Chris Jericho is a man you should envy, somebody you should aspire to be like.
I’m not saying the dream of every University of York student should be to become WWE Champion and front a band that has been releasing albums and touring the world since 1999, but Jericho is a man who appears to have grabbed hold of everything he ever wanted in life, seen the opportunities and made things happen.
“I went to a journalism school when I got into high school. But I realised pretty early on that it was fun to write about people, but I’d rather be the person that was written about. I wanted to be in a band, I wanted to be a wrestler since I was, shit, 12 years old, 13 years old, so it’s kind of just what I decided I wanted to do and I focussed all my assets into making that happen.“
It is perhaps telling that Jericho attended journalism school; it suggests a desire to be involved, at least in some way, with big names, big events and a desire to be close to the spotlight. His need to be the one being written about rather than the one doing the writing is unsurprising, therefore, for a man whose entire working life has been devoted to performing.
Alongside a wrestling career of over 20 years, one currently on hold, and over 10 years with his band, Fozzy, Jericho has also appeared in films, been on TV shows and written books. He is a man who appears comfortable in all aspects of show business.
“All those sort of things kind of come from the same place, it’s not really trying different things, it’s just if something comes up that I feel I can do, I do it. It all stems from entertainment, from show business. I love music, I love wrestling, I love acting and that all kind of ties in together, it’s all live performances. I had two dreams when I was a kid and I was very fortunate to have them both come true so it’s not something I take for granted that’s for sure.”
Indeed, it was the show business side of wrestling and the performing aspect of the business, rather than the physical action, which drew Jericho toward it from a young age.
“I used to watch it with my Grandmother, I just thought it was cool, I loved the characters, the personalities behind it,” he tells me.
“Wrestling’s a strange animal, obviously it’s all acting and performing and playing a character but it’s kind of an extension of who you are as a real person so I guess the best way to describe it is it’s kind of like the show Seinfeld, where Jerry Seinfeld was playing Jerry Seinfeld but it was an exaggerated version of him. Chris Jericho plays Chris Jericho in the WWE and it’s an exaggerated version of me so it is a little bit different from anything else you see – it’s not quite real, it’s not quite acting. It’s kind of a strange purgatory in between.”
This is not the only odd aspect of wrestling. It is marketed as sports entertainment for it is not like any other sport where winning and losing is the ultimate be all or end all. Jericho does not hide the fact that wrestling is scripted, that what’s happening in the ring is not real and the ultimate goal is putting on a top performance for the fans.
“Winning and losing never meant anything to me, it was more about the performance and the match and putting on a great show. You can win a match but if it’s for shits who cares? If they’re going crazy that’s all that matters so I never really cared about winning or losing, whether it’s a title or whether it’s the opening match or anything between. I go out there and make sure I have a great match, the best performance possible.
“You want to know that you did a great job and that you did a good show, you know what I mean? As a professional, wrestling isn’t real so it doesn’t matter if you win or lose – you’re not really winning and you’re not really losing. The way that you win in wrestling is by having a great performance and a great match, one that people will be talking about.”
He does not mind playing the crowd-pleaser or the bad guy, telling me: “I liked them both, I mean it’s more fun being the bad guy, but it’s harder to stay the bad guy because people end up liking the bad guy, so as long as people are responding and as long as they’re reacting to what you’re doing, either or is fine with me.”
In spite of all this, Jericho does still enjoy being able to talk about his title achievements in the world of WWE. He has won 30 world championships between WWF/E, WCW and ECW, a six-time WWE World Champion and a record nine-time Intercontinental Champion. Perhaps best of all, he will go down in history as the first ever Undisputed WWF Champion, after he beat The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin on the same night, December 9, 2001, to unify the WWF and WCW Championships.
“It’s something cool to be able to say, it was such a long time ago and I’m a million times better a performer than I was back then, but at the time it was a pretty honourable thing. Of course just doing that alone doesn’t make a career, it’s just one aspect of something that I did. It was great at the time and it’s still something cool to be able to say that I did, especially within the circumstances of beating The Rock and Austin on the same night, so yeah it was fun,” says Jericho, fairly nonchalantly, on the experience.
And with so many years of experience under his belt, so many famous feuds with the likes of The Rock, Triple H, Shawn Michaels and John Cena, he is unable to pick a favourite time or storyline in the industry.
“I just loved everything, man, I mean I just love the fact that I had these goals when I was a kid and I just got to live my life doing something that I love to do. I got that with music too and that’s why, whether it’s with the WWE or whether it’s with Fozzy, the fact that we get to tour the world and come to places like the UK and play, it’s the dream come true and it’s something that I don’t take for granted.
“There’s a lot of people who aren’t happy with their jobs and with their lives and I’ve got two amazing jobs where I get to do what I wanted to do. There’s a lot of sacrifice along the way, and a lot of hard work but it definitely all pays off and it’s all worth it in the end.
“All the matches are hard because you’ve gotta go out there and put on a great show and try not to get hurt. There’s a lot of aches and pains and bumps and bruises, I don’t really know which one was toughest. There’s a lot of guys that I loved working with; I loved working with Shawn Michaels, I loved working with Rey Mysterio, I loved working with The Rock, I loved working with Cena, those matches were hard, they were fun, so if that’s what you want to do that’s what you look for.
“I was pretty messed up last year. I started doing Yoga, DDP Yoga, and it really changed my whole training style, it took away all of the pain and took away all of the soreness so I feel better now than I ever have in my life. I’m probably in the best shape of my life and I feel amazing and that’s without going to the gym. I don’t go to the gym anymore, I don’t lift weights anymore. As you get older you kind of have to change the way you train and it’s really made a big difference for me so it’s something that I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”
Jericho will soon be making the trip over to the UK to tour with Fozzy between the 27th November and 6th December, and he is looking forward to returning to somewhere he feels extremely comfortable.
“We love Ireland, we love Scotland, we love England, there’s so many great places and we’ve played them all, from the biggest of the big to the smallest of the small, so this tour, England-wise, we’re doing London, Stoke on-Trent, Manchester, Brighton, we’re going over to Dublin, we’re heading over to Wales, we’re doing Glasgow. All those towns are amazing towns with great rock’n’roll fans, great Chris Jericho fans, so it’s just the thought of tearing the roof off and having some fun man, that’s what it’s all about.
“I guess with the fact that we’re coming to the UK with Fozzy for probably the 12th time over the years, we’ve always considered the UK to be our second home. Always the shows are amazing and the crowds are amazing and that to me is the bigger part of what I do, the fact that I get to do something that I always wanted to do on a worldwide level.”
Amongst the sacrifices Jericho has had to make to get to where he is today, spending so much time away from his wife and three children is arguably the biggest.
“It’s always hard, but that’s the cool thing with Fozzy, we don’t do tours that are longer than three weeks and when you’re done you get time off. I’m off for two weeks at home every day taking the kids to school, I pick them up every day so that’s the balance of it. This is my job, I’m on the road and it’s what I’ve always done and it’s what I always will do so it’s hard, but I’m sure it’s hard for guys who have to work 12 hour days, six days a week as well. You’ve gotta make it work because this is what we do for a living.”
Jericho has no hopes for his children other than for them to succeed in life in the same way he has, not by becoming a professional wrestler or musician but by making sure they get to do what they really want.
“I’d encourage them to follow their dreams,” he says. “That’s what I did, if you want to go for it then just make it happen. Don’t take no for an answer, don’t listen to negative people and just go for it, so that’s the advice that I would give them whenever they tell what it is they want to do and they decide on that.
“They know what I do, but I’m just Dad to them. Sometimes they’ll watch a little bit here and there but nothing like posters on their walls or anything like that; I’m their Dad, you know.”
Something you notice about Chris Jericho when speaking to him is that he talks with as much passion about his band as he does about wrestling. For him it is no side-project, no venture he has leapt upon because of his WWE fame. Indeed he is unsure whether his wrestler image has been a help or a hindrance when it comes to his music.
“I don’t necessarily know if it helped- they were always two separate entities for me, two separate passions that I had. If anything it might have been a little bit of a prejudice against us because I was known as the wrestling guy, but I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to me what people think. We just keep doing what we do, we put out great records, we play shows and keep on doing it. Sooner or later even people that are doubting you will check it out and they always end up liking us, so I’m not sure if it really helped or hurt but I just felt that it’s something that I do. I do these two things and if you like it, great, if you don’t like it , stand aside and let the people that do like it get a better seat.
“To me, music is music and wrestling is wrestling and there’s a lot of guys in the WWE who are music fans. There are a lot of wrestling fans in the world of music and I’m sure those guys would want to do both but I’m the only musician in the WWE that really plays. I’ll just let them do what they do and I’ll be the guy that does them both I guess.”
Jericho names two of the world’s biggest metal bands of all time- that is, Metallica and Iron Maiden- as huge influences of Fozzy’s, but, whilst they are primarily a metal band, he also takes inspiration from other genres from across the decades as diverse as Queen and the Beatles
“We love Metallica, we love Iron Maiden, we love Bullet for my Valentine and The Beatles, Journey, Queen, y’know… there are a lot of different influences that we love and you can see those influences in our music for sure,” he tells me.
As to whether the future holds yet another return to wrestling for Jericho, he rules nothing out. Unsurprisingly, he is happy to let his life carry on and continue to ‘go with the flow’, as it is, and keep taking the opportunities he is given.
“I never said that I wouldn’t (return to wrestling), I just didn’t really put much thought into it. Over the last three or four years Fozzy has been the priority and everything else just has to kind of fall in line behind what’s going on with the band so maybe when we’ve recorded another record I’ll go back to WWE for a bit if they want me to – if not then I won’t but I don’t really have any plans or thoughts about it right now.”
Finally, I ask Jericho about fame and whether seeing plastic dolls of yourself and video games with your character in is something you ever get used to. For such a light-hearted subject, it elicits from Jericho a particularly deep and thoughtful answer on the subject of immortality.
“At the risk of sounding egotistical, I’m pretty much used to it because I’ve been in video games since 1997 and made into dolls since around then as well, so it’s always cool for sure,” he says. “It’s cool to know that there’s probably 150 different Chris Jericho dolls out there and then so many great video games which keep getting better and better, so it’s always very cool to be involved for sure – it immortalises you if nothing else.”