Episode 20 - Bozo Visits the Zoo

Timestamps
 0:02:55 - Follow-Ups (Michael Hayes audio, Buzz Sawyer, Guns in Wrestling) 

TGBL: This is one of the areas I want the listeners to pipe in and let us know. I found a second Michael Hayes interview from 1988 in Dallas, TX. Now, at this point, he’s a Babyface and this is when he did that famous “concert” at the Sportatorium when Buddy Roberts and the Samoans attacked them. It’s right before then, they’re giving tickets away on the air, and he says that he wrote Badstreet USA with Jimmy Poppa because he got hip to ASCAP, and the fact that they may come after him for using Freebird, so he better come up with his own original theme music. But – ASCAP never came after him, because Skynyrd loved that he was using the song, and they were friends of his! So even though they never really – and that’s why he said on the interview – that’s why he was always kinda able to interchange – like he was able to use Freebird after that for years. Like every now and then – even in WCW you’d hear some Freebird.

Bix: Through 89.

TGBL: Yeah. But, it’s interesting – that means that he was onto the idea that there would be a publishing issues, which would later effect Vince McMahon in 1985; he was onto that a year earlier than everyone!

- on Michael Hayes interchanging Freebird and BadStreet USA as his theme in the mid-80's before the licencing bust in wrestling.

 0:23:16 - Larry Nelson and The Blaster  TGBL: Ok. Um, (laughing) He’s just “YOU BROKE THE WALL!!!” That’s what his concern is – it’s the wall! (laughing). “Larry, it’s drywall! It’ll be OK!”

Bix: (laughing) Could you imagine Ric Flair going up to the Shockmaster and being like “You broke the wall!” (laughing)

TGBL: (laughing) That would have been funny if they left the board at the bottom of the wall like they did for Shockmaster and the Blaster like popped through the wall and just fell right down. I feel like at that camera angle, it would have been funnier than the Shockmaster.

Bix: The Blaster is lucky that David Crockett didn’t work for the AWA.

- on Larry Nelson's ridiculous emphatic cries at The Blaster breaking through the AWA backdrop wall during his interview with Al DeRusha.

 0:30:49 - Follow-Ups Redux (Slip House Boys, Marc Gullen, Demolition Blast) 

TGBL: So, another follow-up: Demolition Blast. We’ve been told his name is Carmine Azzato, that he may have promoted a Christian themed wrestling company called Pro Wrestling Revolution in Dick’s Hills, NY. Someone pointed out – and I remember this, now – that he was in Eddy Mansfield’s IWF at Universal Studios in Florida ...

Bix: It’s weird seeing Ax and weird big fake-but-i-guess-technically-real-demolition guy Demolition Blast cutting promos in the middle of Universal Studios in front of the rides.

TGBL: I remember them cutting promos in front of the Psycho House (laughing) in the middle of the day – not at night, or anything! In the middle of a sunny day, they’re just in front of the Psycho House cutting promos.

Bix: All those promos on those IWF shows are broad daylight, sometimes with mascots – costumed characters – just insanity.

- on the ridiculousness of Eddy Mansfield's IWF

 0:39:29 - Superuniverse Top 10 

Note: This is the first Superuniverse Top 10 to be voted on by the listeners - the 6:05'ers - of the 6:05 Superpodcast.
 * 10. Akeem Bixenspan


 * 9. Black Scorpion


 * 8. Sex Appeal Ronnie Steal


 * 7. El Pibe 10 '83


 * 6. Marc Gullen


 * 5. The Hangman (Bruce Pobanz)


 * 4. Sue the Shooter


 * 3. Santo Gold


 * 2. Yomamba the Jungle Savage


 * 1. Orgasmic Larry Nelson


 * Champions: The Slip House Boys

 0:49:01 - Dennis of the Week (w/ Jammie Ward) 

Jammie: Well, I’ll start off with my best Dennis story that I have, and then we’ll cycle back. 1990 – I’m going to Memphis with him as part of one of the Joel Goodhart trips, and Dennis said to me – I’m gonna try to do my Dennis voice here – “Hey man, I don’t feel like getting up that early in the morning. The frickin' flight’s at 7 o clock! You’re up early anyway, you’re a frickin’ mailman. Why don’t you go down there, get the tickets, and then go back home and I’ll meet you down there about 10:30/11 o’clock?” I said “Dennis, how are we gonna get another flight? This flights-“ “Don’t worry about it man, I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it.” (laughing) So I go down, I meet Joel outside the, where you go in, and he gives me the plane tickets and he says “are you sure you and Dennis are going to fly later?” and I said “Hey, that’s what Dennis wants to do,” and he says “Ok, we’ll see you down there.” So I’m waiting outside US Air, and sure enough, here comes Dennis, pulling up about 11 o’clock. He gets out and I said “What do we do now?” “Well whatever I say, just follow with me man. Don’t’ worry about it! Just nod your head, say yes.” So we go into the ticket counter and some young girl is in there, and he says “Hey, hey honey. Lookie here. Me and my buddy here, we gotta get to Memphis and we missed our early morning flight.” I’m sorry sir, but there’s nothing we can do for you, and Dennis goes “Uh, listen here, sweetie: you see this guy here and myself? We’re heart surgeons. We HAVE to be in Memphis by 2 o’clock this afternoon! You gotta get us out of here as soon as possible!” and she’s like “Really?” “Listen, listen. Would I lie to you? Look at me – I’m, I’m, I’m dressed in a suit! I wouldn’t lie to you!” Next thing you know, she’s calling a supervisor over, click click click – not ONLY do we get on the next flight, ‘cause we only have carry-on baggage, we don’t need to check anything, the next flight is in 20 minutes and they put us in 1st class!

TGBL: Oh wow. (laughing)

Jammie: On a flight to Memphis, and it’s even better than that, because not only did he finagle for that, he finagled 1st class for us coming back the following Tuesday – this is a Thursday or Friday morning, and he finagles for us coming back the following Tuesday morning...Back to that Memphis trip, we had a separate hotel and he paid – he charged the room to (laughing) – here we go, well Dennis is gone, it won’t matter now – he charged the room, somehow he got Joel Goodhart's credit card and he charged the room to Joel Goodhart. The trip didn’t cost us a penny – the airline tickets and everything, because I kept saying to Dennis that whole trip “When do I pay Joel for the tickets?” and he’d say “Don’t worry about it man, don’t worry about it, it’ll be ok, it’ll be ok.” (laughing) Then I found out after the trip was over, he charged everything to Goodhart’s credit card (laughing). So when Goodhart hears this, he’ll come after me now, but I’ll deal with Joel when that happens.

- on Dennis' penchant for playfully manipulating the airlines for greater amenities, along with the mystery of Joel Goodhart's missing credit card.

 1:09:39 - Adrian Adonis' transition to the Adorable One, and the mystery of "Relax with Trudi" 

TGBL:...Overall, it’s interesting, because he’s still the old Adrian Adonis, but he has the bleach blonde hair, and of course, he throws in “have a GAY new year” which is (laughing) just blatant as it gets, and then Mean Gene follows it with his comments. This is, you know, Bix said before after he lost the tag team titles  - him and Murdoch to Windham and Rotunda in early ’85 – Adrian wasn’t really around. When I look back, I went back and did a timeline here. So, on July 20th, he shows up with Heenan that he’s now under Heenan’s management and he has a briefcase that says “Relax with Trudi”

Bix: Oh, so "Relax with Trudi" actually went on months and months before the change.

TGBL: Oh yeah. So he has the briefcase "Relax with Trudi", and I mean, I could be wrong, but the briefcase is gone once he makes the change, like right away. So he has this briefcase, it’s never explained exactly what it is (laughing). It’s handcuffed to his wrist, it’s a briefcase that says "Relax with Trudi". It’s one of the great mysteries in wrestling – where were they going with this? Because it wasn’t just all of a sudden – the rumor was always Adrian Adonis; Vince didn’t like his weight gain and as a punishment, gave him the gay character.

Bix: But! He didn’t really gain that much weight during THIS period, it was after!

 1:24:05 - Steroids in Wrestling 

Bix: So Jerry Lawler had turned heel around the end of ’89 and he was a heel in Memphis in 1990, and he had been the co-host/color commentator on TV a lot of weeks, and one day, he comes out wearing scrubs, like a Doctor. He explains he’s Dr. Lawler and he brings out two urine samples that he claims are Kerry Von Erich and Jeff Jarrett’s, and he has this special “drug testing device” that if it finds steroids, will make a wacky noise, and he finds steroids in the urine of both Kerry von Erich and Jeff Jarrett, and Dave Brown’s asking them how he got them and he goes “I have my sources.” (laughing) ... Also, Dr. Lawler says, of course, to a girl in the crowd “Don’t get excited, this isn’t a taste test.”

TGBL: (laughing) Boy, they got away with so much stuff in Memphis; it’s incredible. It’s incredible.

Bix: And he talks about how steroids cause brain damage or something like that, and you can tell Kerry Von Erich’s using them because of his interviews.

TGBL: Jesus!

Bix: Something like "Jeff Jarrett would weigh 90 pounds if he wasn’t on steroids."

- on the ludicrousness of the amount of leeway that Memphis Wrestling got away with on the air when it came to "risque" material.

-- “ '''You know the reason you haven’t wrestled against Lawler…the reason you two have not wrestled in those matches is because you’re green and you don’t know how to rassle! The only thing that you know how to do, brother, is to pull them britches down and to put them steroids in that booty! That’s the only thing you two idiots know, and you know it!” ''- Phil Hickerson to Jim Hellwig and Steve Borden in Memphis

 1:49:15 - Wrestlers in Commercials (Part 1) 

 1:58:16 - WWE Legacy Hall of Fame, Wrestling Hotlines, and Classic Audio - Sailor Art Thomas 

- A clip of Sailor Art Thomas on Dominic Valenti's Wrestling Hot Seat; 1998.

 2:05:08 - Book of the Week 

 2:14:50 - Bobby Simmons (Part 2) 

Bobby: The first Saturday that I went in to put the TV ring up, I get there about 8 o’clock in the morning and I cannot get in the station: ring the doorbell, nothing’s happening. You gotta understand: Turner – it was not the slick production company it turned out to be when it first started. I took my pocket knife and I jimmied the back door. I was afraid there was an alarm gonna go off, but it didn’t. I was able to get in by using my knife that way to get into the building. I go down, I weave my way through the control room to tell somebody I’m there to put the ring up so they know I’m in the building. There’s a guy running the control panel – he was bare-footed, he was strumming a guitar, and smoking a joint, and it was 8 o’clock in the morning. I told him “I’m here to put the wrestling ring up,” and he said “hey man, no problem,” and he was doing his thing. Turner was very much the bachelor in those days – he was the man about town, that’s when he had the reputation of doing the crazy stuff, but there was a – I went in on Saturday morning and heard something upstairs one Saturday and I went up there and looked in to see what it was, because I knew it was the business offices, but didn’t think anyone should be up there. So I walked upstairs, I’m looking around, and of course, Mr. Turner was under his desk trying to figure out how to get out from under there, and I just left, but he had had a long night; let’s just say that. But Ted loved wrestling, let me say this: there’s a catwalk above the light-frame in the studio. It was – I don’t know, 10 feet above the lights. Unless you knew it was up there, you couldn’t see it because the lights blinded you when you looked up. Many Saturdays after I started refereeing, I’d look up there and see him out on the catwalk watching the matches because he had a door that came right out of his office right onto the catwalk. So, he was around – not always in the forefront, but he was always around in the background. He loved wrestling.

- on his first interactions at the TBS affiliate studio, and Ted Turner's wild past in relation to wrestling.

 2:57:02 - Ron Skoler (Part 3) 

Ron: I got a call from Gary Juster at WCW and he said that his company was interested in perhaps doing a PPV with us – Eric Bischoff, and could we go to Atlanta. It turned out that Darryl Brooks knew a lot of people at Turner Broadcasting, and he actually knew the guy who was in charge of WCW, the actual guy running it on behalf of Turner Broadcasting. So, you know, we went there and we met with them, and they outlined what they wanted to do and I thought it was great to do a PPV. To get something like that behind us, because Turner Broadcasting, WCW, was going to lay out all the money for the PPV. It wasn’t – we were not going to have to risk anything, and we knew that with a PPV, we would have a hot house in Los Angeles, and we negotiated with them that the house show would remain ours and that they would lay out all the money for the PPV and we would not have to share any of the money on the house show, which we thought was a great deal. Where we went wrong is that I should have negotiated with them for guaranteed second PPV – regardless of what happened with the first one. Also, we should have had a higher price for it. They wanted to charge something like $14.95 or something, and I was trying to explain to them that people who want this will pay $24.95 or whatever it is because they really want this. They’re like “no, no, no.” The first time we would do it on a lower price, which turned out to be foolish because we easily could have sold more – just like at the live events, the more expensive seats, the ones that always sold out first. But, anyway, we had meetings with them, and everything seemed to be ok. I liked Gary Juster, I didn’t really like Eric Bischoff, but I think that’s probably par from the course. We got into bed with them, so to speak, and what happened was they were all gung-ho in the beginning, and Bischoff even talked about doing a “down and dirty wrestling show” every week or something, which I thought would have been great, which is exactly what I wanted, but I think they starting getting resistance from people in their company who were like “why are we doing this? Why are we doing this Mexican wrestling?” a lot of the American wrestlers, including – I heard – Ric Flair were not happy about this and didn’t think it was a good idea. By the time that the PPV was a week or two away, I think they were already sour on the idea. So, we ran the PPV, it was a phenomenal show – very hot crowd, very great show. You know, there was not a bad vibe for the first time, and we broke even on it. For their numbers, they broke even, which is normally encouraging. They didn’t lose money, and I think they probably made a slight profit on it, but it wasn’t a slam-dunk-home-run or anything like that. To say “Wow, we just made half a million dollars profit, we can’t wait to do the next one,” so I think what happened was they were soured on the idea because there were so many people within the company that felt threatened by this, or the establishment, they felt threatened by us where they didn’t like the idea, where they felt it wasn’t the business they should be doing, and Bischoff kinda soured on it before it even happened. You know, when it was a break-even, they just decided “ok, well that’s it, this was fun,” you know. “We’re not really interested in doing any more,” so that’s where it was at. At the time, people criticized us for “why are you doing this with WCW?” but those people were stupid: there was nobody else offering us anything. It’s not like Vince McMahon said “Hey, come with us.” It was either do a PPV with them or don’t do a PPV, and I wanted to do a PPV.

- on the initial meetings with Gary Juster and WCW, and the eventual cooling-off from their end after the event.