Chris Jericho has never been content to be just one person. From the time he was a kid, he wanted to be not only a pro wrestler but a singer in a rock band. Both of those dreams came true. So why stop there. He wanted to talk to interesting personalities so he started a podcast. He wanted to tell stories from his life, about growing up as the son of a professional hockey player to becoming a WWE wrestling champion, so he became an author of three best-selling books. He has acted, hosted, danced, sang, talked about everything from music to politics to business. Wearing just one hat has never interested Chris Jericho. Wearing one hat at a time interested him even less. He is a performer, an entertainer. Why do only one thing when the world is your playground.
Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, Jericho played in bands but it was his wrestling career that took off first, gaining attention in the WCW before rising to even higher status in the WWF/WWE. His over-the-top personality as an egotistical self-promoter made him the superstar everyone loved to hate. But through the years of ladder matches and Wrestlemanias, music was always there. Hooking up with Stuck Mojo guitarist Rich Ward, Fozzy was born as a fun side-project for both Ward and Jericho. But following two albums of cover songs, the band was gelling so good that their third album, All That Remains, was all original material. From there, Fozzy has grown into a favorite live metal band, popular at festivals, as opening acts and their own headlining club shows. Their sixth album, Do You Wanna Start A War, released last year and featuring such hard rockers as “Bad Tattoo” and the title track, has been their most successful recording to date, proving that Fozzy was never a vanity project but a serious band building it’s way up the rock & roll ladder one rung at a time.
Fozzy recently spent a few dates opening for Slash, which is where I caught up with Jericho backstage in Houston. Their set was fast, fiery and energetic; Jericho being the superlative frontman by interacting with not only his bandmates [guitarist Ward, drummer Frank Fontsere, guitarist Billy Grey and new bass player Randy Drake] but the audience as well. Those I talked to following the show were certainly won over, to the point of buying t-shirts and CDs before Slash and his band took to the stage.
With the sound of Slash soundchecking through “The Dissident” in the background, Jericho talked about life in a rock band and never wanting to be just one thing.
When you were a kid, you wanted to be in a rock band and be a wrestler. Could you be the poster boy for dreams coming true?
I don’t know if I’m the poster boy but I think it’s just one of those things that if you have certain things that you believe in and passions that you want to do then sometimes when you tell people that, they will look down on you or laugh at you or kind of say it’s impossible. And I’ll be the person that’ll tell you that it’s NOT impossible. You can do anything, literally, that you want as long as you have belief and passion in it and you’re willing to put in the leg work. You know, nothing that is good is easy to do. You’ve got to work your ass off to get anything you want. And when I said I wanted to be in a rock band and wanted to be a wrestler, or whether it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he wants to be a body builder and a movie star, or whatever it may be, if you really want to do it, you’ve just got to go for it and not worry about what other people think and what other people say. I never worried about it. I still don’t.
But sometimes what people say will dictate what happens.
It does. People are scared to be out there and worried about what other opinions are. If you’re good at something and if you believe in yourself, that’s the only opinion that matters. I know if something is good or something is bad and I know if I can accomplish something or if I can’t. Anything that I have done is because I know that there’s a chance to do it at the highest of levels. And I play to win. I always have. Once I enter the game, I will do everything I can to win that game.
Did you ever just want to do one thing?
No, no. When I was a kid I wanted to be in a rock band and I wanted to be a wrestler. Twelve years old I started playing in bands and I love rock & roll and I love music, I love playing and I also really love wrestling. I kind of thought I could probably do that too. It’s something I had a real passion for. There’s never been like one or the other. It’s always been a duality there whereas I believe in both and I love both and I’ve done both my entire life. It’s not like I started in music when Fozzy started. I was playing in high school bands and garage bands since I was twelve years old so it’s something I have always done. Even when I started wrestling, I still played and recorded demos and played in bands and did what I could. So it’s just always something that I’ve done. There’re two halves to what I do career-wise and I don’t see the difference between the two. They are both very much based in an entertainment element; a live, grooving off of the audience, very hard hitting, aggressive forms of entertainment that are both very contingent on the energy that you get from the crowd. And that’s kind of the same properties that I use as the frontman of Fozzy, the same properties I use when I’m wrestling. It’s making that connection with the audience and that’s the most important thing.
Were you lucky enough to have a lot of support from your family?
Yeah, I was. When you’re telling your mom and dad that you’re leaving home to go become a wrestler at nineteen, some people would take that kind of strange, especially back then, you know, in 1990. It wasn’t as prevalent to get into the business like it is today. There’s a lot of ways to do that. Back then, no one really knew, there was no internet. How do you even do that as a kid from Winnipeg? How do you even get into wrestling? So my dad was into it and believed in it and thought that it was worth it for me to at least explore the dreams that I had. Cause he had done the same thing when he was a kid, to play hockey, to play in the NHL. So he knew what it was like to kind of leave home at a young age and to go for something that a very small percentage of people get a chance to do, you know.
You’ve been in Fozzy since 2000. Do you feel like people have accepted you now?
Well, no one accepts everybody. But we’re touring with fucking Slash. How much more legit do you need to be than that, you know. Invited to tour with Slash. But we’ve had to work twice as hard to get people’s respect but we’ve always been a legitimate band. We’ll kick any fucking band’s ass out there. Just because I’m a wrestler, I’m not a wrestler onstage. You know, 30 Seconds To Mars isn’t an actor’s band. Pretty Reckless isn’t the Grinch Who Stole Christmas band. There’s always going to be people that have that kind of looking down their nose at you but I’m sure there were people that looked down at Slash. “Oh come on, why don’t he just get back with Guns N Roses. How good could this be?” So once again, you’re always going to get those people that think that. And I don’t fucking care what people think. I know when we’re onstage, the reactions that we get, the buzz that we have as a band, the entertainment value, the energy that we have, the songs that we do … yeah, anybody that doesn’t like our band is cause they’ve never seen us or heard us. And that’s fine.
There’s a lot of bands that I don’t listen to that I probably should listen to but I just never really got around to it. And when I see them live it’s like, “Oh my gosh, those guys are great.” Black Stone Cherry, I remember last year, I’d never seen them, never heard of them – I heard of them but never listened to them, never would have listened to them – but they happened to be playing right after us at a festival and I checked it out and it was great. There are so many bands out there and if our band is known as the band that has the wrestler in it, well at least it gives us something different, something to live or die on. And then once people come and check it out, we’re ready.
Did you feel like it was more of a struggle for Fozzy to prove yourself over the past fifteen years, more so than your average up & coming band?
I wouldn’t say fifteen because at first it was a very part-time thing. It’s only over the last ten years that we’ve been full-time, really giving a go of it. And you can really see how the band has grown in the last five years. I think it’s a struggle for any band. Any band has to have some kind of a gimmick. KISS wears makeup. “Oh, well, that must suck.” There are still people that think KISS is a joke band cause they wear makeup. But the makeup only lasts so long. Either it’s good music or it’s not. It’s the same with us. We wouldn’t have been doing this for as long as we have if we weren’t good. The fact that the wrestler in the band is singing only goes so far. It would be one album, one tour, and then that would be it.
Your latest album, Do You Wanna Start A War, showed the growth in your diversity and I thought it kicked ass.
Thank You. So did everybody else. It’s our highest charting record, our biggest seller, the best reviewed we’ve ever had. And most of our set is songs from the new record and they all go down huge. People love it. Last night we were in Beaumont, Texas. Those are our fans so they love all the songs. You come here, play in front of Slash, yeah, there are some of our fans, but the majority don’t know the band or never heard the band, and right off the bat we know how to win people over. We know how to do a show. And that includes Slash’s band. I mean, they’re freaking out about how much they like us and that’s good, that’s why we’re here. It’s like an audition of sorts. We’d love to do a full tour with Slash because it’s a perfect mix. Their fans are our fans. People want to come and have a good time. It’s like a dirty type of sound, greasy, and that’s what we do too and I think we are definitely holding our own with Slash and I knew we would. Same thing is going to happen when we go out with KISS in October. We know what to do to turn the heads of people who are like, “Oh come on” when they see us play and that’s all you need. Give us one chance, that’s all we need.
When you first started getting into music when you were younger, what was the band that really blew you away?
The Beatles. The Beatles was my favorite band when I was a kid. I was really attracted to the concept of who they were. And not a kid, I’m talking like eight years old, to where I knew everything about The Beatles. I had every one of their records and was reading books about them and knew all the details. Then when I went to Junior High School, I learned that it wasn’t cool to like The Beatles so I better find another band that can allow me to talk to girls (laughs). And at the time everyone was wearing Iron Maiden shirts and Judas Priest shirts and Ozzy shirts so I went and bought Blizzard Of Ozz at a used comic book store and that’s kind of how I started getting into heavy metal.
You guys have played all the big festivals. Do you think that is the best route to broaden a band’s audience?
Of course, that’s why you do festivals, that’s why you tour with any band as a support band. When you play to new faces and new audiences, that’s the idea of any band. That’s why Metallica still goes and opens for the Stones when they get asked to, you know what I mean. You still want to increase that fan base by any means possible.
It’s sad you got rained out at Rockville..
Yeah, that was a drag. We were all set to go. We were the next band on and there were a lot of people there to see us and that was good cause it’s the one festival that we did get to do two years in a row. Last year we did a great set and this year the buzz was there. People were waiting to hear us and see us. Like I’ve said, you can’t fight God so it was a drag that we got rained out but there is nothing you can do about that. But it’s good to know that there was a lot of people disappointed in it, you know what I mean. And us, top of the list. But hopefully next year.
Do you remember the first concert you did with Fozzy?
Back in like 2000, maybe, in Atlanta. It was something for fun. I wasn’t really nervous or anything, cause I’d done dozens of concerts before that in high school. But anytime you try something new like that it’s always kind of stepping outside the box and it was fun enough to where we knew that we had something that we wanted to build on and expand upon. It was probably really bad (laughs) but it’s the first one, you know.
Did that start your wheels turning once you saw what you had?
Well, I had been planning on putting a band together anyway at that point and it kind of fatefully came together. So yeah, the wheels had already been turning but that was kind of like, I think I can do this and kind of figure out a way to make this more of a permanent thing. But like I said, it was still always more of a side project throughout the 2000’s and then 2009 came and Rich and I said like, “We really think we can do something with this. Let’s make this a full-time thing.” So ever since then is when all these major things and cool things have been happening. It’s been a blast.
What do you do next? Are you working on any new material?
We’re always kind of working on stuff. I think the plan is a new record next summer. We have a handful of shows here and there and then we’re going back to Europe in November. We’re doing the KISS thing in October. And we’re doing Heavy Montreal in August. A couple of festivals in Canada, a couple shows of our own. It’s a pretty light schedule this summer but the fall is always our busiest time, it seems. We did all the festivals last year and you usually don’t do festivals two years in a row so it’s kind of an off year for festivals.
What was the craziest thing you’ve ever done onstage?
I don’t know, I mean, I climb stuff a lot. There was a scaffolding last gig and I climb up on it all the time. I’m not scared of that sort of stuff. I think probably another crazy thing was Download 2005. I jumped off the stage into the crowd and didn’t realize how high the stage was and I remember when I landed both of my ankles kind of bent outwards the wrong way and I was thinking, and it was the first song too, and I could have just fucking landed, snapped both of my ankles and just been stuck in the pit. But you’ve got to be careful onstage cause there is adrenaline and stuff that makes you really go nuts. You’ve got to be careful and make sure you don’t hurt yourself cause you can get legitimately hurt in rock & roll. Like I said, I almost broke both my ankles onstage. It’s show business and sometimes you just go places that you wouldn’t normally go if you weren’t out there, whether it’s in the ring or onstage. If you want to give the extra mile, give people their money’s worth, scary, dangerous, none of that really matters. It’s all about making people excited to see you and making people want to pay money to come check you out next time you come to town no matter what that is.
Now I heard that you went to school with Slash’s drummer Brent Fitz and that you didn’t like him.
Yeah, I didn’t like him. We went to high school together and his band was always better than mine (laughs). His band was called Seventh Heaven and my band was called Scimitar. Over the years though, we’ve become really, really close friends and that’s another cool thing about this. This was Slash inviting me to do this and then Fitz, and even Todd Kerns too, he’s from Canada, we actually even play in a band together and it was fun. I remember hanging out at 7-11 after a Motley Crue concert and seeing Fitz. There he is in 1988 and here we are all these years later touring together with a Rock & Roll Hall Of Famer. It’s pretty cool.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
We were just talking about that last night. For me, it was a band called Kick Axe. Me and Fitz and Kerns all love them and I met them. My friend won a contest at the Winnipeg Sun and I got to meet Kick Axe and sing “With A Little Help From My Friends” with them onstage. Those were the first real rock stars I met.
To you, what is rock & roll?
Attitude. Attitude of just being a free-spirit, don’t take any shit from anybody, but do what you believe is right. Stand up for what you believe in and believe in yourself. And don’t listen to people that don’t. Find a dream, find a goal and go for it, make it happen. That’s rock & roll, man.
Live photographs by Leslie Michele Derrough,
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