Chris Jericho talks about his latest book, Paul Stanley, Southpaw Regional Wrestling, more
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Credit: RING RUST RADIO
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Chris Jericho Interview Transcription
Ring Rust Radio: You recently released your latest book, No Is a Four-Letter Word: How I Failed Spelling but Succeeded in Life. Why did you feel now was the right time to write this book and what are you hoping to accomplish with its release?
Chris Jericho: It’s pretty philosophical man. Like there is some kind of otherworldly design behind it. What happened was I’ve already written three autobiographies in the course of seven years. I love to write and I have lots to write about. A fourth autobiography at this stage in my life might be a little pretentious, like does the world really need another Jericho autobiography? I’m not exactly Jack Kerouac or whatever. So, I thought I would answer a question that gets asked quite often in how you did all these things you do. How did you make it in wrestling? How did you make it in music? How do you continue to do all these things? So, I sat down I came up with 20 principles of things I learned over the years from celebrities, family members, people that I know, fictional characters, and put them all down. Twenty principles like I said, the David Bowie principle of always reinvent yourself; The Vince McMahon principle of work hard then work harder; the Steve Austin principle, always be a little bit of an asshole. All these little things that helped me get these goals accomplished that I wanted to accomplish. It became almost like a motivational book or self-help book and it never really intended to be that way but that’s the kind of way it morphed. Now that it’s out, it’s really cool to see people’s reactions and how people are gaining a lot of advice from things that I’ve learned and applying it to their own life. It is a pretty cool feeling.
Ring Rust Radio: You’ve already enjoyed so much success as an author, but for those thinking about picking up your new book, how would you say it most differs from the previous ones. And also, how does it compare to your previous books in terms of how challenging it was to write?
Chris Jericho: It’s a little bit different because it’s more of a self-help motivational thing, but it’s still filled with ridiculous stories and things about my life and what’s happened and fun stuff and all those sorts of things. It’s pretty much in the vein of the other books just more of a theme and focus behind it. A book is a book, it’s hard to write. It’s never easy to write a book and I write all my books by myself from cover to cover so it’s a lot of edits and rewrites, a lot of time spent. I think for my second book I divided the amount of hours that I worked on the book by the amount of money I got for it and it came out to $2.14 an hour. It was hundreds of hours of work for a big chunk of change. You have to put the time in and it’s like anything else that’s worth it. Whether it’s writing a book or making an album or doing a podcast or putting together a wrestling match or whatever it may be; the more time spent on it, the better it’s going to be. You can’t do anything half-ass or its going to come off that way and I refuse to have anything I do not be 1000 percent completely all my effort put into it.
Ring Rust Radio: The foreword for your latest book was written by rock legend Paul Stanley. What went into your decision to ask Stanley and how did he react when asked?
Chris Jericho: The whole book kind of started from this quote that Paul said in 1987 in a movie I saw where he said, “The only people that tell you can’t do something are the ones that have failed. I’m not going to tell you that you can’t do it because I did it. You can do it.” When he said you can do it, I really felt like he was looking right at me, Paul Stanley telling me you can do it. So, it’s kind of how I live my life and focus my career on wanting to be a wrestler and be in a rock ‘n roll band. Well Paul Stanley said I could do it so I don’t care what anybody else thinks. So, the last few years we met through a cool set of circumstances and became pretty cool friends with Paul and now he is just a dude and a good friend of mine. So who better to do the forward of the book than the guy who basically kicked it all off with a cool thing he said 30 years ago that I’ll never forget? He probably doesn’t even remember saying it. I just called him up and asked him. He said how long should it be and I said as long as you want it to be and he came back with a really cool original foreword. I happened to see Gene Simmons last week while we were on the same trail of book tours. You go to the same interview places and talk shows and that sort of thing and we crossed paths a couple of times. He knew all about the Gene Simmons principle because nowadays you do something or say something and everyone is going to tweet you about it. He thought that was pretty cool and the Gene Simmons principle is always dress like a star. So little things like that you can learn and take with you for the rest your life.
Ring Rust Radio: Southpaw Regional Wrestling is one of our favorite things this year. What was your experience like filming that and playing the role of Clint Bobski and do you think we’ll get more episodes in the future?
Chris Jericho: It’s something I heard about a while back when they came up with the idea and asked if I wanted to be involved. I said yea I want to be the backstage interviewer Clint Bobski. That’s the name that I used in college when I went to do creative communications, television classes and radio classes. Whenever we were doing box sports casts or mock radio on sports, I was always Clint Bobski. I love that name and I don’t know why. I used it again for Southpaw and it was a lot of fun because I used to watch wrestling like that. Stampede Wrestling and local wrestling in Winnipeg it was called the FWA. They were filmed in the exact same type of cheap gritty videotapes and the backstage announcers were over the top and cheesy. They were playing backstage announcers saying things like, “Oh my goodness look at what we have here! I have never seen such a thing!” It was a lot of fun to do and people were very confused early this summer when I came back for Smackdown for one night only and they thought that I was back. I wasn’t back I was there because I was filming the second season of Southpaw Wrestling and asked if I could do a match and thought might as well while I am here. I would love to see a few more but I don’t know if the series took off virally like they thought it would and I am not sure what the numbers are on that but it was a lot of fun while we did it and hopefully get to do more. I think a lot of times the initial one is always the best because it’s such a surprise and nobody really knows what they’re getting into. Where with the second one everybody wanted to get involved and some of the characters weren’t as strong. I think Miz’s guy was terrible in it whatever he was called. I just thought it was terrible and it wasn’t funny. I thought the Butcher Boys weren’t funny. The first one was really funny because no one was really trying. They were just being whatever they wanted to be. It’s like a sequel to a movie where you stumble onto something and it’s never as good as the original. If they do more Clint Bobski will be there and if they don’t it was fun while it lasted.
Ring Rust Radio: It was recently announced that you will be hosting Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager At Sea cruise in October 2018. How did you come up with this idea and what can fans expect during the voyage?
Chris Jericho: We did a KISS cruise in 2015 with Fozzy and the second I walked off the cruise I said we could do this. We could do a wrestling cruise and a rock ‘n roll cruise. I talked to my manager and we started working on it. Two years later after trials and tribulation, we even lost our boat at one point, but that’s another story for another time. I want it to be synonymous with what Chris Jericho is known for: rock ‘n roll and wrestling. I also wanted the live podcast, paranormal, comedy and all that sort of stuff I have on Talk is Jericho. I wanted to be on the cruise because the KISS cruise was such an amazing fantasy because it wasn’t just about KISS, there’s so much going on and so much to do. I thought I could do this. There has been kind of wrestling themed cruises in the past, but never a wrestling cruise where the matches are happening at the sea while you are traveling across the ocean. We had to do a lot of engineer qualifying reports to see if the ring could hold up straight. I thought, “I was just on the KISS cruise and the stage held up straight and that’s way heavier than a damn ring is.” We had to get all the approvals for all that stuff and estimates and everything. What fans can expect is it is going to be the greatest destination vacation they could ever want. If they love wrestling, rock ‘n roll, if they like to laugh, it is going to be a big party for everybody. For kids from nine to 99, I think it can be the cruise of the year. Everyone’s talking about it and I think people are still a little bit tentative about what it is, but now that we have it up off the ground and over year to go. A lot of people think it is happening in a month, but that would be crazy to do it in a month. I got a call from Stone Cold Steve Austin saying are crazy you can’t do it in a month! I told him its 2018, so he said, “Oh ok, sorry.” So, we have a lot of time to build it up and get those tickets sold. I think it’s cool, but I’m expecting this to be a huge hit and I want it to be an annual Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Rager.
Ring Rust Radio: Your band Fozzy’s latest hit is Judas, I think it’s an awesome song and it’s done so well for you on the charts. I know they’re different mediums, but how does the feeling of having a hit song like Judas compare to a big accomplishment in wrestling like winning a title or really getting a character over or something to that effect?
Chris Jericho: I think it might be even harder to get a number one song in music. It’s hard to become a champion too, so they would be very similar. It’s a real pat on the back for years of hard work. This is not a song that went to number one instantly. It went from 15 to 10 to nine to eight to seven, so we’re building this fan base and I think there’s a lot of people that have heard of Fozzy but never actually heard Fozzy before and now that’s changing. There are a lot of people checking out the band because of what they heard about Judas did or they know about Jericho and wrestling and they go back to check out Fozzy and then they suddenly hear the greatest song we have done in our career. We’ve had successful songs in the past, but nothing like this. It’s on a whole different level and a whole different world. It’s really cool that after all this hard work we put in, which is the whole motto of my life which is no is a four-letter word. When people told me I would never make it in music and guess what? We just did. That’s very, very cool to see the fan base growing and the buzz about the band growing and we are still getting started. Judas is still rising in the charts which is great. It has been a pretty cool experience but very, very well deserved after years and years of hard work.
