Otherwise, the highway was bordered by fifteen-foot hedges so you couldn’t even see inside the country. There were no exits.
Travel to East Berlin was permitted—a one-day tourist visa cost about thirty bucks American, in return for which you would be handed a pile of East German scrip that was of a lesser quality than the toilet
paper. The coins were made of tin. But none of this mattered since you had to spend all your money that day before you returned to West Germany and the only thing you could buy with it was beer and bratwurst. Exchanging dollars for a few pennies’ worth of scrap metal was their way of bringing hard currency into the country. And of course, while you were a guest of the State, you were being watched by the Stasi. You had to be careful that no one tried to pass you a note or tried to talk to you about Hollywood movies, which were strictly verboten.
All of this made it a real pain in the ass to bring drugs into West Berlin, so they just made them there. Bathtub labs lurked in every corner of the city, cooking military-grade amphetamines. Beyond any truck-driver crank you might imagine, this was the shit that powered Wernher von Braun’s best rockets. One good bump of shiny yellow crystals off the end of a switchblade could keep you going for days.
There were lots of blank-faced Berliners for whom years of tweaking on zoom dust had not had the beneficial effects of, say, a good nap and a bowl of Grandma’s best chicken soup. While we were there, my policy was to eat and sleep once every few days, whether I had to or not.
We were staying in an apartment above the Ecstasy club in the swanky Schöneberg district. Every night there was another band, another party. Like professional wrestlers and high school teachers, about one in five was worthwhile. But there was always Top Secret Action in Kreuzberg, a bohemian district of anarchists and hard-core punks and artists nestled up against the Wall. The bars, many of which had blankets covering the windows to hold back the dawn, were uniformly shrouded in thick smoke from hash joints and were buzzing with booze and speed. Most nights I’d have to suck back a fifth of Jim Beam just to take the edge off.