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His Philosophy

I finally got a chance to rent the behind-the-scenes wrestling movie Beyond the Mat. I used to watch pro wrestling, from around the early to mid 80s: the Hulk Hogan wins the title from Iron Sheik, good Andre, Flair, the late Von Erichs, Dusty Rhodes, Rocky Johnson and Tony Atlas, when Rick Martel was AWA champion (AWA was a joke to us. “Dude all they got is Rick Martel, if he was in NWA or WWF he’d be a stinky guy”); and I stopped watching around the early 90s: the ultra-gimmicky, Jake the Snake vs. bad Andre, Hogan vs. Savage, Honky Tonk Man era. I used to read all about it in Pro Wrestling Illustrated and the more glossy WWF Magazine. I remember seeing the debuts of Junk Yard Dog, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, Brutus Beefcake, The Rock n Roll Express, Jake the Snake Roberts, among others. I couldn’t tell you who the WWF champ is now. I haven’t watched much wrestling in the past 10 years, even after it started to get good again around the mid-late 90s. When I do watch wrestling I have to ask a bunch of questions that immediately qualify me as an outsider. It’s embarrassing.

But I do remember when the Wild Samoans fought Adrian Adonis and Dick Murdoch. You have to be in your mid 20s or older to remember the infamous bloody “I Quit” match between Magnum T.A. and Tully Blanchard. It ended when Magnum took the leg of a broken wooden chair, and stabbed it into Tully’s bloody forehead, and all this blood was gushin out…. I think I wrote about this before. Or when Nikita Koloff Russian Sickled Magnum TA in front of his mom on that NWA TV show from the Omni in Atlanta (I forget what it was called). And of course the Texas Death matches between Buzz Sawyer and Tommy Rich.

The Road Warriors were my favorite tag team, hands down. Just fuckin bad ass. They’d come down to “Iron Man” like fuckin pit bulls with those spiked shoulder pads, looking like crazed bikers, and chase their opponents out of the ring before the bell even rang. Fuck yeah! It made me want to go outside and knock some fellow 6 year old off his big wheel and beat his ass for no reason. And in those days, I sometimes did that.

We still give propers to the Greatest, Ric Flair, when we play Charlotte. I was also a big fan of Rowdy Roddy Piper, and as I got into my mid-teens I started to appreciate the less popular guys, like Canada’s Finest Athlete, Iron Mike Sharpe (“No no no no no no no!”) and Steve Lombardi (before Vince McMahon turned him into the “Brooklyn Brawler”) and Barry O, whose entire gimmick consisted of him making an “O” above his head with his arms. Wonder how long it took him to devise that crowd-pleaser. Forearms, double axe handles, clotheslines, turnbuckles and body slams were the fundamentals back in nem days. Don’t forget the Irish Whip!

I seen a ton a matches, dute. The first match I ever saw--I was probably 5 or 6 years old-- was at the Civic Arena. It was Tiger Chung Lee vs. Mr. Fugi (formerly a great tag team) in a cane match. I just remember they had a huge bamboo stick and they were trying to hit each other with it, and I think it ended in a disqualification when Mr. Fugi tried to throw some of his patented Japanese cocaine (or whatever that shit was) into Tiger Chung Lee’s eyes.

Lemmy see, I saw Andre vs. Big John (“That’s the giant John Stud!”) Stud in a body slam match. I saw Hogan vs. Stud, Hogan vs. Flair, Piper vs. Snuka, Hogan vs. Piper, Steele vs. Savage, Lombardi vs. O, a Great American Bash which included a double cage match, a taping of WWF Main Event in West Virginia, Honky Tonk Man vs. Jake the Snake. Honky Tonk Man used to have his own fan club, three dorks who got front row seats to all the Pittsburgh matches. That was in the days when everyone was supposed to like the good guys and hate the bad guys. Honky Tonk’s fan club went to that TV taping in West Virginia, and when we watched it on TV the WWF’s editors went as far as to edit them out, so Honky Tonk looked like he didn’t have any fans.

My buddy Doug and I used to wait for the wrestlers to exit the building in the parking lot of the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. It was easy to figure out which door they were coming out- you just had to look for a bunch of rented cars. Hogan and Flair would always slip out another door. But, from what I remember, we managed to get signatures from Sgt Slaughter, Tully Blanchard, Wendy Richter, Arn Anderson, Lex Lugar, Diamond Dallas Page, the black announcer, Wahoo McDaniel, I think maybe Terry Funk, and several others. I don’t remember any of the guys being assholes. This was back in the day when you could get third row seats for $13.

Around the same time Doug and I got a chance to meet Bruno Sammartino, the Living Legend. He’s a native Pittsburgher, from the North Hills, and he was doing an under-promoted book-signing at Phantom of the Attic Comics at Parkway Center Mall. There was no one else there, so we stayed for at least an hour and talked to Bruno. We’re talking to him about wrestling and everything, and this woman comes in with her five year old. She says, “Look honey, it’s Bruno Sammartino. He’s a wrestler, just like Hulk Hogan.” Bad mistake lady.

Bruno gets pissed, “No no no! I’m a wrestler but not like Hulk Hogan! He’s a goddamn steroid freak and a grandstander!” The lady covers her kid’s ears and tries to be nice and says, “Oh don’t say that, he likes him.” Bruno: “I don’t care. Your son shouldn’t be looking up to a damn drug abuser.” And then he gave her an Irish Whip into a rack of Spidermans and a couple forearms to the head. I held down her son while Doug pummeled him with forearms.

Last part=made up.

It was cool before the rock ‘n’ roll copyright infringements set in, when the Road Warriors came down the aisle to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” Hulk Hogan came down to “Eye of the Tiger,” the Fabulous Freebirds came down to “Freebird,” and Junk Yard Dog came down to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” That was before Rick Derringer was writing all his half assed wrestling songs, like “Girls in Cars” for Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart and “Jive Soul Bro” for Slick.

The early Rock and Wrestling Connection was Captain Lou Albano appearing in Cindy Lauper’s video, and The Wrestling Album with all those Rick Derringer songs and “Land of 1000 Dances” on it, and bad guy Roddy Piper trashing the video because he don’t want no rock ‘n’ roll. It was terrible music, and of course I owned it. And there was the Saturday morning cartoon, “Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling” that was most likely terrible (can’t remember), but of course I watched every episode.

Cut to recently when Gene Simmons and Kiss, Inc. make their own wrestler, and Motorhead plays Triple H’s theme song, and I bunch of other examples I don’t know about.

I could write a whole article on the Rock and Wrestling Connection but the parallel I drew between the two forms of entertainment was from watching Beyond the Mat. As far as the entertainment aspects of both media go, all wrestlers and all bands and all musicians have a shtick. Jake the Snake had the snake, Andre was the Giant, etc. And yes all bands have shtick. Even bands like us, who pretty much wear the same clothes we walk around in all day as the ones we play in, have a shtick. A lot of people don’t like to admit it in music, but once you get up on stage and try to get in the papers and on the radio, you’ll start to be described in general terms, and people will know your opinions and whether you’re sober or not, and you automatically have an image. It doesn’t have to be as gay and obvious as the Vinnie Vincent Invasion or as dumb as The Red Rooster.

But that’s only one parallel of the music and wrestling business. Both rockers and grapplers are doing something tough as hell (okay wrestling’s a little tougher), that they love and is almost impossible to make money at. Song-players and man-slammers who aren’t famous get paid dick and either have to get a regular day job, couch surf or live with their parents. I’m sure there are some who are not stars of the WWF but make a living in the indie leagues, just like there are a lot of bands not on MTV that make money from touring and selling merch.

But a lot of the time this happens: musicians and wrestlers who love what they do, so much that most are so eager to make a living at their dream, sign their lives away on corrupt but legal contracts offered to them by the majors. The few who make it to the top are usually used for a year or two, and in that short time spend all their money on cocaine because they think they are rich, and then after their appeal wears off, get dumped by corrupt bosses, and end up poor as hell. It’s not exactly what you’d call a “career.” It’s more like becoming a product. They might end up surfing in and out of the minor leagues dancing for peanuts, and the lucky ones end up making a living at a job they like that’s centered in wrestling/music.

And the bosses don’t give a darn. They are making millions, and it’s perfectly legal. Unhealthy as hell for wrestling and music, but legal. It’s very easy to manipulate a man when you know he’s willing to jump at any opportunity to be in the big leagues. Beyond the Mat had a few interviews with wrestlers who were pretty much screwed by Vince McMahon. Jake the Snake, one of the most bad ass wrestlers of all time, got pinned by the excesses of his stardom.

On the independent wrestling circuit, from what I hear from the people I know involved in APWF and SCW, and what I saw in the movie, most of the guys are paid about $40 a night, some guys even talked about only being paid $25 or even wrestling for free. That somehow sounds familiar to me. But really, I’m just looking at it from a casual spectator’s point of view. Maybe the champ, Matt Vandal can give us an insiders look at it sometime in the future. I think that’d be interesting. His belt looks like the old NWA title. Hell yeah!

It’s the whole Economics 101 champagne glass effect. Remember that? The music and pro-wrestling industry can serve as examples and models of the entire country-- world really. And it’s all legal, and I’m not complaining because there’s not much I can do about it. I’m just telling it like it is. The top 1% have all the bank, and the rest don’t got shit. So it works like a champagne glass: all the good stuff is floating around at the top, and the rest of us are just supporting the top. And the top ain’t gonna give anything away. They’re having too much fun. This ain’t communism boy!

But unfortunately greed doesn’t make for a solid, healthy business structure. It causes grief in the employees: everyone’s pissed at the boss, overworked, underpaid. In wrestling and music, the employees love their job, which is why wrestling and music industry leaders are raking it in. But the more people get screwed in the end, the more unrest there is, and the structure starts to topple. The monsters they created come back and bite them. That’s what McMahon was so paranoid about in Beyond the Mat.

I think it’s happening slowly, as all good things do (like Heinz Ketchup), but now we have independent record labels and independent wrestling leagues, and what’s dangerous about some of these labels and leagues is that they love wrestling as much as the wrestlers do, and they love music as much as the musicians do, and people are paying attention. A lot of help comes from old wrestlers (see Terry Funk in Beyond) and musicians, who can sympathize with the current talent. Terry Funk loves pro-wrestling more than anything in the world. So the new bosses want to support the wrestlers and musicians as much as they can, and, in music I can say for sure, their reputations and integrity are riding on it.

So hopefully a new ethic will come about from these independents, one that holds value in providing for the work force when the profit’s high. But the lure of money and greedy temptations are hard for any man to resist, and he might just put that money into his personal bank account rather than back into the company, and souls may be sold fast and integrity may be flushed down the toilet along with respect for the art and decent wages, should the opportunity arise.

We shall see. Until then, I’ll be typing these words from my day job.