Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [28]
We decided to stay in character at all times during interviews. When you were interviewing Fozzy, there was no Chris Jericho, only Moongoose McQueen, and in order to pull this off I took direct inspiration from Andy Kaufman and his Tony Clifton character. Clifton was an abrasive, horrible stand-up comedian who was actually Kaufman in disguise, although he would never admit to it.
Jonny Z loved the idea and asked what songs we’d be recording for the record. We told him we were thinking of doing Maiden, Priest, Ozzy, Scorpions, Dio …
Rich and I mimicking the Scorpions on set during the filming of Unleashed, Uncensored, Unknown in 2000. No idea why I’m wearing two kimonos.
“Dio?” he asked, his voice growing stern. “I don’t think you should do that. There’s a big Dio backlash throughout the United States right now. If you do a Dio song, there could be trouble.” What did he mean by a Dio backlash? Was there an angry mob roaming the countryside wielding pitchforks, ready to hang the Holy Diver along with anybody else who had the audacity to play one of his blasphemous songs?
Z sat back in his chair shaking his head and murmuring, “This could really derail the whole thing.”
But Dio backlash notwithstanding, Jonny was convinced that the combination of Jericho from the WWE and Rich from Stuck Mojo playing covers under alter egos would be huge. Megaforce kept throwing cash at us and decided that the backstory was so good that we needed to make a short film that would be used as an electronic press kit to promote the band. They gave us $100,000 and told us to show up in Orlando to film for two days. That was it—no script, no ideas, no nothing. So Rich, Willis, and I compiled a bunch of ideas into a bare skeleton of a script so we’d have something to film. The basic premise was that Fozzy had returned from Japan after twenty years to play their triumphant return concert at the Hard Rock Café in Orlando and the entire country was going nuts with anticipation.
We promoted the gig on the local rock station and discussed the trials and tribulations of being stuck in the Orient and the problems we faced as a band. We discussed our first guitar player, Chuck Berry (no relation), who found side work as a sumo wrestler even though he weighed only 145 pounds. Unfortunately, an actual sumo wrestler fell on top of him, crushing his hands forever, leaving us no choice but to fire him.
Then we discussed how Fozzy once got into trouble for using laser lights at a show. The beams were so strong that they blinded people in the crowd. Fozzy avoided a lawsuit by giving all of the injured people seeing-eye dogs. And not just any seeing-eye dogs—these beautiful specimens were so good that people wished they could be blinded so they could have one.
I called in some favors from some of my friends to give their testimonies of how Fozzy changed their lives. Zakk Wylde, Mike Portnoy, Sebastian Bach, and Dee Snider all spoke about the influence of Fozzy.
Zakk claimed that he’d auditioned for the band three times but never made it because his metal wasn’t up to snuff. The sting of our rejection led him to crack and heroin addiction. Portnoy talked about how K.K. influenced his drumming and his stick twirling technique. Sebastian said that whenever Fozzy came to town, groupies would welcome us with open arms and open legs.
But the coup de grâce was Dee Snider’s performance. I had seen the Behind the Music episode about Vanilla Ice, where he was explaining how he didn’t steal the bass line for “Ice Ice Baby” from Queen. Ice said, “Queen’s goes ‘dun dun dun dundundundun.’ ” Then he hummed the exact same bass line and said with a shit-eating grin, “Mine goes ‘dun dun dun dundundundun.’ It’s not the same thing.” Even though it was the exact same thing.
I called Dee and asked him if he’d seen the show. He had and was totally down when I explained