music

Today’s Question: Completely random, and I’m pretty sure one that hasn’t been done already…..Of all of the wrestling TV shows in the history of the business, Which company/territory’s opening TV show theme/credits got you most excited to watch their TV show?


Yesterday’s Question: Who would you put on your Mt. Rushmore of all time wrestling managers?

damaverickridesagain:
Okay now, are we talking different styles for managers? If so good because thats how i would built my mount rushmore
for the WWF -no one did it better with tag teams than Captain Lou Albano or Heenan for his work in two promotions (AWA and WWF).
for one stable and the WCW/NWA: its got to be JJ Dillion- the horsemen would be the prototype for every super stable since, although I will concede and admit that Paul heyman could give JJ a run for his money
For women managers and one of the best jobs of promotion of one client, lets give a spot to Elizabeth. Some nansayers are going to say Savage managed himself but I think Liz was brilliant in her WWF run eliciting sympathy while driving male fans to want to defend her against her lunatic of a boyfriend/husband. Runner up has to go to Jim Cornette for taking the midnight express team (all of versions except WWF) to the top and making them more than a team named after a 80s movie
Last how about a manager that was a former wrestler, for this I would say Freddie Blassie, the dude legitimately scared me as a kid with his promos.


A lot of thought into it….Capt. Lou, Liz, Cornette and Blassie…I think this may be the only person who didnt mention Bobby Heenan

parallax1978: Heenan, Heyman, Bearer, Blassie

4 of the best…..thats for sure

BooBoo1782:
Heenan: The best, without question, although if there were a question, it would be how much his commentary work influences our perception of Heenan as a manager. To me, the classic memory of Heenan is him tossing out some completely ridiculous comment and an annoyed Gorilla saying, “WILL YOU STOP?” That having been said, he was never afraid to show ass when the story dictated it – from the Warrior right on down to the Red Rooster – and he was a great mouthpiece for guys who weren’t great talkers on their own (Andre being the most obvious example. The other thing about Heenan was that even when he was paired up with a good promo guy – Perfect and Flair come to mind here – he was able to contribute without getting in the way.

Cornette: I’m a bigger fan of Cornette when he’s shooting, but the fact remains that his fiery Southern preacher style, loud outfits, and goofy mannerisms made him a blast to watch.

Heyman: The Dangerous Alliance is one of my favorite things that WCW ever did. His promos during the Invasion were one of the only good thing about the whole shebang. And of course, his current WWE run has been wonderful to watch.

Jimmy Hart: The megaphone, the rapid-fire speech, those airbrushed jackets…you wanted to see him get clobbered, and that’s the defining characteristic of a successful heel manager.

Devin Harris:
Dillon – He was an actual manager. He didn’t order the Horsemen around, he just took care of their business affairs. That’s what an actual manager is supposed to do. He did it the best making sure they got the best deals and the best spots on the card.

Heenan- He was more like a pimp than a manager cause he bossed all his clients around. He never managed a world champion so points are deducted. Some of you will want to count Andre but I don’t. I want to say he was terrible at his job but he at least got his guys title shots.

Cornette – Points deducted for being bankrolled by his mama but he took all three versions of the Express to the tag titles. Points deducted for never managing a singles champion. Yoko doesn’t count. That was Fuji.

Race – Managed two world champions that had pretty long (for the time) title reigns. He did what a manager is supposed to do. He retired on top, unlike his in-ring career. Guy learns fast.

I think someone mentioned it on the blog, but Heenan managing Nick Bockwinkel as AWA Champion for 5 years has to count

Extant1979:
Most evil Mount Rushmore ever – Paul Heyman, Bobby Heenan, Mr. Fuji and JJ Dillon. The image must, however, have Virgil standing behind them all as the bodyguard to the stars.

kbjone:
Old School: Grand Wizard (or Eddie Creatchman)
WWF: Heenan (or Jimmy Hart)
NWA/WCW: Cornette (or J.J. Dillon)
Other: Gary Hart (or Paul Heyman)

The Fuj:
MR. FUCKING FUJI!

Seriously

Right now.

Bobby Davis, Paul Heyman, Bobby Heenan, Jim Cornette

Darren X:
Jim Cornette – The greatest manager of all-time. He took a surefire gimmick (momma’s boy/wimp/rich kid who could fight his way out of a wet paper bag) and ran with it
Bobby Heenan – The most talented overall of the managers, in that he could work damn good as well, and sell like nobody’s business
Gary Hart – The ultimate shady, cut-throat mafioso type manager
Paul E. Dangerously – So would this make me a Paul Heyman guy? Seriously, his work the last 2 1/2 years with CM Punk and Brock Lesnar has pretty much cemented his legacy. Tough to leave off Paul Ellering, Bill Alfonso, Jimmy Hart, and a few others, but there’s my four.


The blog is on hiatus for a couple of days (I have to be in a wedding) but I will be back with a new topic on Monday

Hi Scott,

So I know WWE network can't or won't get the rights fees for any ECW stars who used actual rock or rap songs as their entrance, thus they dubbed over them with corny generic songs.  However, how did ECW get the rights to these songs to use them originally?   I figure they didn't get the rights to them.  And since they were such a small operation, were the bands not aware their songs were being used?   Would the band Prong for example go after WWE if they let Justin Credible's entrance audio remain as is?

Thanks,

> Hey Scott,

>

> Was there a reason WCW didn't use Pomp and Circumstance for Macho Man's Music? It was in the Public Domain.

Because WCW?

1. As we all know, Bruiser Brody died in 1988 at age 42, but lets say for a moment that he had not – what do you think would have happened to his career? His demise coincided with the dying days of the territories, so would he have gone to WWF? Would he have went to Japan and maybe come back for a promotion like ECW? 

As some of you know, in addition to writing about wrestling here, I also periodically review music over at Inside Pulse. Normally, I never like to mingle the two. But recently I was thinking about wrestling-themed music releases. On normal circumstances, music themed from wrestling doesn’t really work as regular music for me. There are old WWF themes that I love, but I would never put them on my iPod or anything. There is one exception to that, though. In 1998 ECW released their hopefully-titled Extreme Music, Volume One. Mostly comprised of cover versions of ECW theme songs, this album has the kind of replay value that most other wrestling-related music never reaches.

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In his book Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman makes brief mention of the wrestling/heavy metal cross pollination and gives props to Extreme Music for the quality of its covers. Two of the heaviest hitters cover Metallica. Most are familiar with Motorhead’s version of “Enter Sandman”. That’s right, The Sandman beat HHH to the punch in having a Motorhead theme. This version still makes the rounds on YouTube to OG metalheads who weren’t familiar with ECW, it seems. Lemmy’s vocals add a little crunch and grime to the most radio-polished of Metallica’s early work, which serves them well. The prayer in the bridge sounds particularly sinister with Lemmy’s whiskey-tinted growl. However, the riff loses a little luster with Motorhead’s more stripped down guitar attack; a lot of James Hetfield’s signature fatness and depth in his rhythm playing gets aggregated into a grungy mess. Also covering early Metallica are their old buddies in Anthrax, this time tackling “Phantom Lord”. This was actually a B-side to the “Inside Out” import single they had released that year, so ECW just got the leftovers. Still, it’s a smart move for Anthrax to take on a track from Metallica’s early fantasy-lyric-laden thrash days. Definitely something more up Anthrax’s alley, and they go at it with full force and a stripped down production that gives it the immediacy and tone of an old vinyl 7-inch. This one was one that I think got cycled around a few different ECW people but it represented Mike Awesome on the album.

Other metal legends get covered to more mixed results. Muscadine (a side project of psych-folk solo artist Jonathan Wilson) do a lackadaisical cover of AC/DC’s “Big Balls”, the inimitable theme song of Balls Mahoney. Rather than attempt to mimic the late great Bon Scott’s voice, a fool’s errand for anyone including Brian Johnson himself, Wilson adopts the bored ennui of a joyless socialite and delivers all the ballroom puns as deadpan as Steven Wright himself. It’s an interesting choice, and in some ways I might even prefer that version. Rob Van Dam’s theme of “Walk” by Pantera gets a much less capable remake, by the Rhode Island band Kilgore. While they get brownie points for naming their band after a Kurt Vonnegut character, they do no justice to the Pantera original. While I certainly grasp that not just anyone can shred like Dimebag, the solo in Kilgore’s version is completely half-assed and lacking any any fretboard pyrotechnics. Even the uneven phrasing that Phil Anselmo deploys in the original is evened out by Kilgore’s frontman. If their intent was to turn one of the all time classic grind anthems into a radio-friendly unit shifter, Kilgore succeeded. Justin Credible wasn’t one of the most beloved ECW workers by any stretch but quite a few people seemed to be enamored with “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck”, by industrial cult-favorites Prong. While Kilgore did “Walk” a disservice by polishing a gritty classic, Australian band Grinspoon actually put their stamp on “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck” by not attempting to imitate Tommy Victor’s grunting vocal style. In its place the clanky industrial of Prong’s original turns into a pop-metal gem.

Speaking of Pantera: before the formation of Damageplan, Dimebag Darrell, Vinnie Paul, and Rex Brown splintered off from Anselmo to form the side project Tres Diablos, featuring Dime on vocals. Their sole recorded work was their reworking of “Heard it On The X” by ZZ Top, representing Francine on this CD. Think the southern-fried version of thrash favored by bands like Alabama Thunderpussy and REO Speeddealer and you’ve got an idea of what these Cowboys From Hell got to do when they let their Texas roots show. It fit them well and it’s a shame that they never recorded any more tunes in that vein before moving on to more butt-metal pastures. Another 90s band goes back even further than ZZ Top, as Monster Magnet covers The MC5’s classic “Kick Out The Jams” for Axl Rotten. Monster Magnet’s syrupy stoner-metal style doesn’t quite jibe with the proto-punk of MC5, but it’s a hard song to get wrong (even Presidents of the United States of America did it well, albeit by changing the lyrics and speeding it up to double time).

One last cover on this album is the standout track: as given to Bam Bam Bigelow, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden fame does a take on The Scorpions’ “The Zoo”. Trent Reznor famously said of Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” “It doesn’t belong to me anymore,” and that’s how I feel about The Scorp’s tale of debauchery and fear at Berlin’s Banhof Zoo. It might have come from a personal place for them, but where it was all cheese metal sheen in the original, Bruce amplifies the bluesy swing in the riff and unleashes the voice, his unparalleled bleacher-reaching howl over the chorus. Klaus Meine has a similarly big voice but when it comes to metal vocals, you DON’T win that arms race with Bruce fucking Dickinson. Without having to compete with the riffage in Maiden, and able to go back to the blues roots that all NWOBHM heavyweights sprung from, Bruce sounds like he’s having unadulterated fun on this track, and it must be heard.

Of course not all the songs on this record are covers. White Zombie’s “El Phantasmo and the Chicken Run Blast-O-Rama (Wine, Women, and Song remix)” was Lance Storm’s theme for years. It originally appeared on their remix album Supersexy Swingin’ Sounds, and if you’re familiar with any of the electronic-influenced remixes of Rob Zombie’s music, you know about where this one stands. It’s still one of the standout tracks from the 90s classic Astrocreep 2000, so it comes off well here. Megadeth chimed in with an instrumental version of their track “Trust” for Jerry Lynn. I actually prefer this instrumental version to the original. While the original has a very different tone, with Dave Mustaine singing about “my body, your body” and just generally trying to sound intimate (and Mustaine trying to be sexy is not a mental image I’m comfortable with AT ALL), the instrumental reveals the guitar track that sounds like a score for an epic battle in a fantasy film.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the bookends to this album, Harry Slash & The Slashtones originals. “This Is Extreme!” is the ECW Theme song any real ECW fan remembers well, and it serves as an intro here much as it did on Hardcore TV. It’s a great atmospheric track but without the images of Tommy Dreamer waffling Raven with a chair and the like it doesn’t have the same effect. Sabu’s “Huka Blues” theme closes out the album. The Arabian vibe, the haunting saxophone, and the monster-plod riff all play together really well, making one of the very scarce original theme songs in ECW their best (I’d take this any day over “Total Elimination”). That even today Bully Ray’s TNA theme sounds like a mashup of his old Dudleyz theme and “Huka Blues” speaks to the lasting influence of Harry Slash’s original.

So there you have it. Twelve songs from ECW during its early days of PPV and expanded TV presence. A few years later, they followed up with the much less interesting Extreme Music Vol. 2: Anarchy Rocks, but that one was mainly filled with drab nu-metal that didn’t correspond with most ECW entrance themes. Not much of ECW’s side merchandise was worth its salt (I’m thinking here of their terrible video games and hideous action figures) but Extreme Music, Vol. 1 tied into the excellent musical tradition that ECW brought to North American wrestling and cemented its place as the only wrestling album worth listening to, in my book.

If you’re wrestling history buff scour YouTube you can find original Wrestlemania downloads up. The super old school broadcast.

In hindsight it’s pretty rough as Lord Alfred Hayes looked really uncomfortable in his role as a…whatever the hell they used him for. I love how everyone called Gorilla Monsoon “Gino” as well since that was probably what they all called him off air.

If you’ve never seen the original, full-of-kinks broadcast it’s worth the two hours to see WWF in its mega-event infacy.

Now for the important stuff, it time for the Princess to prove that she runs the Castle.

As loving as my family is we’re equally competitive and somehow the heir to the throne has convinced himself that he can beat my time this year in one of the triathlons we are competing in. Silly youth.

And naturally Mr. Princess wants in as well (and will quickly get left as he can’t swim as well and swimming 9/10th of a mile in open water is very tough).

Anyway I wanted to do some different music for my training. I wanted to do about 90 minutes of WWF entrance music. I have a few that I want on there like “The Game” and “I Walk Alone” and “Metalingus” and of course the Ultimate Warrior theme. But otherwise I’m open and looking for suggestions. Help me!

After re-watching the Haku/Race match from the ’90 Rumble (as reviewed by ’12 Scott Keith), I realized that at least 5 wrestlers have used “The Great Gate of Kiev” as a theme song: Race, Haku, Duggan, Savage and Lawler.  What other songs can you think of that have been recycled?  I can name the following:
Generic Japanese Song (WWF): Orient Express, Bull Nakano and Aja Kong
Real American (WWF): Hogan, Orndorff, Patterson/Brisco and the US Express
Generic Metal Song: Blitzkrieg, Bunkhouse Buck
This list must be incomplete.

Yeah, WCW used to recycle the shit out of their music.  The Hollywood Blondes theme became Austin’s theme, and then became Greg Valentine’s and a few others.  WWE famously turned the Patriot’s song into Kurt Angle’s.  The Hardy Boyz and Holly Cousins’ music are both public domain pieces that were kicking around for years before and can generally be heard on Spike TV’s commercials among other places.  Both are generally used in those “World’s Wildest Police Chases” shows.  There’s many, MANY other examples, though, because it’s an easy way to save money in the days before selling songs on Itunes became yet another revenue stream. 

After re-watching the Haku/Race match from the ’90 Rumble (as reviewed by ’12 Scott Keith), I realized that at least 5 wrestlers have used “The Great Gate of Kiev” as a theme song: Race, Haku, Duggan, Savage and Lawler.  What other songs can you think of that have been recycled?  I can name the following:
Generic Japanese Song (WWF): Orient Express, Bull Nakano and Aja Kong
Real American (WWF): Hogan, Orndorff, Patterson/Brisco and the US Express
Generic Metal Song: Blitzkrieg, Bunkhouse Buck
This list must be incomplete.

Yeah, WCW used to recycle the shit out of their music.  The Hollywood Blondes theme became Austin’s theme, and then became Greg Valentine’s and a few others.  WWE famously turned the Patriot’s song into Kurt Angle’s.  The Hardy Boyz and Holly Cousins’ music are both public domain pieces that were kicking around for years before and can generally be heard on Spike TV’s commercials among other places.  Both are generally used in those “World’s Wildest Police Chases” shows.  There’s many, MANY other examples, though, because it’s an easy way to save money in the days before selling songs on Itunes became yet another revenue stream. 

After re-watching the Haku/Race match from the ’90 Rumble (as reviewed by ’12 Scott Keith), I realized that at least 5 wrestlers have used “The Great Gate of Kiev” as a theme song: Race, Haku, Duggan, Savage and Lawler.  What other songs can you think of that have been recycled?  I can name the following:
Generic Japanese Song (WWF): Orient Express, Bull Nakano and Aja Kong
Real American (WWF): Hogan, Orndorff, Patterson/Brisco and the US Express
Generic Metal Song: Blitzkrieg, Bunkhouse Buck
This list must be incomplete.

Yeah, WCW used to recycle the shit out of their music.  The Hollywood Blondes theme became Austin’s theme, and then became Greg Valentine’s and a few others.  WWE famously turned the Patriot’s song into Kurt Angle’s.  The Hardy Boyz and Holly Cousins’ music are both public domain pieces that were kicking around for years before and can generally be heard on Spike TV’s commercials among other places.  Both are generally used in those “World’s Wildest Police Chases” shows.  There’s many, MANY other examples, though, because it’s an easy way to save money in the days before selling songs on Itunes became yet another revenue stream. 

After re-watching the Haku/Race match from the ’90 Rumble (as reviewed by ’12 Scott Keith), I realized that at least 5 wrestlers have used “The Great Gate of Kiev” as a theme song: Race, Haku, Duggan, Savage and Lawler.  What other songs can you think of that have been recycled?  I can name the following:
Generic Japanese Song (WWF): Orient Express, Bull Nakano and Aja Kong
Real American (WWF): Hogan, Orndorff, Patterson/Brisco and the US Express
Generic Metal Song: Blitzkrieg, Bunkhouse Buck
This list must be incomplete.

Yeah, WCW used to recycle the shit out of their music.  The Hollywood Blondes theme became Austin’s theme, and then became Greg Valentine’s and a few others.  WWE famously turned the Patriot’s song into Kurt Angle’s.  The Hardy Boyz and Holly Cousins’ music are both public domain pieces that were kicking around for years before and can generally be heard on Spike TV’s commercials among other places.  Both are generally used in those “World’s Wildest Police Chases” shows.  There’s many, MANY other examples, though, because it’s an easy way to save money in the days before selling songs on Itunes became yet another revenue stream. 

After re-watching the Haku/Race match from the ’90 Rumble (as reviewed by ’12 Scott Keith), I realized that at least 5 wrestlers have used “The Great Gate of Kiev” as a theme song: Race, Haku, Duggan, Savage and Lawler.  What other songs can you think of that have been recycled?  I can name the following:
Generic Japanese Song (WWF): Orient Express, Bull Nakano and Aja Kong
Real American (WWF): Hogan, Orndorff, Patterson/Brisco and the US Express
Generic Metal Song: Blitzkrieg, Bunkhouse Buck
This list must be incomplete.

Yeah, WCW used to recycle the shit out of their music.  The Hollywood Blondes theme became Austin’s theme, and then became Greg Valentine’s and a few others.  WWE famously turned the Patriot’s song into Kurt Angle’s.  The Hardy Boyz and Holly Cousins’ music are both public domain pieces that were kicking around for years before and can generally be heard on Spike TV’s commercials among other places.  Both are generally used in those “World’s Wildest Police Chases” shows.  There’s many, MANY other examples, though, because it’s an easy way to save money in the days before selling songs on Itunes became yet another revenue stream.