Though the songs themselves are sonically worlds apart, the recently released videos for indie rockers the Mountain Goats’ "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" and Canada’s DJ crew A Tribe Called Red’s "Suplex" both showcase the bruising moves and oversized personalities of pro wrestlers. Like the Beat the Champ album it’s pulled from, director Scott Jacobson’s video for "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" pays homage to the territorial wrestling days of the 1970s and '80s using regulars from the current Los Angeles-based independent promotion Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, plus Guerrero himself. The clip for "Suplex" features members of Toronto’s Smash Wrestling roster, partially because pro wrestling was one of the few places where the members of A Tribe Called Red say they could see depictions of actual indigenous people in mass media when they were growing up.
Pro wrestling has been used in music videos before—from Tyler, the Creator’s "Domo 23" to Bif Naked’s cover of "We’re Not Going to Take It" off the Ready to Rumble soundtrack—but the connection between the two goes back over 30 years to the time when both of these worlds first became national sensations. In 1983, Cyndi Lauper released the video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", the first single from her album She’s So Unusual. Lauper turned into one of the breakout stars of the early MTV era and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" won the first Video Music Award for Best Female Video. In it, Lauper’s mother is played her actual mom, while her father is played by Captain Lou Albano, the legendary wrestler and manager known for his flamboyant style and the rubber bands he pierced to his face with a safety pin. Albano’s casting was made possible by the video’s producer Ken Walz and director Edd Griles, who had developed a relationship with the World Wrestling Federation (now known as the WWE) and its owner Vince McMahon when they tried to make a movie set in the world of pro wrestling. As David Shoemaker writes in his book The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling, "Albano’s Papa was an overacted neon epiphany, wagging his finger and throwing his arms in dismay—all the camp that served him so well as a blowhard antagonist playing to the wrestling world’s cheap seat now made newly potent under the lights of MTV hyperactivity."
The idea to bring in Albano came from David Wolff, Lauper’s manager and boyfriend at the time. (Wolff became a recurring figure in Lauper’s videos, first as the conflicted love interest in "Time After Time" and a campy biker in "She Bop", both of which also feature cameos from Albano.) After the success of "Girls Want to Fun", Wolff orchestrated a multi-year entanglement in which Lauper feuded and then reconciled with Albano in the wrestling world, resulting in tons of press coverage for both the singer and the WWF. This started the so-called "rock 'n' wrestling" era that helped result in the first Wrestlemania pay-per-view event, a crucial moment in the WWE’s progress to become the billion dollar global corporation it is now.
As Lauper’s dalliance with wrestling continued, Wolff became more involved with the WWF, serving as a producer on their Saturday morning cartoon show "Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling" and working on a totally nuts music video featuring dozens of wrestling personalities performing "Land of 1000 Dances" and appearances by Lauper, Meatloaf and Rick Derringer.
Here, David Wolff explains how the connection between Lauper and pro wrestling and music videos came to be, and how it got so big.
Pitchfork: When you were growing up were you into wrestling?
David Wolff: I was always a wrestling fan, from when I was a little kid. My dad got me into it. I grew up in Stamford, Conn. The WWE wasn’t there yet, they were in Greenwich, Conn., then they moved to Stamford. I was a fan of Captain Lou Albano and Bruno Sammartino and guys like Karl Von Hess and Haystacks Calhoun. And I understood the psychology of wrestling—I saw the theater, I saw the soap opera aspects of it. As I would watch it, it was kind of like I knew what the general public didn’t know. I just related to it, I don’t know why or how.
Pitchfork: When did the idea of bringing the wrestling world into Cyndi Lauper’s career come about?
DW: Cyndi had actually met Captain Lou Albano on a plane coming back from Puerto Rico before I even knew her. She told me about that later. That subliminal connection to wrestling started in my mind. When we were talking about the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" video, we decided that we would use Cyndi’s mom, and that felt perfect to me, and we were talking about who the father should be, and I said it should be Captain Lou Albano, if we could get him to do it. It would be an amazing thing—it would be funny, it would be camp, it would totally fit into the comedy of the video. The producer of the video was a guy named Ken Walz, he had a relationship with Vince McMahon. At this point I didn’t know anybody in wrestling. When I learned that Ken knew Vince McMahon, I said to do whatever you’ve got to do to give us Captain Lou for this video. He called me back about an hour and said that Vince said it was fine. So I was in seventh heaven.
Pitchfork: What was it like working with Lou?
DW: We’re on the set of the video and Lou didn’t hear song, didn’t hear anything, he just showed up. And when he walked in, I walked up and introduced myself. From the minute we said hello to each other, we bonded, we were buddies. From that minute forward, we spoke every day for years. He taught me a whole lot about the [wrestling] business, because I would ask him all the questions. The relationship with Lou and Cyndi was so natural and so loving that I knew we had a winner with this combination of wrestling and rock music. I could see it from the video.
I approached Lou with this idea where he would say he was really Cyndi’s manager. We created our own soap opera where it wasn’t just in the wrestling community, but we would take the soap opera into the real world and the real media. Then we would create events in the wrestling community to settle these disputes. He loved the idea. I called Ken Walz and told him he had to get me to meet Vince McMahon, because I thought that I could do something with wrestling and rock music that no one ever did before. I went out to dinner with Vince and his wife and we got along great. He invited me to the offices and we started having meetings about what we could do with Cyndi and Lou and wrestling. I told Vince that if we created a storyline and involved rock musicians and MTV, we could create a storyline that was much bigger than any of his other storylines that were confined to just the wrestling community. I could bring it to the major media outlets. He loved the idea. He said, "If you can get my guys [meaning the wrestlers] to support this, go do it."
Pitchfork: How did MTV get involved?
DW: I went to them and I had a meeting with Les Garland, who was the head of programming back in the early days. I told him my idea and he said he wanted me to come back tomorrow and explain this to his staff. The next day, every head of every department was in this meeting. I outlined what it was and how I wanted to use MTV with this whole storyline. I had the 100% percent support of MTV and Vince McMahon with this crazy idea had to get "the rock 'n' wrestling connection," which is what I was calling it.
Pitchfork: Why did MTV want to do it so badly? At this point their status was still rising and they were becoming a sensation, so why did they think that wrestling was something they wanted to get involved in?
DW: They wanted to get in on the ground floor of something that was getting big. Les Garland saw what I saw. And their ratings for their wrestling show, I think, were the highest on MTV. It was big, it was fun, it was entertaining.
Pitchfork: So how did the storyline unfold?
The basic idea was we would Cyndi go on the Piper’s Pit with Rowdy Roddy Piper and Lou Albano, and Lou and Cyndi would get into a tiff where he would say he was the one who really made her. They had this fight where Lou said that without him she’d be nothing and that all women deserve to pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. When he said that, Cyndi grabbed him by the shirt and hit him over the head with her purse and hit Roddy.
Then the real media picked up on this, because people thought this really happened. Overnight, we were getting calls from around the world. It was amazing, because it’s exactly what I thought would happen if you took a person who had nothing to do with wrestling and have her get in a fist fight with wrestlers. That was the start of everything. All of the Piper’s Pits and all that stuff was shown on MTV to lead to a fight where Cyndi was going to prove to Lou that she could beat him at his own game in wrestling. The way we were going to do this was that Cyndi found Wendi Richter, a woman wrestler, who was going to go up against the Fabulous Moolah, who was going to be managed by Lou. That battle was televised on both MTV and Vince’s program.
Then it went into another battle with Hulk Hogan after Roddy Piper body slammed me after Lou and Cyndi made up and got an award for all this money they had made for fighting multiple sclerosis. We had this big event at Madison Square Garden where Dick Clark was the MC. Roddy came in and busted it up and kicked Cyndi and body slammed me. When he body slammed me he had to slam me on my side because a cop came into the ring, because nobody knew we had planned this. He almost broke my back and I had to go to a chiropractor for three weeks to straighten my back out. Before we did this, Hulk Hogan came up to me and goes, "You better not fuck this up, this is our business." I said to him, "I’m not going to fuck this up, it’s my business too." From there it went on to Mr. T and all that craziness, all of those things were born from the stuff we were doing with Cyndi.
Pitchfork: When Captain Lou showed up in the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" video, did most people know who Captain Lou was or was he just a weird looking guy with rubber bands in his face?
DW: The masses did not know who he was, but wrestling fans knew who he was. What made it mean something was that people began writing about him all the time. It drew more attention to wrestling from media that never even followed wrestling or gave it any credibility. It was regarded as a subculture. With Lou being in the video and us promoting this whole wrestling connection, it took wrestling out of the dark ages and into the mainstream. It was helping us make Cyndi famous and we were helping make wrestling famous.
Pitchfork: How long was Cyndi involved in this world?
DW: A couple of years, off and on. Eventually wrestling went on and we went on. Cyndi’s personality and sense of humor is so good and she has such an incredible delivery of a joke—she was the perfect person to bridge the gap. She was able to do those wrestling interviews, she was able to do all the stuff in the ring. It just worked.
Pitchfork: Did she like wrestling?
DW: Not to any extent to the way I did. I told her, "If we do this, watch what happens. It’s going to be insane. I can feel this, it’s a natural." She said, "Okay, I’ll follow your lead on this one."
Pitchfork: In the midst of this, you guys did the video for "Goonies are Good Enough" from The Goonies soundtrack.
DW: I called Vince and I said, "Hey man, we’re going to do this thing for the movie, it’s going to be big, I’m going to need seven or eight of the wrestlers, can I pick the ones I want?" He said yes, so I picked Andre the Giant, obviously Roddy, Lou and the rest of those guys and we created this ridiculous story. We got Steven Spielberg involved, because it was his movie [Spielberg is credited as an executive producer and coming up with the story], and Dick Donner, who was a major director, directed it. And we just laughed for three days.
Pitchfork: When did you decide that you’d taken it as far as you could?
DW: It kind of dissolved with Cyndi naturally. Cyndi was a recording artist at the end of the day, and when the novelty of this started to wane, wrestling went on and they kept growing and growing, and we went back to our normal way of doing stuff. Otherwise, what would we have done? Cyndi was not going to become a wrestling star, she’s a singer and she still has a career.