Our hard work paid off, as “Sandpaper” by Fozzy (featuring M. Shadows) was a success, spending twelve weeks in the Top 10 on XM Octane (wassup, Jose!) and was the perfect representation of the sound of our new record. We’d entitled it Sin and Bones, which Rich came up with when he sent a text describing how he was turning into “skin and bones” on a European tour, and autocorrect stepped in.
When it came time to do a video, I was having a problem figuring out how we could do one without Shadows, whose vocals were featured so prominently in the track. I had the idea of using the moving-camera-in-the-woods gimmick from Evil Dead to mask the fact he wasn’t there. Then Rich took things further by suggesting we do a full-on Evil Dead homage and found an old cabin in the middle of the woods outside of Atlanta with an adjacent creepy graveyard that we could use for the set. I called Sean McEwen, who had directed Albino Farm, and he wrote an excellent script treatment that perfectly fit the vibe we wanted.
Over the next two days, we shot a fittingly eerie short film featuring Sam Raimi’s moving-camera gimmick, hellacious demons attacking the cabin, Fozzy being possessed (Rich couldn’t get the white contacts we all were wearing into his eyes, so we just stuck his hair in his face), and satanic vines that molested us and caused our demise. It was an impressive piece of work (especially considering the budget we had) that got even better when Shadows called last-minute to say he wanted to be in the video.
Sean and Gargano went to his hood in Orange County to film him on a green screen so we could insert him into the video wherever we wanted. Shads only had a few hours to get everything done, so I got worried when Gargano called me to say there was a problem.
“Shadows refuses to film anything until he gets some red licorice.”
I knew Shads liked to chew on Red Vines licorice whenever his throat was sore, but he was only lip-synching for the video and I thought he was being a little bit of a prima donna with his request. But he was doing us a huge favor and I wanted him happy.
“Well, if he wants red licorice, then get him some red licorice, Paul.”
Gargano fired back that it wasn’t his job to drive around looking for licorice and said Shads would have to get it himself. I flipped out and told him to stop effin’ around, but he never replied. A few minutes later he sent me a picture of a pouting Shadows mid-tantrum with his face turned away from the camera and his arms crossed.
I couldn’t believe he was acting that way, but I continued blowing up Gargano’s phone, telling him to go get some damn Red Vines.
“Dammit, Gargano! Don’t blow this for us! Get him some fucking licorice!!”
The next text I got was a picture of the three of them laughing and giving me the finger. It was Boots all over again.
Shadows pouts as he waits for his red licorice during the green screen shoot for the “Sandpaper” video. I was totally buying into this rib, until I saw this pic and the slight curve of a smile on the side of Sean McEwen’s face.
Licorice or not, the “Sandpaper” video was also a success, amassing over a million views on YouTube and winning the Rebel Life Media award for Best Heavy Metal Video of 2012.
Now that we had a great video and were confident we’d made our best album ever, we were hoping that everyone else would agree. Our hard work was vindicated when Sin and Bones became the best-reviewed album of our career (esteemed English rock journalist Malcolm Dome called it a masterpiece), our biggest-selling record, and our highest-charting effort when it debuted at number one on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and cracked the Billboard 200 at number 143 (a first for us). It also opened the door to the biggest tour of our career, the 2012 Uproar Festival headlined by Shinedown and Godsmack.
While we’d played a few Uproar dates the year before, this time we were asked to headline the second stage for the entire six-week tour stretching from sea to shining sea, our first-ever full-length U.S. jaunt. We played thirty minutes a day and got a great reaction on most shows, especially in Indianapolis, where we had six circle pits and eight pairs of flashed tits. (That’s a total of sixteen boobies, by the way.)
Since our set was so short, we decided to adapt what I call The Queen at Live Aid Principle. Inspired by Queen’s legendary 1985 performance at Wembley Stadium in London (it’s been voted the greatest gig of all time), they stole the show with only a scant twenty-minute set filled with pure energy and less talk, more rock. It was all the time they needed and I wanted Fozzy to have the same seek-and-destroy attitude.
The Shinedown guys respected our work ethic and dug our sound and I spent most of my nights after the show riding around in golf carts with guitarist Zach Myers. He had a skeleton key that started the carts in all of the venues across the U.S. and we’d cruise the woods surrounding the amphitheaters, scouting out the hidden graveyards and secret streams, and searching the parking lots for stragglers.
We found some in Dallas when we saw two girls drinking in their car at two in the morning. I grabbed my artist’s laminate, walked up to their window, and tapped it with my finger.
The chick in the driver’s seat slowly rolled the window with a worried look on her face.
I flashed my laminate in her face and said, “Dallas Police. Are those open containers?”
She mumbled that they were, but they were waiting for her boyfriend to come get them and weren’t going to drive. I berated her for drinking in public and told her that she was in serious trouble with the law. While I was in mid-scold, a pickup truck pulled up and her lumberjack of a boyfriend unfolded out of the front seat, asking menacingly what was going on.
Paul Bunyan changed his tone when I flashed my laminate badge and said, “I think you should drop the attitude, son, and watch how you speak to the police. You don’t want to end up jail with these two, do you?”
He backed off immediately and began apologizing for his girl’s behavior. I confiscated the bottle of Jack they’d been sipping on and told the girls to get into the boyfriend’s truck.
“If you return to this car within the next twelve hours, it will be impounded and you will go directly to jail, do you understand?”
All three of them nodded their heads and promised they’d stay away. There was a new sheriff in town and I had the laminate to prove it.
In full costume at our Uproar Cop ’Stache Bash in Salt Lake City. Paulie is so froot he didn’t need a mustache, just a police hat. My mustache (if you can call it that) is real, BTW.
I had so much fun impersonating a cop (I think that’s illegal, right? Oops!) that I encouraged the whole tour to join in when Fozzy hosted the inaugural Cop ’Stache Bash (Duke’s idea), the best after-show party of the tour. Everyone was required to wear a mustache or grow one of their own (I did), and dress like a ’70s cop. There were gallons of red and blue vodka punch, donut holes, and a DJ that played nothing but disco.
The Bash was a huge success and afterward we were celebrating on our bus, when I glanced out the window and saw Rich approaching the front door. There was a partition between the driver’s area and the lounge, so I pulled down my pants and bent over to give him a surprise. I heard the sound of the sliding door opening, but Rich didn’t react. That confused me and I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t a giggle or at least a groan of disgust. Suddenly everybody in the lounge burst out laughing, and when I turned around, Rich was standing there with his pants down, eyes closed, and ball bag tucked between his legs, Silence of the Lambs style. We gasped in unison and hiked up our respective pants, realizing how close we’d come to my bare ass grinding into his naked nut sack. Ahhh, life on the road.
Uproar was another win for Fozzy and opened a lot of touring doors for us worldwide, especially in our biggest market, the UK. Dan DeVita booked us on a co-headlining tour with U.S. metallers Soil, who were fairly popular in England a few years earlier and were making their big return. As co-headliners, we had equal billing and equal set times, but insisted on goi
ng on before them even though we had a bigger name than they did in most of the markets. Our theory was that if we went on first, Soil’s fans would have to watch us even if they didn’t know who we were, which meant we would be playing to the maximum audience each night.
The Soil guys were great, which was lucky since we had the worst tour bus of all time. There had been a fuckup at the bus company and all that was available was a dark, depressing dirge of a coach that resembled a mortuary on wheels. It constantly reeked of cigarette smoke because the slovenly driver (who looked like the Rancor’s keeper) wouldn’t stop smoking no matter how many times we asked him not to. On top of that, the damn thing was FREEZING.
Many a night I shivered under the covers in my bunk, fully dressed with my hoodie up and a scarf around my neck as my breath plumed out of my mouth. I couldn’t even read a book because my hands got too cold if I took them out from under the blankets.
As bad as the bus was, our shows were awesome and we played to packed houses all across the country in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Brighton, where, much to my surprise, Rod Smallwood, the manager of Iron Maiden, came to see us. I’d known him for years and when he told me he was coming and asked what time we were on, I told him eight thirty P.M. even though we were on at eight forty-five. I figured a guy that busy would probably show up late and I didn’t want him to miss anything.
We played a cracking show that night and I scoured the audience, looking for Rod’s face the entire set. I didn’t see him and thought maybe he had jammed out on us, but minutes after the show was done, there was a knock on our dressing room door.
“Rod! I wasn’t sure you had made it.”
“Of course I made it. I told you I would, right? Did you think I was some kind of creep? You made me wait, though, I was here at eight fifteen, you wankers!” he replied crankily.
I asked him what he thought of the show and he looked at the shirt I was wearing with The Rev’s face, and Rich’s that boasted a ghost’s face, and said, “It was quite good, but you guys shouldn’t wear shirts with big white faces on them. They’re distracting.”
Not exactly the offer to tour with Iron Maiden I’d been hoping for, but I told him we’d make better fashion decisions the next time he came to see us.
—
The tour was winding down and we had just pulled up to the venue in Frankfurt, when I caught a whiff of fresh cigarette smoke drifting through my bunk. There must’ve been a vent in the driver’s area that connected to mine, because I could always smell it the minute he lit up. Cigarette smoke and cold temperatures are a singer’s worst enemy on tour and this fat-ass slob was responsible for both of them, even though we’d told him dozens of times to turn up the heat and to NOT SMOKE ON THE BUS!
I’d had enough of his disrespect and was sick of being diplomatic, so I stormed into the venue and straight over to where he was stuffing his chubby face with junk food.
“Hey, asshole! We’ve told you a dozen times on this tour that there is no smoking on the bus, but you won’t listen and I’m over it. If you light up one more time in there, I’m going to slap your fat face and shove that pack of cigarettes straight up your ass, you got it?”
It was quite gratifying to see Sin and Bones debut at number one on the Billboard Heatseekers chart . . . ahead of Volbeat no less. And I just noticed Florida Georgia Line is on there too!
The driver yammered an apology in his German accent and fled out of the room. I looked over and the Soil guys were staring at me wide-eyed in fear, with their knees pulled up to their chins.
“I promise I won’t smoke anymore either . . . and I don’t even smoke,” bassist Tim King whispered worriedly.
Old Habits Die Hard
With the Soil tour finished, Fozzy was done touring for a few months and since I had an open spot in my schedule, I called Vince to see if he was interested in having me back in the WWE from the Royal Rumble to WrestleMania.
“Contact HHH,” he answered. “He’s your man.”
“OK, but you’ll always be my man, Vince.”
There had been a gradual shift in hierarchy during the last few years as Vince was grooming HHH to take over the company after he was gone. I totally understood that, so I called Hunter and, to his credit, we made the deal for my return in about ten minutes. I would come back as a surprise entrant in the Rumble and continue on until WrestleMania.
Now that I was coming back to the WWE for a fourth run, I started thinking about what I could do to build up my return this time around. The vignettes heralding my previous entries had been so grandiose and classic, I wondered what I could do to top them. Not to mention I was famous for having the big buildups, so if any kind of mysterious vignettes aired, people would pretty much know they were for me.
So I started thinking it might be a good idea to go in the opposite direction and keep my return at the Rumble a complete surprise. But was that even possible in this day and age when everyone had a cell phone camera, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a big mouth? It seemed like a real long shot that my secret could remain under wraps for that long.
There was no reason to go train with Lance again as I’d only been away from the WWE for a couple months, but there were a few other projects to finish before I returned, the biggest being the web series I’d cowritten and cocreated called But I’m Chris Jericho!
BICJ was an idea that my collaborator Gary Rideout and I had come up with six years earlier when I did the play Opening Night in Toronto. The idea was to do a spoof of what I was really going through at the time, when I left wrestling and went to Hollywood to study acting. I started thinking what if Y2J was kicked out and blackballed from the wrestling business, forcing him to make a career change where he has to start at the bottom of an industry that couldn’t care less about who he was or what he’d accomplished in the past?
Gary and I wrote a couple sizzler scripts and pitched it around Hollywood in a few different incarnations for a year or two with no success, and I moved on to other projects. But Gary never gave up and called me toward the end of 2012 to tell me he’d sold the show (it had been so long that I asked him “what show?”) to Shaw Cable as a ten-episode web series. I was proud of his tenacity for sticking with the idea and was excited to show off my comedic skills.
We shot in Toronto and it wasn’t easy getting the ten episodes finished in five days, but the shows were so well written that the scenes flew by. We assembled a great cast that included acclaimed actors Scott Thompson from the Kids in the Hall (a comedic genius), Colin Mochrie from Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Andy Kindler from Everybody Loves Raymond, who played my bumbling agent. I loved the idea of Jericho being the straight man surrounded by a cast of idiots in a world where nothing goes right for him. It ended up being a legitimately funny (in my opinion) body of work and I was VERY happy with how it turned out. The episodes have over one million views and if you haven’t seen them, go check it out on YouTube or butimchrisjericho.com now. If you don’t laugh, I’ll refund the money you paid to watch it.
This is what I wore for the filming of But I’m Chris Jericho . . . during breaks.
After filming the final scene where I wore a French maid’s outfit, I drove straight to the airport (sadly, without the French maid outfit) to fly to Anaheim for the 2013 NAMM convention. NAMM stands for North American Music Merchants and this was an annual affair where the most famous musicians in the world gathered to do signings and shill for their respective endorsers. It was also a giant party and a chance to see all your friends from other bands who were on the road the majority of the rest of the year.
My signing was on Saturday in Anaheim and since the Royal Rumble was the next day and just a short flight away in Phoenix, NAMM was the perfect smokescreen to fool the fans into thinking I wouldn’t be there. Surprisingly, my return still hadn’t leaked online, which I considered a huge coup since wrestling websites had been
predicting the returns of John Morrison, Shelton Benjamin, and Carlito for weeks but hadn’t mentioned my name once. Plus, I’d been tweeting about my signings at NAMM on Saturday (which were legit) and Sunday (which were not), so the hellhounds had been thrown off the trail so far.
The NAMM party was in full swing and Shadows was also there for a signing, so after my appearances were finished, we headed out to the wilds of the OC to hang out with the other Avenged guys and some of their friends, including a stoic dude named Chris, who I renamed Graham. Not sure why; I guess he just looked like a Graham, ya dig?
I spent a large part of the night trying to convince Shads and Graham to go see Stryper, as I was stoked to see them again after joining them onstage the prior year to sing their version of the Scorpions’ “Blackout.” I’d written in my 1988 high school yearbook that someday I was going to join Stryper, and there I was some twenty-odd years later onstage, filling in for Michael Sweet as their lead singer. It was another awesome dream come true and I praised God for letting me have that moment.
But now that I’d had a few Yeah Boy!s, it was time to be professional and split back to the hotel, for I had my big Rumble return the next day and wanted to be well rested.
But on the car ride back to the Marriott, I decided for some reason that I wanted to kiss Graham on the lips. Why he needed a kiss from me I have no idea, but it made perfect sense at the time. Graham kept refusing, which only made me angrier and, considering I was the guy who’d once spent three hours trying to convince The Undertaker to let me kiss him on the lips in Tokyo (he eventually let me give him a peck on the cheek), I wasn’t about to give up that easily. We pulled into the parking lot of the hotel and I gave him one last chance to let me kiss him, but he refused again, so I got out of the car, pulled the driver’s door open, and started chasing him. We ran around the car a half dozen times like something from a drunken Three Stooges routine, except there were only two of us and Graham wasn’t drunk. Shadows was in the backseat laughing his ass off as Graham jumped back in the driver’s seat and locked the door. I jumped on the hood of the car (like the idiot in Victoria, British Columbia), screaming, “You WILL kiss me, Graham! You WILL kiss me!” as a crowd gathered around and hotel security wandered over to see what the problem was.
The Best in the World Page 38
