Episode Fifteen
Holy cow! In 50-odd weeks of this malarkey, we’ve made it this far! That’s like 1.363636363636364 episodes per month! How do we do it? We are masters of efficiency! And we are very handsome! It’s so easy when everyone’s trying to please us, baby…
Uh…
In one corner we have Dan talking about some his favourite wrestling and music cross-overs! In the other, we have Matt talking about his favourite academia and music connections! We are totally crossed-out and criminally over-connected!
If you’re not checking this playlist, you’re doing this wrong!
Dan’s Notes
Punk and wrestling crossovers
Bob Mould in late WCW
World Championship Wrestling was in a weird place at the cusp of the millenium, before its ultimate demise and sale to the WWE after the heady years of “the Monday Night Wars”. Under the creative direction of Vince Russo and his “Crash TV” artistic credo a lot of wild things went down, and during that time a lifelong wrestling fan from the Twin Cities named Bob Mould who was looking for a little direction after the breakup of his band was brought in first as a consultant and then writer/producer to help provide a young and hip perspective during the company’s attempts to regain their heights of success from the earlier part of the late 90’s. I know that a day job is a day job, but I still find it totally wild that the person behind some of my favorite thoughtful melodic punk songs of his era had a small hand behind the scenes during the wild and wacky waning years of WCW. The company had definitely sunk a bit at that point since their heyday of 1996 to 1998 when they were actively challenging the WWE for dominance of the industry and at this point were aiming squarely for the lowest common denominator while also trying pull in new eyes through pop culture tie-ins with Insane Clown Posse, KISS (who paid them to dress wrestler Dale Torborg up in a variation of Gene Simmons’ onstage getup and facepaint and bill him as “The KISS Demon”) and the movie Ready To Rumble (by making Rumble star David Arquette the company’s World Champion for a brief time). Oh yeah The Misfits (sans Danzig in the Michael Graves era) were also there for a bit accompanying luchador Vampiro – who had grown up a fan of the band as a young punk rocker in Thunder Bay ON before moving to Mexico to learn that country’s high flying grappling styles and taking the Lucha Libre scene by storm and later joining the WCW roster to break into the US market. Mould’s talk of his time working there usually lead to stories of him more being the one invariably trying to pass along whatever potential Russo-penned storylines that late era-Hulk Hogan was destined to reject with a resounding “Doesn’t work for me, brother….”, than any sort of real backstage power figure of any kind, but still a pretty cool little side gig to have as a fan while taking a break from the music industry, and a neat little crossover between the punk rock and wrestling worlds.
Andy Williams, The Butcher Of Buffalo
You know how sometimes you may start out in one creative milieu but some force or other drives you to maybe try something else out for awhile, only to not get back to the other thing years later? When aspiring Buffalo pro wrestling student Andy Williams injured his knee and picked up a guitar, a new path opened up that would still lead him to the ring, but first to a different sort of stage. He and a few Buffalo pals founded metalcore heroes Every Time I Die in 1998 during his break from in-ring training and released nine full length albums over the course of a little over two decades, though towards the end of the 2010s Williams started contemplating a possible return to the ring during his off time between ETID tours, and the band even started featuring wrestling matches featuring friends from around Buffalo and beyond during their “Merry TIDmas” holiday charity shows. During the latter half of the last decade Williams joined forces with longtime wrestler and trainer Jesse Guillmet and started making appearances around the indie wrestling scene with him as tag team The Butcher And The Blade. The band drew the attention of the budding All Elite Wrestling and were soon appearing on TV regularly, primarily as in-storyline goons for a variety of heel characters and with Williams aka “The Butcher Of Buffalo” dressed in biker-esque attire while usually exaggeratedly chewing on a pork chop or comically large sandwich while making his way to the ring. The role of “enhancement talent” is an important one in the world of pro wrestling and B & B have occupied that role for a large part of their All Elite run thus fa, with Williams organizing tours around wrestling appearances and balancing both until Every Time I Die ultimately called it quits in 2022 due to alleged tensions between their vocalist Keith Buckley and most of the rest of the band. While Andy Williams hasn’t joined either post-ETID project (the Keith Buckley-fronted Many Eyes or the rest of the band’s new project Better Lovers who released a pretty solid full length last year), he has continued to appear on AEW’s three weekly TV shows regularly, even if it is in the capacity of storyline hired goon.
Brody King/Gods Hate
Sometimes there are people who seem to function as the unofficial ambassadors between various scenes, and Brody King is someone who serves that function in the worlds of hardcore music and professional wrestling, and has also had a hand in one of the most popular reality TV competition shows of the past decade or so in his day job era. For the past decade or so he has been the frontman of SoCal moshy hardcore heroes God’s Hate, who have been growing in popularity steadily in recent years after their pretty great self-titled album on Closed Casket Activities in 2021 and a string of appearances on high profile events like the annual Sound And Fury Fest in Los Angeles. On top of that he has been a professional wrestler working for New Japan Pro Wresting, Ring Of Honor, and now AEW as part of the House Of Black faction. Also as a side note on top of all of that, his day job prior to becoming a full time wrestler and hardcore frontman was working onset as part of the lighting crew for various TV productions like The Newsroom on HBO and several seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. On top of that, through King’s involvement with AEW some of his bandmates have been getting involved with the wrestling scene in their own ways as his Gods Hate-mates Colin and Taylor Young have written and performed entrance music for House Of Black as well as other AEW wrestlers like Wardlow, The Gunn Club and Danhausen, and AEW recently released a 12” record compiling various songs used as entrance music by House Of Black, including tracks by Gods Hate and related bands like Twitching Tongues and Deadfuckingbody.. King and Danhausen were also notoriously part of a backstage crew of straight edge hardcore enthusiasts who gravitated to the orbit of CM Punk during his stint in AEW. CM Punk is a whole other can of discourse worms for another podcast that is not our own haha, but still something I thought deserved at least a mention. As far as my side of the topic this week goes, Brody King is one of those rare folks taking on both music and wrestling with equal fervour at the same time, and integrating bits of both into his presentation of the other and one of my favorite current in-ring performers currently so I had to include him on my list.
Jeff Cannonball – Altered Boys, Gary The Squirrel and deathmatches
The first time I was exposed to the work of Jeff Cannonball, it was in his capacity as backing musician to a squirrel puppet voiced by a 2000s underground comedy podcast icon, that being Gary The Squirrel voiced by Tom Scharpling of The Best Show, on a 7” of songs performed by the squirrel puppet in question as a fundraiser for the show. Little did I know that the bassist from the squirrel puppet’s backing band was a longtime stalwart of the more underground end of the death match wrestling scene working for companies like the infamous Combat Zone Wrestling on top of playing in a killer garagey hardcore band with records on boutique labels like Deranged and Katorga works, and occasional collaborations with alt-comedy squirrel puppets. Cannonball’s wrestling is definitely part of the grittier end of an already pretty grimy and away-from-the-mainstream part of the indie wrestling scene. His matches are more likely to use metal chairs, light tubes and barbed wire than any sort of high flying acrobatic moves or intricate holds. The death match wrestling scene definitely skews closer to the grassroots end of the music scene a lot of the time in general, with it not uncommon for the audience to also be more into stuff like death metal and extreme music as well as the more visceral and bloody end of indie wrestling. Cannonball and his wife and fellow wrestler Terra Callaway have both also been very involved with fundraising and grass roots advocacy around mental health issues with their peers in the indie wrestling scene through her Dropkick Depression organization as well. While his band the Altered Boys ceased playing together in the 2010s, Cannonball’s latest project Big Heads continue along a similar fast and rocking hardcore sound and have been teasing a demo release on bandcamp soon. While maybe not the biggest star in either arena, I thought it would be cool to mention someone like Jeff Cannonball travelling in the more DIY and underground ends of of both punk and wrestling at the same time currently.
Billy Corgan and The NWA
The National Wrestling Alliance was one of the most important forces in pro wrestling for decades, a cartel of promoters that literally ran the industry nearly unopposed until Vince McMahon Jr’s purchase of the WWWF from his father Vince Sr, which led to a whole other thing you may have heard of called the WWE. If you are interested, the book “Death Of The Territories” by Tim Hornbaker gives a good account of the organization’s history during its original run. In the late 2010s a group of old timey wrestling fans decided to purchase all trademarks and rights to title belts and stuff associated with the NWA in hopes of reviving the brand via YouTube, and needed an investor (or “money mark” in the slang of the industry). Continuing the spirit of Rick Rubin’s patronage of Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the 90’s, a lifelong wrestling fan named William Corgan of Chicago Illinois decided to sink a chunk of his money from playing in a lttle band called Smashing Pumpkins into helping them revive it as a boutique promotion on YouTube with a self-consciously retro vibe to its shows, first in the documentary series Ten Pounds Of Gold and later their weekly showcase NWA Powerrrrrrrrr. Powerrrrrrrrrr had a bit of an online following at first, and early on attracted some pretty high profile up and comers and indie stalwarts like Ricky Starks, Thunder Rosa and Eddie Kingston who all quickly jumped ship to the higher-profile stage of AEW. Unfortunately the company also attracted controversy by adding territories-era in ring performer, wrestling historian and internet troll Jim Cornette to their commentary team who decided to “add” to the show’s self-consciously retro image by some 80’s-style racist jokes to his play by play commentary on an episode of Powerrrrrrrrrr, and while they did fire him over the incident, it definitely laid bare the fact that part of the subset of wrestling fans who were drawn to said self-consciously retro image also were maybe a little less progressive than fans of other independent promotions currently. Unfortunately Corgan saw this and noticed an opportunity, and after a title run by indie veteran and actual grandparent Tim Storm, the NWA championship was put on ex WWE wrestler Tyrus, fka “The Funkasaurus” Broadus Clay who had gone from dancing in a Dayglo tracksuit on Monday Night Raw to trading in conservative talking points (including some pretty nasty homophobic rhetoric) as a personality on Fox News, where he would carry his title belt onscreen during various Gutfeld Live appearances as a means of drawing the network’s devotees to the promotion as a throwback to “simpler times”. Corgan also welcome the remains of the failed “Control Your Narrative” promotion to join his roster, a weird right-libertarian themed wrestling company that made up of a handful of mid card ex-WWE wrestlers fired during early pandemic cost-cutting measures and a couple of one-time indie stars no longer booked by more credible promotions due to their histories of abuse allegations (and therefore “victims of cancel culture” or whatever). While on occasion he has still featured some enjoyable performers like Matt Cardona and Max The Impaler, Billy Corgan’s misadventures in wrestling promotion have leaned more towards courting controversy over putting out a quality project, and after Tyrus’ loss of their title became a meme from how overall lacklustre their match was and a potential TV deal with the CW cable network was shot down due to a segment of their YouTube show where wrestlers were pretending to snort cocaine on camera during an in-storyline celebration, the Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman’s efforts in wrestling promotion has not exactly been the most celebrated of late, but he is certainly one of the more high profile pop culture figures to try his hand at the wrestling promotion game at that level (even if the end product has kind of sucked).
Miscellaneous
Manner Farm fits on both lists! Here is their 1997 demo Oppression And Compassion circa when Happy Kreter fka XStrife The Vegan WarriorX of various Vancouver-area indie wrestling promotions, and later of Gob, By A Thread, and Between Earth And Sky was playing bass for them. Their drummer is now a professor of Indigenous Geography in Vancouver.
Matt’s Notes
Greg Graffin (Bad Religion) / Milo Aukerman (Descendents)
Of course, I’m going to include them. Of course, they’re at the top of the list.
Did you know Milo had a heart attack not that long ago? Mild as it turns out.
Milo’s described by Internetish sources as punk blah-blah and “former research molecular biologist.” You learn new things here all the time, right?
Dr. Graffin is listed on Google as “American singer and evolutionary biologist”.
Being one of these doctorate people myself I know the insanity you throw yourself into in the programs. I know nothing of the insanity of being in popular punk bands from California. Like… it’s your job… and the science stuff… also a job… is mainly the fun thing?
I mean, well-done to anybody who can keep those two enterprises going at once.
Patterson Hood (Drive-by Truckers)
This is a case where a college or university degree is pursued but left incomplete due to any number of factors. I would call this academically crossed-over to the extent that were it not for said incompleted (sic) academic endeavours, there would either be no DBT, or DBT would exist far differently than it currently does or has. In this case, DIFFERENT actually would be BAD, children.
Here’s an article from long enough ago that Patterson looks young! Six albums into the DBT’s career, and he gives a guest lecture on the music business for some Southern university or other… it’s as cool as anything else they’re involved in…
Ben Nichols: The Last Pale Light in the West / The Lawrence Arms &/or Brendan Kelly: Blood Meridian
I feel like I must’ve mentioned the Nichols record before on this podcast… possibly on the mixed media special? And even I know that I mention TLR way too often. But… to the extent that they both deal with one of the Real Great American Novels… I’d be remiss not to include them both here… or all three… or all four… or whatever, man…
To the extent that there exist at least three significant recordings by singers known to be literary generally and outright loquacious when performing about this one novel. Well, it’s one hell of a thing. Downright academicish? I’m stretching the limits of the format to be sure. And yet, I do so knowing that I have no credibility to risk by such shenanigans. Which shenanigans, as a bona fide post-academic worker person, I can tell you are rampant in academia… so, in a very roundabout way, this is relevantish!
Cormac McCarthy for the win, now and forever, obviously.
And here is a downright charming interview Ben did with the small Southern university where he did his History degree… thirteen years into Lucero… which means some DECADES have clearly passed!
Shotmaker (somehow)
I am absolutely determined to make Shotmaker fit into this topic, somehow, so I will have an excuse to talk about the amazing new collection 1993-1996: A Moment in Time.
In terms of my particular moments in time, I was in high school those exact years.
There’s something about those of us who grew up in the 90’s, man… I’ve been known to call us the Greatest Generation… have I mentioned that before?
Anyway!
Because for sure the three guys in Shotmaker have had day jobs, families, and everything else… their lives are not as documented as say Dr. Greg, or Dr. Milo… or that guy from the Offspring… so… one would say that in all likelihood at least one of them is among the seventy-five-ish percent of Canadians who complete some kind of post-secondary education..
Case closed! The monkey did the murder in the morgue!
Also, the answer may POTENTIALLY lie in this interview with Nick from Shotmaker on the Washed Up Emo podcast. Dan probably knows about this awesomely named thing, but I didn’t! But I do now!
And I also can’t recommend the boxed set strongly enough!
*Important update: Nick from Shotmaker has had a significant career in the arts and is now a professor at OCAD in Toronto! So THERE’S my academic connection on this. Phew.
Finally, there is a really good interview with Tim and Nick in a now-defunct music blog… but it’s from 2019, so… recent-ish!
Titus Andronicus: The Monitor
All I’m saying is, making a double record themed around the American Civil War is pretty goddamned ambitious. And, with his high-minded caterwauling Patrick Stickles leaps viscerally into the schtick. Viscerally like a bayonet to the soft parts… viscerally like… you get it, I’m sure! From the state that brought you Sinatra, Springsteen, and Glenn Danzig… and William Carlos Williams!
AND: The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s first play (as per the so-called “literary canon” eyeroll, puke-puke). And pretty hardcore in terms of violence for the time (I guess!) and for the Shakes-ster’s collective body of work (more guessing!). Academic-ish? A mile wide, says I!
For more on this SEMINAL (Editor: Must you??)(Me: Like Butthead: He-huh He-huh He-huh) album, you should check Ye Olde Wikipedia entry on the same! I could refer you to Pitchfork & whatnot, but by now my work here is either completely done or completely UN-done. But, either way, you know!
A PERSONAL APPEAL TO PATRICK STICKLES: PLEASE WRITE AN ALBUM ABOUT THE WAR OF 1812 BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA!
And, holy crow, there is a one-hour “making of” documentary which I just discovered now! Next time I’m just going to get an AI to write these notes.
Kira (Black Flag)
Kira Roessler was the bassist for Black Flag for their most productive run of albums. As per Wikipedia:
Roessler was majoring in applied engineering at UCLA, and Black Flag’s subsequent tours were scheduled around her classes—a condition of her joining the band. Her bass playing was featured on five of Black Flag’s studio albums and two officially released live album.
She went to university! Which means I get to include her, and Black Flag, in this episode!
I became aware of this fact in the first place through Jim Ruland’s excellent book Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records which I’ve mentioned on the show before. Out of all members of Black Flack across it’s lengthy-ish existence, Kira has found the most durable, successful career in music over the years… working as a dialogue editor in Hollywood, and winning an Academy Award with her team for the sound design on Mad Max: Fury Road. She also won TWO Emmy Awards for dialogue editing on HBO shows! Accomplished in all kinds of ways, this Kira!
If you look at the Black Flag discography, a couple of things should be evident:
- Kira played on many (most!) of the albums people think of when they think of Black Flag… minus The First Four Years, and Damaged….
- How does a band record and tour 5 full albums within two years? By punk standards… or ANYBODY’S… this is incredibly prolific… you only have that kind of energy in your twenties… says a guy who probably NEVER had that kind of energy!
At some point I’m going to dive into all things Minutemen for one of these episodes… which will be another great opportunity to talk about Kira. Until then…
You wanna get nuts?? Let’s get nuts! #bogmonstermusic
*Honourable Mention: Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Super Deluxe Edition
Back in the not-so-distant Before Times, when I was solving as many problems as I thought I had by, in a large part, leaning into IPA & Vinyl Dad mode…
Is this the Ulysses of early-00’s Americana? He thought, distractedly, typing foppishly. What an utterly weak line. Weak. And how is it that I’m still pecking away at these notes all these blasted days later?
Uuuhhh… [Clears throat] SUPER productive night up in here. Yessir….
Oh! And! Replacements biographer Bob Mehr wrote the significant liner notes! And he won a Grammy for such! Making him a two-time Grammy winner… the first being for the amazing Replacements reissue Dead Man’s Pop… making it the only thing related to the Mats to win that coveted (?) statue. Go writers! Somebody in this mess has been to college.
*Extra Honorable Mention: The Great Unwashed & Unknown (TGU&U)
All you people out there with college certificates… diplomas…. MBA’s…. arts degrees… PhDs in Engineering… whatever… meat cutting school… CompuCollege…
Or who attended a thing and didn’t finish it… or put it on hold… or took forever to finish it…
AND
Who play in bands… or go to shows… or pay for music…
All of you… the 75% of Canadians who attend post-secondary… no word on how that skews in or around or among the punk subculture!…
You are all “crushing it”, to use a term!
Please forgive me… I am a middle-aged man and I am prone to fits of sentimentality…
We couldn’t be more obliged for you visiting than we are, even if we wanted to! Which we don’t!
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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ December 4, 2023 4:41 pm
