Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [26]
Dean told me that when I made my WWE debut he, Chris, and Eddy gathered around a TV backstage at Nitro to watch, and just as I walked out to confront The Rock, one of the producers made them change the channel. According to WCW logic I was now the enemy and they weren’t allowed to be friends with me anymore.
There was a huge buzz throughout the business when they appeared in the WWE, especially for Chris and Eddy. But in his first match in the company, Benoit, who had walked out of WCW as the World Champion, wrestled WWE Champion HHH and was pinned clean in about ten minutes. Once again, Vince didn’t care what anyone had accomplished outside his walls, you had to prove yourself all over again when you came to work for him.
It was his World (Wrestling Entertainment), and we were just living in it.
CHAPTER 7
Too Esoteric for Our Demographic
Rich Ward and I originally put Fozzy Osbourne together as a fun side project, consisting of a bunch of friends playing our favorite heavy metal songs. We only played two gigs together, but because Jericho from the WWE and Rich from Stuck Mojo (who had a significant underground following, selling three-quarters of a million records worldwide) had started a band, there was a buzz about us from the start.
After the two gigs caused such a stir, Mark Willis, the manager of Stuck Mojo, called me and asked, “Do you want to do more with Fozzy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there are record companies that want to sign you guys.”
“Sign what? We’re a cover band!”
Mark responded, “They know. They also know that you can’t really tour. But they still want to sign you.”
“Well, what have they heard from us that would make them want to sign us?”
He said, “Nothing. You guys have only done two gigs and I sure as hell wasn’t going to send them the video from those, because they were terrible.”
I’d never met Willis, but he sure was comfortable giving it to me straight. I liked him already.
“Obviously you hadn’t rehearsed or anything,” he continued. “But the point is the word is out about you guys, and they’ve heard nothing and seen nothing. They just know who’s in the band and they want to sign you.”
The talk of a record deal had come out of nowhere, but I was stoked since I had two dreams when I was a kid—to be a wrestler and to be a rock star. I’d been playing in bands since I was fourteen years old, a lot longer than I’d been wrestling, and it was surreal to see my other dream coming true.
It was strange that there was a label bidding war going on but we weighed the offers and decided on signing with Megaforce Records. Based out of New Jersey, Megaforce was the first label to sign Metallica and Anthrax to record deals. They were far from their glory days, but the fact that we were going to release an album with the same company that had given James Hetfield and Charlie Benante their starts was good enough for me.
We got a $75,000 advance from Megaforce, and that’s when I got a crash course in the music business. When you’re a kid, you think that when a band signs a record deal they’ll be huge rock stars instantly and be showered with cash. It was the same mindset I had when I first started watching Stampede Wrestling. I assumed that all of the wrestlers were rich and famous because they were on TV. I would watch an opening-match guy like Goldie Rogers and think to myself, “If I can just get to his level, I’ll make a hundred grand a year and have tons of chicks hanging around me.”
Goldie was probably making three hundred bucks a week and hanging