Tag Archives: Chris Jericho

From SummerSlam to the Uproar Festival, Jericho rocks the ring and stage

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With the release of Fozzy‘s new Sin and Bones album on Tuesday, the band’s inclusion on the Uproar Festival tour starting tomorrow and his match against Dolph Ziggler at SummerSlam on Sunday, it could easily be argued that Chris Jericho is the busiest man in the entertainment world right now. And that’s not even mentioning his weekly Rock of Jericho radio show, his best-selling books, his numerous TV appearances or his acting career. But for the next few months, Y2J’s focus will be on Fozzy, whose new album is above and beyond anything the band has previously released, proving that the satirical hair metal premise the band began with is long since gone. Before he hits the road for Uproar and challenges Ziggler at SummerSlam, Jericho takes a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture once again.

First of all, congratulations on the new Fozzy record. It’s definitely the band’s best album yet and it seems like I’m not the only one who feels that way.

Thanks, man. Yeah, it’s been totally cool to get a great response to a record we’ve spent so much time on. When it comes out and people say it’s your best work ever, give it ten out of ten and all this other sort of stuff, it’s a great reward for your psyche.

One of the things I really liked about it is has a darker feel to it, as well as a good bit of ’80s metal influence. From the Dexter-inspired “Dark Passenger” to Avenged Sevenfold‘s M. Shadows joining you on “Sandpaper,” how would you say that darker influence came about?

I had a bunch of lyrical ideas based around song titles, so I went backwards from there. Then when I finished all the lyrics, I realized there was kind of a dark tone to all of them. Rich [Ward, guitarist] had been writing a lot of riffs that were dark as well, so we decided we wanted to make a record similar to Metallica‘s Black Album, which was a very cohesive record that fit. Even though there was a lot of diversity on it, every song kind of lead into the next and had the same tone and vibe to it. That’s what we wanted with Sin and Bones, and I think we achieved that. There’s a lot of diversity on the record, but it all fits into the same mold and the vibe is more of a darker type of tone.

I’m a big fan of Dexter and I just loved the concept of the Dark Passenger that he talked about. I don’t know if the song is about Dexter per se, but it’s definitely the same vibe, having this Dark Passenger inside that caused him to commit these unspeakable acts. I get a lot of ideas from TV and those type of things. I wrote another song called “Walk Amongst the Dead” that’s an iTunes B-side that’s based on The Walking Dead, a zombie type of thing. But it didn’t start out that way. I was thinking about Anthrax‘s Among the Living and I thought, “What about ‘Among the Dead’?” Then, “What about, ‘Walk Amongst the Dead’?” Then I started writing it and was like, “Wait a minute. This totally should be about zombies, so I’ll go there.”

But all my lyrics were based around the song titles. The song title “Spider in My Mouth,” I read that in a Stephen King book years ago and had the thought process of, “What would it be like if somebody woke up with a spider in their mouth?” I thought it would be a cool song title, but it wasn’t really about waking up with a spider in my mouth. It started there and went from there.

You’ve clearly always been inspired by ’80s metal singers, but your singing on this album is much more accomplished than on previous Fozzy albums. Did you take vocal lessons before recording this album? Were there particular singers you drew inspiration from on Sin and Bones?

I took singing lessons a few years ago, but not recently. I’m not just inspired by ’80s singers. I like Bruce Dickinson, but I’m also a big fan of Matt Shadows from Avenged Sevenfold. But I’m not trying to emulate anyone in particular because everyone has his own voice and I don’t want to sound like anyone else. I just open my mouth and sing and that’s the voice that comes out.

Fozzy started out as a fun thing for you and your friends in Stuck Mojo, but there have been some lineup changes since then. Aside from you and Rich, who else is in the band now?

The three guys that have been in the band the whole time are myself, Rich and Frank Fontsere, our drummer. Billy Grey, who was with us in 2002, rejoined the band for Chasing the Grail. Then we got Paul Di Leo on bass, who is just a monster player. You can hear how the bass has changed from Chasing the Grail to Sin and Bones since he’s become a primary element of the band. I think adding him to the band and his performance is one of the highlights of Sin and Bones as well.

As you’re in-ring dealings with Dolph Ziggler have heated up over the past few weeks leading into your match at SummerSlam this Sunday, we’ve seen you return to your Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rolla persona. The timing is good since you’ll be touring with your rock ‘n’ roll band over the next few months. Was that a conscious thing or did that all happen by chance?

It just kind of happened organically. The fans decide what they want to see and over the last three or four months they’ve been really cheering for me. I had a good three-year run as a bad guy, but after a while what’s bad is good and people just started enjoying my work and cheering for me. So I decided to just go with it and not fight it. It’s good to be out on the road with Fozzy and have my character in WWE be a good guy. Even though I keep them completely separate, a lot of times when you’re the bad guy people think you’re an asshole all the time. So it’s nice to be a nice, fun guy for once after all these years of being a jerk.

You’re one of the few wrestlers who can successfully go from being a heel to getting the fans back on your side pretty quickly. Why do you think you’re able to do that when many wrestlers are either good or bad and can’t convince the fans they are capable of changing?

I’ve been wrestling for 22 years, so I just have the experience and know how to do it. There are subtle intricacies that you need to do to make both things work in different ways. But the experience makes it a lot easier.

When you made your WWE return several months ago, you debuted the latest in your wrestling ensemble, which is your elaborately lit jacket. Will we be seeing that at the Uproar Festival or is that reserved strictly for wrestling?

No, that’s only for wrestling. If I wore that on stage, I’d also have to wear tights and kneepads, and just wouldn’t look right.

There are a lot of other bands on this tour whose music has been used by WWE and other wrestling promotions. Are there any particular bands you’re looking forward to seeing and touring with?

I’m a big Shinedown fan. I love Papa Roach, so I’m excited to see those two bands and Godsmack, obviously. It’s going to be fun and we’re excited. We did a tour last year with Avenged Sevenfold and Bullet For My Valentine, which are two of my all-time favorite bands. But this one will be fun and it’s our first full-fledged coast-to-coast tour in the States and it’s one of the biggest tours of the summer. So to be part of it is huge for us and we’re excited. We’re ready to go out there and tear people’s heads off and be one of the best bands every night and be one of the most popular bands every night. That’s what our  mission is.

I interviewed Rick DeJesus from Adelitas Way a few days ago and he mentioned some comments you had made about his band on Twitter. Is there perhaps a friendly rivalry developing between the two bands?

No, I wasn’t saying anything about them. I just wanted more of the Twitter followers they had. I just said I wanted Fozzy to have more Twitter followers than Adelitas Way. And now we do, so there you go. I hope I didn’t hurt his feelings.

I think it just encouraged him to step things up on this tour. But this has been a big week for you. The album was released on Tuesday, the tour starts tomorrow and you’re wrestling Ziggler on Sunday at SummerSlam. Regardless of the outcome of that match, when do you think we might see you in the ring again? Do you have plans to keep touring after Uproar ends?

We’ve got tours booked all the way up until next March, so we have a busy schedule coming up. You can’t do both at the same time, so we’ll see. I’m sure I’ll come back to WWE at some point, but until then I’ll be on the road with Fozzy.

You wear many hats these days, and they all seem to fit equally well. But who would win in a fatal four-way between Jericho the wrestler, Jericho the rock star, Jericho the radio show host and Moongoose McQueen?

Well, Moongoose McQueen dies years ago, so he wouldn’t be much of a factor. So it would have to be a three-way draw.

For more information, go to www.fozzyrock.com.

Chris Jericho discusses his future with WWE and Fozzy

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Though he’s accomplished pretty much all there is to accomplish in wrestling, Chris Jericho has come up short in his two recent attempts to take the WWE Championship from CM Punk. While the argument could still be made that Jericho is, as he likes to say, “the best in the world at what I do,” it’s hard to say what is next for him in WWE. But for someone who has transcended wrestling to find success with his rock band Fozzy, last year’s Dancing with the Stars and other realms of pop culture, it’s hard to imagine Jericho having a hard time bouncing back from these losses in some way. A showman in every sense of the word (have you seen the jackets he wears to the ring now?), Jericho is not lacking when it comes to entertainment value. With today’s announcement that Fozzy will be on this year’s Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Tour alongside the likes of Shinedown, Adelitas Way and In This Moment, we know Jericho will be away from the ring during August and September. But in this Wrestling with Pop Culture interview, he talks about his jacket, his band and his future with WWE.

Courtesy WWE

Since your return to WWE, you’ve been coming to the ring in an eleborately lit jacket. How much did Dynamo from The Running Man inspire your new jacket?

It’s funny because people say Dynamo and I guess David Hasselhoff wore a jacket similar to that when the [Berlin] Wall got torn down in ’89. But I didn’t know about any of those. The only thing that inspired me was the guy who made it has also done a lighted jacket for Alicia Keys. It wasn’t as extensive as mine, but I had the idea of this wall-to-wall spikes and studs, so we combined the two and that’s how it all came to be.

The jacket was kind of the culmination of the buildup for your return, following a series of mysterious vignettes over the course of several weeks. There seemed to be a good bit of intentional misdirection with those vignettes, implying that maybe they were signalling the return of the Undertaker or Kharma. What was the reason for all the mystery?

A lot of times you just put together some mysterious vignettes. Then it’s like, “Well, what do people take out of that?”. It’s not like we sat down and said, “OK, I want this to be that. Put this right here and put that right here.” You just have to do something vague, but with a point and a purpose. People take what they want out of it and they found a lot of clues that didn’t exist. There’s a lot of things that they’re seeing that aren’t really there.. It’s like the “Paul is dead” theory – Paul McCartney‘s dead, here’s the album cover, here are the clues. But there are really no clues, it’s just people’s imagination. People still ask me to this day, “Who was the girl?” There was no girl. It was just something we put in there to make it creepier.

Why did you have these creepy vignettes, then have this kind of goofy return where you came out with the jacket and didn’t speak for a few weeks?

I don’t know if goofy’s the right word. What it was was, the thing people wanted to see me do the most when I came back was talk. So what if I just don’t talk? What if I just do the exact opposite of what people want? What if I just keep smiling and leading cheers and never saying anything? How will people react? And each week people got angrier and angrier to the point that they were just like, “Screw this guy. Enough of this guy already.”

Courtesy WWE

I wanted something dark because the concept of it was tying into 2012 being the end of the world as you know it, because we’ve been hearing that for so long. As you drive down the road, different turns and things come up that you morph and move with it. I never planned on coming back with black makeup or anything. It was just something different to get people thinking and wondering, “What is this all about? What is the end of the world as you know it?” Which was me coming back and taking back what is mine, which led to CM Punk and all the other people that copied me.

So it wasn’t all that different from your WWE debut with the Y2J thing.

Well, that was the Millennium Man. So it wasn’t really the end of the world, it was more about me coming to save WWE. This time I was coming to take back what was mine and end it. Just something to get people talking.

I interviewed you a few years ago after a Fozzy show just days before you defeated The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin  to become the Undisputed WWE Champion. That’s one of many things you’ve accomplished in wrestling, but you’ve also accomplished quite a bit outside of wrestling. Is there anything in WWE or elsewhere you have yet to accomplish that you’d like to?

It’s not like I sit down and go, “There’s, like, 100 different things I want to do.” It’s all about what comes up and what interests me that I think I can accomplish. If you look at my track record, it’s all art. I’m an artist and I like being creative. When I was 12, I wanted to be in a band and I wanted to be a wrestler. Those were my two dreams and wrestling took off first, but I continue to play and write music. When Fozzy started in ’99, that was this other passion that I have. Now that Fozzy’s gotten to a higher level, you can kind of see lightning striking again. I’m very fortunate.

Dancing came from that, too. Dancing is creative, it’s show business. Writing is that, acting is that, radio is the same thing. If there’s something exciting and creative that I want to do, I’m going to do it. I’ve turned down a lot of stuff because I can’t do everything. So I just try and concentrate on doing the projects that I want to do. There’s also a certain standard of quality that Chris Jericho has established, so I have to make sure the people that enjoy what I do won’t be let down. I can’t halfass anything.

I ran into your Fozzy bandmate Rich Ward recently and he mentioned that you guys are working on a new album. When will that be out?

That will be out at the end of August and it’s the first record on our new label, Century Media, which is the first major label we’ve ever been with. We’ve kind of carved out this cool little niche where we play very heavy, but very melodic, music. It’s something a lot of bands don’t do now. It’s almost like Metallica combined with Journey or something like that. We’ve really gained a big fan base from that and we’re just continuing down that path and expanding upon that. I think people will be blown away by it. I know we are. We’re really excited about it.

Courtesy WWE

Fozzy originally had a back story about bands like Dio, Twisted Sister and Iron Maiden stealing your songs in the ’80s. Why did you decide to drop that gimmick and reveal who was really in the band?

It was just a fun thing we were doing at the time, almost like Pantera started out as a different band. After a couple of records, we realized we really enjoyed doing it and decided we should take it in a different direction. And that’s what we did. In the beginning the band was a cool, fun hobby. Then we did All That Remains, which was all our own stuff and our own personalities and characters and lives and that’s when it really started getting to the next level.

Having come up short on your two attempts to win the WWE title from CM Punk, what are you plans in WWE going forward?

I have a lot of ideas. That’s one of the reasons I came back was because I had this idea with Punk. I think people make a lot of judgments and read a lot of stuff on the Interweb that they choose to believe, but until you actually see what I have in my head you’ll just have to follow along and enjoy the ride. Don’t analyze it, just enjoy it.

For more information, go to www.chrisjericho.com.