Goldie was probably making three hundred bucks a week and hanging out with herpes.
The $75,000 they signed us for was more like a loan. You don’t have to pay it back if you end up making less, but you won’t make a dime more until the record company starts seeing a return on their investment. Plus you also have to pay for the entire recording of the record out of that advance: studio time, producer, engineer, musicians, krell, everything. If a limo picks you up from the airport, your band is paying for it. If you order a hot dog with an exec at lunch, your band is paying for it. If you run out of toilet paper while you’re taking a dumpus, your band is paying for it.
After you finish the record, then it’s time to try and recoup, and that’s when the real work begins. Now, for all of you who think that when a band releases a record they’re automatically loaded, think again. So kids, get out your calculators and protractors and let Professor Jericho give you a math lesson.
Let’s say your record is released and sells for $10. As the band, you’ll get $1 per record sold. While you’re getting $1 per record, the record company is getting $5. If you sign for $50,000 and sell 10,000 records, the record company makes fifty grand and the band makes ten grand. The $10,000 you’ve made gets subtracted from the $50,000 they signed you for, and you still owe them $40,000 even though they’ve already made $50,000. You have to sell 50,000 albums to “pay back” the contract they signed you for.
Does that make any sense to you? No? Now you know how I feel.
Megaforce was owned by Jonny and Marsha Zazula. Jonny Z made a pretty big name for himself during the ’80s and now that he was returning to the music industry, he had decided that Fozzy was going to be the next big thing.
After we had signed the contract he looked us square in the eye and said, “Are you ready to become the next Metallica?”
The next Metallica?? Did he not realize we were a cover band wearing wigs and shit?
Rich and I smiled and nodded. “Uhh, sure.”
However, Jonny was adamant that Fozzy was going to become huge by playing covers, so we did what any self-respecting musician would do.
We shut up and took the cash.
Once we saw how motivated Jonny was to push Fozzy, Rich and I decided that we wanted to do something more original with the concept of only playing covers. First, we knew that we couldn’t continue as Fozzy Osbourne; the name was just too silly and we didn’t know what Ozzy’s camp would think of it. So we changed it to the Big City Knights, then to the Originals. But there was another group in the East End called the Originals, so we became Fozzy.
While we weren’t crazy about doing a covers record, it was what Jonny Z wanted, and we decided to do the best we could within those parameters. To distinguish Fozzy from the thousands of cover bands in the world, we came up with a twist. Being a huge fan of the Blues Brothers, Spinal Tap, and the Traveling Wilburys, Rich and I decided that all of us would adopt alter egos and play characters within the band.
I became Moongoose McQueen, the most pompous and arrogant lead singer of all time, and Rich morphed into Duke Larue, guitar hero extraordinaire. Our bass player, Dan Dryden, became Shawn Pop. When I asked him why, he said, “Because it’s Pawn Shop with the letters reversed,” and smiled proudly as if he had just cut the Gordian knot. Our other guitar player was a student of Rich’s named Ryan Mallam, who didn’t talk much. So we called him the Kidd and decided he had no social skills whatsoever and would remain eternally silent. Frank “Bud” Fontsere, the drummer, became K. K. LaFlamme, and the list was complete.
The backstory we concocted was that Moongoose and the Duke had been swindled by a dodgy record company into moving to Japan to make an album. While they were there, the company went out of business, which left them stranded and destitute, strangers in a strange land.
So they began recording demos that were subsequently sent all over the globe and snatched up by Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Krokus, et cetera. All of the supposed covers Fozzy were playing were really our own songs that were stolen from us while we were in Japan. Now, after twenty years, Fozzy had returned to the United States to reclaim their glory and their songs, playing them the way they were meant to be played.
We decided to stay in character at all times during interviews. When you were interviewing Fozzy, there was no Chris Jericho, only Moongoose McQueen, and in order to pull this off I took direct inspiration from Andy Kaufman and his Tony Clifton character. Clifton was an abrasive, horrible stand-up comedian who was actually Kaufman in disguise, although he would never admit to it.
Jonny Z loved the idea and asked what songs we’d be recording for the record. We told him we were thinking of doing Maiden, Priest, Ozzy, Scorpions, Dio …
Rich and I mimicking the Scorpions on set during the filming of Unleashed, Uncensored, Unknown in 2000. No idea why I’m wearing two kimonos.
“Dio?” he asked, his voice growing stern. “I don’t think you should do that. There’s a big Dio backlash throughout the United States right now. If you do a Dio song, there could be trouble.” What did he mean by a Dio backlash? Was there an angry mob roaming the countryside wielding pitchforks, ready to hang the Holy Diver along with anybody else who had the audacity to play one of his blasphemous songs?
Z sat back in his chair shaking his head and murmuring, “This could really derail the whole thing.”
But Dio backlash notwithstanding, Jonny was convinced that the combination of Jericho from the WWE and Rich from Stuck Mojo playing covers under alter egos would be huge. Megaforce kept throwing cash at us and decided that the backstory was so good that we needed to make a short film that would be used as an electronic press kit to promote the band. They gave us $100,000 and told us to show up in Orlando to film for two days. That was it—no script, no ideas, no nothing. So Rich, Willis, and I compiled a bunch of ideas into a bare skeleton of a script so we’d have something to film. The basic premise was that Fozzy had returned from Japan after twenty years to play their triumphant return concert at the Hard Rock Café in Orlando and the entire country was going nuts with anticipation.
We promoted the gig on the local rock station and discussed the trials and tribulations of being stuck in the Orient and the problems we faced as a band. We discussed our first guitar player, Chuck Berry (no relation), who found side work as a sumo wrestler even though he weighed only 145 pounds. Unfortunately, an actual sumo wrestler fell on top of him, crushing his hands forever, leaving us no choice but to fire him.
Then we discussed how Fozzy once got into trouble for using laser lights at a show. The beams were so strong that they blinded people in the crowd. Fozzy avoided a lawsuit by giving all of the injured people seeing-eye dogs. And not just any seeing-eye dogs—these beautiful specimens were so good that people wished they could be blinded so they could have one.
I called in some favors from some of my friends to give their testimonies of how Fozzy changed their lives. Zakk Wylde, Mike Portnoy, Sebastian Bach, and Dee Snider all spoke about the influence of Fozzy.
Zakk claimed that he’d auditioned for the band three times but never made it because his metal wasn’t up to snuff. The sting of our rejection led him to crack and heroin addiction. Portnoy talked about how K.K. influenced his drumming and his stick twirling technique. Sebastian said that whenever Fozzy came to town, groupies would welcome us with open arms and open legs.
But the coup de grâce was Dee Snider’s performance. I had seen the Behind the Music episode about Vanilla Ice, where he was explaining how he didn’t steal the bass line for “Ice Ice Baby” from Queen. Ice said, “Queen’s goes ‘dun dun dun dundundundun.’ ” Then he hummed the exact same bass line and said with a shit-eating grin, “Mine goes ‘dun dun dun dundundundun.’ It’s not the same thing.” Even though it was the exact same thing.
I called Dee and asked him if he’d seen the show. He had and was totally down when I explained that I wanted him to mimic that exact scene when explaining that he didn’t steal “Stay Hungry” from Fozzy.
He did this great bit in front of the Twin Towers where he said, “The A Tower and the B Tower have similarities, but they are completely different structures. That’s the same with our version of ‘Stay Hungry.’ Their song goes, ‘Stay hungry feel the fire,’ and my song goes, ‘Stay hungry feel the fire.’ Just like the Twin Towers are different, so are our versions of ‘Stay Hungry.’ ”
Another one of the stars of the documentary was our pig-faced mascot Arthur. During our very first rehearsal for Fozzy Osbourne, I found a pig mask on the floor of the studio and told Rich that the pig would make a great mascot for us, in the fine tradition of Iron Maiden’s Eddie and Dio’s Murray. The idea was that Arthur wasn’t a guy wearing a mask, but a human being stricken with swinus, a very rare disease that transforms the face of its victims into that of a pig. So we put Arthur in a Boy Scout outfit, gave him a metal hook for a hand, and voilà: instant mascot.
The director of the electronic press kit was Lawrence O’Flavin, whom we quickly renamed Lawrence Awful Haven. His sole claim to fame was making a Volkswagen commercial. Rich and I had specific ideas of what we wanted to do with the film, while Lawrence had his own thoughts. But he was so pompous and arrogant in conveying them that we totally ignored him, blowing off pretty much all of his suggestions. We ended up getting into a lot of disagreements about what was and what wasn’t funny, disagreements exacerbated by the fact that we had a much wider sense of humor than he did.
Take the famous Monty Python cheese skit, where an obsessed fromage aficionado names a staggering list of cheeses in one breath: “White Stilton, Danish Blue, Double Gloucester, Cheshire, Dorset Blue Vinney, Brie, Roquefort, Pont l’Évêque,” et cetera. Frank knew the entire bit by heart and decided that K.K. had worked in a cheese shop while stranded in Japan and would go off about how much he loved cheese and name them all. Rich and I thought it was hilarious, but O’Flavin wouldn’t have it.
“We’re not going to do that. It’s too esoteric for our demographic.”
Too esoteric for our demographic? We were the demographic!
After a giant fight the cheese bit stayed, but O’Flavin’s pretentiousness and incompetence continued when he set off $10,000 worth of pyro for a scene with no cameras rolling. Les Grossman was not happy and told him to fuck his own face.
Our Spinal Tap homage was turning into the real thing.
When it was all said and done, Fozzy—Unleashed, Uncensored, Unknown turned out better than it had any right to. MTV bought the rights to air the movie, and MuchMusic in Canada ran it a few dozen times as well. Zakk loved it and could quote most of it by heart and even turned Ozzy on to it. Sadly, Megaforce decided not to release it on DVD and it just kind of disappeared. A few years later I bought a DVD-making machine and made a thousand copies to sell on my own, not for the money, but for the fans who’d heard about it and had never gotten the chance to see it. I sold it until I was served a cease-and-desist order from Megaforce. If you’re a huge Fozzy fan (and who isn’t?) and you don’t have the DVD, I bet you can find it on eBay—or you can pick one up Sundays between 4 and 6 p.m., when I’m selling them from the back of my trunk on the corner of 53rd and 3rd. See ya then.
CHAPTER 8
Heeeeere’s Belding!
WrestleMania is the biggest show of the year for the WWE.
It’s the night when every performer vies to steal the show and where careers are made or broken. I would never be a true WWE Superstar until I had been a part of WrestleMania, and on April 2, 2000, I finally got my chance. My debut Mania match was a Triple Threat vs. Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit, in a Two-Fall match for both the Intercontinental and European titles. Angle had just arrived in the WWE a few months earlier and was getting a huge push by holding both titles. It was decided that Benoit would pin me to win the Intercontinental title in the first fall and I would pin him to win the European Championship in the second, resulting in Angle losing both of his titles without being beaten.
Even though I won a championship, my first WrestleMania was not a great experience. The crowd was dead, the match was mediocre, and I was still reeling from the realization that I had been kicked out of the main event.
How did that happen, you ask?
Well, nobody ever officially came out and told me that, but it didn’t take Robert Downey Jr. to deduce that something rotten had occurred in Stamford.
Here is the evidence. First, the original poster for the show featured four faces: The Rock, HHH, Big Show, and your fearless scribe.
When it was released I was so excited, I did the WrestleMania Dance (not to be confused with the Nitro Dance).
Here it was, my first WrestleMania, and my gorgeous mug was already plastered on the poster! The plan for the main event of Wrestle-Mania 2000 was a four-way match featuring a McMahon in every corner, each one representing a different wrestler. The problem was that all four of the faces on the original poster were in that match except for me. Then a few weeks before the show, my face was replaced in all of the promo material with Mick Foley’s (0 wins vs. Jericho), who was in the main event. So it’s not too far off to assume that at some point, I must have been slotted to be in that match, but because I wasn’t delivering the goods I was replaced by Mick ( 0– 5 against CJ).
It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Hanging with the Sebastian Bach band (including David Letterman drummer Anton Fig in the sweater) at the House of Blues on Sunset, a scant six hours before the call time for WrestleMania 2000 in Anaheim. Love my jean shorts.
* * *
In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m a weird cat. I need to feel challenged creatively and professionally in order to really deliver in the ring and on camera. Since I felt slighted with my Mania match, instead of getting a good night’s sleep before the big show, I went to see a Sebastian Bach concert at the House of Blues in L.A. and stayed up drinking until 4:30 in the morning. As I was going back to Anaheim, I passed a giant WrestleMania billboard on Sunset featuring the original Jericho-friendly artwork. That made me want to dive even further down a bottle of Crown Royal.
My match was well received by fans and critics, but I didn’t care for it at all. I felt the crowd response was lukewarm, and the three of us didn’t quite gel. It was a letdown, and for me, my first WrestleMania was a BombaMania.
After the show there were a bunch of random celebrities hanging around backstage making the scene. Jaleel White, a.k.a. Urkel, was hovering around telling anyone who would listen that his career was on the upswing and he had more work than he could shake a stick at. A very short stick, I assume. Also in attendance was Rob Reiner (who graciously accepted my Fozzy DVD, although I’m sure it met the same fate as the Schwarzenegger storyline I gave to Vince in Baltimore), Robert Sweet from Stryper (who gave me a framed collage of him playing drums, which was ironic since I once waited for hours to get a picture with him when I was seventeen), Wayne Brady, Dennis Miller, Dennis Hopper, Dennis Rodman, Dennis DeYoung, Dennis the Menace, Dennis Stratton, and, most important, DENNIS HASKINS.
Now, if you’re asking (a) why there were so many famous people named Dennis backstage at Mania or (b) who in the hell Dennis Haskins is, then keep reading, sport.
Dennis Haskins was the guy who played Mr. Belding, the principal from Saved by the Bell. He was also a huge WWE fan, albeit a strange one. Most people would say hi, shake hands, and move along, but Belding followed us around everywhere. In the arena, backstage, catering, crunking, what have you, Belding was there. I felt like Zach Morris trying to cheat in social studies with the amount of attention he was giving me. It seemed like Belding followed the WWE around like a Deadhead. We would show up in Nashville and bingo, there was Belding! I’d walk into the arena in Cleveland and biggity-bam, it was Belding! When I took my seat on a redeye from L.A. to NYC and turned to the passenger next to me, heeeeere’s Belding!
“Howya doing Chris?” he said with a nerdy grin.
I stuffed my head into a vomit bag and fell asleep.
The night after my Mania d
ebacle, I had a match against Eddy Guerrero. I loved Eddy like a brother, but I was praising the heavens above that the finish was Chyna turning on me, costing me the European title, and me ending up with him. I was never so happy to lose a title in my life, because it was finally the end of Chyna and Chris Jericho. Overall Chyna was a nice person and she worked hard, but we just didn’t get along. But as hard as it was working with Chyna, at least with her I was involved in a storyline. Now, without her by my side, I was dumped back into WWE purgatory. When I showed up in San Jose a month later and was told I was losing to the 450-pound Viscera, I decided it was time to talk to the boss.
One thing about Vince that was so different from WCW boss Eric Bischoff was that he was very accessible. He always made time to speak to his employees and knew the names of everybody on the crew from wrestlers to writers, cameramen to sound guys. All you had to do was knock on Vince’s door and if he had time, he would talk.
After our blowout in Tampa, I wasn’t as intimidated to talk to him as I was before—the worst thing that could possibly happen already did, and I had survived—so I went into his office and told him my concerns.
“Vince, I’ve been here for eight months, and besides the feud with Chyna, I haven’t really done much. I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels.”
He looked directly in my eyes and said, “We need to find a place for you.”
He then gave me some cryptic advice. He started talking about Bobo Brazil and what a great babyface he was and how he sold so well. Vince explained that the way a babyface got over was to sell, sell, and sell some more. I felt like Shelley “the Machine” Levine getting lectured by Alec Baldwin, but his point was loud and clear. Then he started talking about how King Kong Bundy’s work looked like shit and hurt like hell. It was a subtle message but as Mick (Winless Against Me) Foley had warned, my work was stiff and I needed to lighten up a bit.
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 7
