Jon Langmead’s Ballyhoo! is a thorough and entertaining history of American wrestling’s early twentieth-century history.
My way into the world of early 20th century pro wrestling was realizing that it had an awful lot in common with the indie rock world of the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, which I had some firsthand experience with and about which I’d read and heard plenty. When I’m not working my day job, struggling to write something, or cleaning up after my cats, I try to play the drums. It was through the drums, and working with some great songwriters, some of whom show up in the list below, that I was exposed to a deeper love of writing and reading. (Of those that don’t show up, a special nod to Vincent Scorziello, Tanya Donelly, Jay Walsh, Charles Bissell, and Amy Bezunartea.) The wrestlers whose lives I write about in Ballyhoo just never seemed all that different to me than the musicians who worked a circuit of clubs and towns, effectively as independent contractors, and traveled hours and hours for almost no pay to play for what they hoped would be a few people in a strange town. They both lived dangerous lives and were exposed to lots of temptations and opportunities for bad behavior. And both were in professions that had lots of great things to recommend them, for sure, but mostly, if you weren’t careful, could leave you bored and heartbroken.
Big Star, “Thirteen”
This first one is cheating. It really has nothing to do with the book but everything to do with my life. I can remember hearing this song for the first time on either 99.1 WHFS or 103.1 WRNR as a 16-year-old in my bedroom in Baltimore on a Sunday night. No offense to Rush or Pearl Jam or any of the other bands I loved at the time, but hearing “Thirteen” that night rearranged my whole life. The beauty of it just made me want to look for more things that could communicate back what it felt like to be alive. The line “Tell your dad to get off my back/ Tell him what we said about ‘Paint It Black’” reached out to me to from 1972 and introduced me to a whole new world of secret pacts and shared lives.
Donald Fagen, “I.G.Y.”
I love Steely Dan and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly might be my wife’s favorite record, so it’s gotten an awful lot of play in our house over the years. (The drums are by the great James Gadson. If you want to learn to play a shuffle, play along with them on repeat for about 100 hours). Two World’s Fairs figure pretty prominently in the life of Jack Curley, the wrestling promoter at the center of Ballyhoo. First is the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, which he ran away from home to be a part of, and second is the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, held in Seattle, where he promoted a reality-bending series of wrestling matches. The title “I.G.Y.” refers to International Geophysical Year, so the song isn’t really about a World’s Fair, but I always pretend it is, anyways. Something about the narrator’s optimism makes me imagine people marveling at new inventions and dreaming of a better future. I imagined Jack Curley at different stages in his life, caught up in that fervor, soaking up the atmosphere and working his schtick. If you want a song that’s actually about a World’s Fair, check out Aimee Mann’s “Fifty Years After the Fair,” from her wonderful Whatever record.
The Paranoid Style, “Barney Bubbles”
One of the bands I play drums for is the Paranoid Style, a Durham by way of D.C. band fronted by songwriter Elizabeth Nelson. I’d never heard of Barney Bubbles, real name Colin Fulcher, the great English graphic designer who died horribly in 1983, until 2019, when Elizabeth sent me the demo of a song she had written about him for an album we were preparing to record. I loved the song immediately, and through Elizabeth and eventually writer Paul Gorman, I came to learn more about Bubbles’s life. His most iconic designs were for Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and other artists associated with Stiff Records, but Bubbles was always working at something. He produced hundreds of pieces in his day, set a mercilessly high bar for himself, and seemed to be on a constant hunt for ideas. Gorman’s book, The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, came along just as I needed a lift to help me get my own work finished. Bubbles’s life was an inspiration to me and a reminder to keep busy with the business of being inspired, to keep looking for the mystical in the everyday, and to try and avoid running yourself into the ground while doing it.
Elvis Costello, “Veronica”
Over the eight or ten or however many years I spent working on Ballyhoo, for a lot of different reasons, I needed to put it down for a while and then come back to it. In some ways this was good because it gave me the chance to reconsider things from a fresh perspective, but it was risky all the same. Anytime I got lost in the woods or needed to get excited again about writing, I could put on an Elvis Costello song and remind myself of the power of words and language and the way they can help you get into the lives of others. “Veronica” specifically made me imagine all the characters in my book later in their lives, as enfeebled older men, neglected and wasting away in memory care facilities, dreaming about their life.
Billy Bragg & Wilco, “Joe Dimaggio Done it Again”
I love the first two Mermaid Avenue albums so much. Their mix of heartbreak, wonder, politics, and just pure whimsy seem to cover the whole gamut of life in America. On this song, I always imagined Woody Guthrie and his family sitting around and listening to a Yankees game on the radio. It felt like the same way I would sit on the back porch as a kid and listen to Orioles games with my dad. On radio, things like the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd take on a whole new dimension. Wrestling fans in the late-1920s and 30s would have been listening to matches on the radio, too, including those featuring “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg, who was the world champion for most of 1929. I often thought about what that was like for them. What sounds did they focus in on? And did any of them feel the way about Gus that Woody Guthrie and millions of Yankees fans felt about “Joltin’” Joe?
The Mendoza Line, “Settle Down Zelda”
The Mendoza Line are one of the great underappreciated bands from the last thirty years and for my money, you can’t beat their 2005 record, Full of Light and Full of Fire. The language and the imagery are evocative throughout, particularly on this song. The man in the song seems menacing in the way he throws his power around, but in the end, he winds up as frail and vulnerable as any of us. I thought about this song a lot as I was researching the story of New Orleans Senator Huey Long’s drunken night at a cocktail party in Nyack, New York in 1933, which serves as the prologue to Ballyhoo. I stole the word “wheel” to describe the way Long moved around that room, insulting staff and guests. He wound up getting punched out in the men’s room, a pitiful end to the evening made even more pathetic by his attempts to cover his tracks.
Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”
The songwriter Chuck Prophet once posted to Twitter that people often ask him what his favorite Bob Dylan record is, and that his answer is always, “Whichever one is on the turntable.” I couldn’t agree with him more. This song stands out because of the stanza about the thrill-seeking promoter happy to stage the next world war just so they can sell a few tickets for people to watch it. (The drums, another great shuffle, are played by the legendary Chicago drummer Sam Lay.) Something in that guy’s scheming confidence and inability to imagine failure (“Yes, I think it can be very easily done”) reminded me of Jack Curley’s efforts to stage the 1915 heavyweight championship fight between boxers Jess Willard and Jack Johnson. There was nothing easy about pulling that show off and Curley was happy to exploit racial tensions to squeeze out some sales. It took him six months, during which he travelled more than 15,000 miles, but in the end, Curley stuck his bleachers out in the sun and got his world war.
The Lemonheads, “Rudderless”
I never really appreciated the Lemonheads until my friend Jennifer O’Connor, a great songwriter who I play drums with, played It’s A Shame About Ray in the van on a long drive between shows. I saw them years later in San Francisco when another friend, the incredible guitarist Chris Brokaw, was in the band. “Rudderless” was the highlight of that night, and the word stuck with me. I finally got to work it into my own book as a way to describe the effect of Jack Curley’s death in 1937 on the business of pro wrestling.
Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”
Citing a Springsteen song, no less one off of Nebraska, makes me feel like a walking cliché, but here we are. Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A., and, in particular, Tunnel of Love, were huge inspirations to me when I was younger. For Ballyhoo, I lifted the line about life consisting of only winners and losers and the need to make sure you’re always on the right side of the line. I re-purposed it for Jim Londos, the wrestler who shot to fame in the early years of the Great Depression. I think Londos symbolized that struggle for his audiences, most of whom were watching their own lives slip into a crisis of deprivation and need. Londos always won in the end, no matter how badly his opponent beat him up or how bleak things got in the ring. I think that people needed to see that. That promoters managed to screw him out of his championship in 1932, only to all but beg him to come back to work from them by 1934, made him all the more inspiring to his fans.
Buck Owens, “A-11”
For a good year or so, when I wasn’t writing or researching pro wrestling, I was listening to a lot of Buck Owens, trying to copy the great shuffle feeling that his band captured on so many of his songs. The slow ones, like “Together Again,” require your playing to be super relaxed but also steady. Slowing down is the kiss of death. But the super fast ones, like “I’ve Got a Tiger By The Tail” and “Act Naturally” require you to be even more relaxed. On those, tensing up is the kiss of death. I first heard “A-11” (drums by either Willie Cantu or Ken Presley) while sitting in with a band for a Saturday afternoon show. Written by Hank Cochran, I just fell in love with the story of a guy so lost over a break-up that he begs his fellow bargoers not to play a particular song on the jukebox. He’d played it so many times in happier days that he’s memorized its location. The language is so direct and you get the whole story in just a few lines. As I was busy rewriting and rewriting, it was a good reminder to cut out whatever felt draggy or superfluous and to try to find some kind of connection to people’s real lives whenever possible.