In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, The Headbangers (Mosh and Thrasher) spoke with Steve Fall about their wrestling career, how they got their gimmick in WWE, a possible Hall of Fame induction, their current deal with WWE, and a lot more. Scroll down to the bottom of this article to watch the entire interview.
On who created their WWE gimmick and how they started wearing skirts:
Mosh said, “We were wrestling in Arkansas for Ozark Mountain Wrestling and we got a message to call Cornette. He was interested in bringing us in, but back then we were wrestling as The Spiders. Cornette basically called us and he said, ‘Listen, I like to bring you boys in, but I hate the masks. I hate The Spiders.’ You’re gonna laugh at this. He told us he was in New York at a Glenn Danzig concert. It was like a big mosh pit. They were beating the shit out of each other. They were spitting on each other. They had piercings and tattoos. They were wearing dresses and skirts. He said, ‘It was just chaos, but the way their attitudes were and the way you guys are, you know, you’re from that area, I think you could make this work. It’s not that I’m expecting you to get piercings or tattoos or wear dresses or skirts or anything like that.’ It was his original idea. When we showed up on our first day in Smoky Mountain, he handed me a Slayer shirt, he handed Glenn a Metallica shirt, and we had shorts and sneakers and boots on. Like we really had no idea what the gimmick was going to be and as it went on, we just kind of evolved into what it is now. So it was originally his idea. I mean, when we went out there, we didn’t even know our names. He goes, ‘You’re gonna be Headbangers. You’re probably going to be Mosh. You’re gonna be like Slasher or something and Glenn changed that to Thrasher because of Slash, but it was literally on the fly on TV during an interview where we came up with names.”
“We came up with the skirts. We were still in Smoky Mountain. The problem we were having was not with the crowd or anybody in the locker rooms. We looked like PG 13 except we were twice as big. So we’re walking around a thrift store and I, as a kind of a joke, wandered over to the women’s aisle and grabbed a skirt, put it on, and I walked in the middle of the aisle. He turns the corner and he’s like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I went, ‘Listen, this is kind of the thing. It’s going to be different.’ We buy a skirt, we try it out, and if it doesn’t work, you know, we don’t do it anymore.’ He was like, ‘Nope, not doing it.’ So after about 35 seconds, I convinced him to put on the skirt. The funniest part of that is we put them on in the locker room, but we were very hesitant to put them on in front of all the boys. We’re putting the skirts on and they’re all looking at us and they’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ Glenn’s like, ‘We’re just trying something different.’ Like, just see what happens. Cornette said the same thing. He kind of looked at us and he went, ‘Okay, let’s see.’ We went out and we got so much heat. Here we are right outside Knoxville and you know, we got a bunch of rednecks, and they’re yelling at us. They’re calling us sissies. They’re calling us everything you could possibly think of. We got in the back. Cornette looks at us and he goes, ‘Where did you buy those?’ We said, ‘Thrift store.’ He handed us each $20 and he goes, ‘Go buy more. You now wear skirts.”
On teaching MTV’s Road Rules Contestants to wrestle:
Thrasher said, “They just told us that, you know, you’re gonna introduce them to the squared circle. So we just went with that. Everything that we did was on the fly for that.”
Mosh added, “We legit laid everything in as if they were regular workers, like guys who were wrestling every night. We laid everything in and there were no punches pulled.”
Thrasher finished with, “We went up to the producers of the show and stuff like that. We were like, ‘Where’s the line that we draw? You know, how far do you want us to go?’ That’s exactly what he told us. They said, ‘Treat them as you would anybody else’, so we did.”
On winning the WWE Tag Team Titles:
Mosh said, ‘What did it mean to us? Everything. People say to me, like, ‘Career wise, like, what’s the greatest?’ That pay-per-view and WrestleMania 13 are two of the greatest when it comes to that. You’re at the top. You’re at the pinnacle. I mean, everyone wants to be in WWF and if you’re a champion in WWF, you know, you’ve made it. You’ve done it.”
On Mosh becoming WWE’s Beaver Cleavage and Thrasher getting injured:
Thrasher said, “I tore my AC, my meniscus. Back in, I think it was ’99, that surgery was really, you know, in depth. It’s not like it is today. It put me on the shelf for a good nine months to almost a year. When they approached Chaz with that, you know, we talked about it. He still has to, you know, go out and do what he does and stuff like that. I didn’t think anything like that was bad for us. It wasn’t talked about like it was a breakup. It was, hey, he’s gonna do this while you’re out recovering. Then towards the end of it, we kind of got different information. I was going to come back as Doink the evil clown. Bruce Prichard was going to be my manager. So I don’t know if you guys remember back then Bruce used to go out to the ring and pick up different objects during the hardcore matches and he used to run backstage. So that was going to be my weapon when I came back as the evil clown Doink, and Chaz was going to continue to do the Beaver Cleavage thing. So as it got closer to actually doing it and stuff like that, the Beaver Cleaver thing I guess fell off or lost steam.”
Mosh added, “I was a little hesitant, but at the same time, a little excited at the opportunity to do my own thing and figure something out. The Beaver Cleavage thing was, I mean, it was fun. It was funny. Those vignettes were hysterical. It was so much fun doing the vignettes, and then, you know, my head’s buried in boobs every night outside the ring doing vignettes. I mean, who’s complaining? The only complaint I had, and hindsight being 20/20, looking back at it now, I didn’t like the girl who was my mother. We just didn’t click, personalities. We didn’t get along. At that point, I was like, this is going to suck. We just weren’t a good fit, but I didn’t look at it from the business side of it going, ‘I don’t have to like her. We just have to get along on TV. I have to like her for 10 minutes. That’s it.’ I didn’t look at it that way. I didn’t even look at it back then where, you know, they were bringing all these females in and whoever had a female valet kind of was getting pushed to the top. That’s when Jeff had Debra, and Lita was coming in like, you know, all these women were coming in and the guys were getting pushed. So we did the vignettes. I did the one match against Christian. I have another undefeated gimmick. Beaver Cleavage never lost, but that’s when you know, Sable was doing her sexual harassment suit and all this other stuff is going on. So anything that was sexually edgy, and I mean, let’s be honest, they were insinuating I was having sex with my mother. I mean, that’s where the gimmick was going. That’s when they killed it off and they’re like, you’re just gonna be Chaz, this kid from New Jersey.”
On returning to WWE in 2016:
Mosh said, “My son is now 19. He’s a sophomore in college and he’s seen us do, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of indie shows. I mean, he finds it boring. I mean, at one point we looked over and he was laying on a table sound asleep in the middle of our match, but okay. One of my dreams always was, on my bucket list, was to actually have him see me in a WWE ring. So when they were in town, I’d reach out to Road Dogg and Triple H and go, ‘Hey, you guys are gonna be in town. Can I somehow get on the show? It’s a house show.’ They’re like, ‘No. Insurance reasons. You can’t.’ I’m like, ‘I’ll sign a waiver, I’ll sign whatever. You don’t have to pay me. I just want one time for him to see us in that ring.’ So Road Dogg knew this all along. I got a text one time, and I had Brian’s number still in my phone and it said, ‘Hey, are you guys available to do SmackDown on Tuesday.’ This was like, I don’t know, Thursday or Friday. I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay, who is this and where’s the rib?’ He immediately called me. He’s like, ‘No, no, no.’ He goes, ‘No rib at all. We’re doing this storyline and you guys would fit perfectly into the storyline. We’d like to have you come out.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re in’, and then like two days later, he calls me back and he goes, ‘I’m so sorry. You got to have full blood work done’, and blah, blah, blah. There’s no time to get it all done. ‘I’m going to try and carry the storyline over to the following week, but I can’t promise’ and I went, ‘No big deal. I appreciate the thought, but if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, I appreciate the thought.’ I purposely watched SmackDown the next Tuesday. What’s the storyline? Where do we fit into this? I see nothing and I’m like, alright, either they’re able to carry the story over or I’m just dumb and I’m missing where we can fit into any of the storyline. So Tuesday comes, Wednesday comes, Thursday comes, and I don’t hear anything. I’m like, I guess we got scratched. Friday afternoon at four o’clock I get a call from Howard Finkel, ‘Chaz Warrington, Howard Finkle here with the WWE. You are needed at SmackDown on Tuesday night.’ Within an hour, we had plane tickets. We had everything we needed. To go back was just, again, that’s probably in my top three moments of being able to go back or in my wrestling career because, you know, my son was able to watch me live on TV. My wife at the time, she actually set up her phone on the floor videoing him watching me on TV, so when I got to come home, I got to watch him watch me and I got to see his reactions.”
On the strangest place they have wrestled:
Thrasher said, “I would say the weirdest place that I ever wrestled was down at Cowtown Rodeo in New Jersey. It was in the middle of a dirt rodeo stadium. That was my very, very, very first match.”
Mosh said, “We wrestled in I think it was Clarksville, Tennessee. It was in the middle of the mountains. You had to go up into Kentucky and come back down to get back into Tennessee to go and as we’re pulling in, there’s a white building, and spray painted on the side of the building was, long live the KKK.”
On signing WWE Legends contracts and rumors of going into the WWE Hall of Fame:
On the Legends contract, Mosh said, “Basically they call it a nostalgia contract, but otherwise, the inside is the legends contract. It’s basically merchandise, action figures, we’ll be on video games, hopefully, T-shirts, hopefully when the merchandise starts coming out. We signed it in March. They said it could take 10 to 12 months with production and stuff. So I think once that starts, and maybe they’ll probably bring us back on TV because there’s appearances rolled into that whole contract we signed. When we’re doing other stuff, we can do whatever we want as long as there’s no merchandise made of us and sold. So we’re free to do, like when the NWA thing came up and we were asked, I checked with the office first because I didn’t want to, you know, have a conflict of interest and you know, get that contract killed off or be in trouble and they said,’No, you are free to do whatever you want, as long as there’s no merchandise made.”
On if there is talk of them going into the WWE Hall of Fame, Thrasher said,” I’ve learned in this business for 30-plus years to never say never. So yeah, no idea. That would be an honor and a privilege.”
Mosh added, “My initial thought is no. I’m like, what have we done? To me, we’ve been around for 30 years. I think we’ve made a good impact in 30 years, we’ve done a lot, but at the same time, I go, we haven’t done that much. There are other legendary tag teams that aren’t in the Hall of Fame yet that I think probably should get in before us, but at the same time, I literally think like what did we really do, and then you start talking to people and they start rattling off the different things we’ve done. We’ve been around so long is one of the things, and I go, yeah, maybe, so the answer, the legit answer is who knows?”
This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page.
