A collision of worlds: when the Misfits joined WCW
Punk rock and pro wrestling share a special connection. They’re both subcultures where outsiders can find refuge from an uncaring world. They’re both partial to an outlandish stage costume or 12. Most importantly, they’re both boom and bust industries. The two of them have periods of mainstream popularity before falling back into the status quo of being about as cool as sepsis. For professional wrestling, however, there will never be a commercial peak like there was in the late 1990s. One so all-conquering that a band as image-conscious as the Misfits, who are probably more famous for their logo than any actual song, just had to get on board.
It is very difficult to overstate how popular wrestling was in the late ’90s. These salad days for scripted fights in skimpy tights saw the two biggest wrestling companies in the world go directly head to head. WWE (WWF at the time) and our subject today, WCW, put their flagship shows on at exactly the same Monday night timeslot. In contrast, the Game Of Thrones finale had 13 million viewers for HBO’s highest-viewed and most anticipated production ever. At the height of the Monday Night Wars, an average episode of WWF Raw and WCW Monday Nitro was getting 11m viewers every single week.
This was big business, but by 1999, Dubya-See-Dubya was losing the fight. Fans were jumping ship to WWF’s Attitude-era product, which saw Steve Austin and The Rock in their prime. WCW sought to steady the ship by bringing in any celebrity guest who looked at them twice. This was nothing new where the big boys played. This is, after all, the company that once had Robocop come to Sting’s rescue, and its World Championship was won by David Arquette.
In 1999, the company had one of its midcard stars, Vampiro, teaming with that other bastion of late ’90s taste, the Insane Clown Posse. In a quite frankly damning indictment of WCW’s place in the food chain, though, the Posse left to begin their own headline tour.
The goth-tinged, makeup-caked vampiro was forced to find an alternative band to team up with, and on November 1st1999, with Nitro set to air from the Target Centre in Minneapolis, the man born Ian Hodgkinson found his kindred spirits playing at a rock club literally across the street. At this point, the Misfits were essentially Jerry Only and whoever he could coax into some tight leather trousers, and they were doing anything they could to keep up with the mainstream icons they inspired.
So, when Hodgkinson asked if they’d like to appear on TV that night, the band jumped at the chance. This led to the band being cast as Vampiro’s heavies, backing him up as a heel stable.
Credit where credit’s due, Jerry Only bought into it. He installed a wrestling ring at his family’s factory back home in New Jersey and seemed convinced he could make it work as a professional wrestler. His bandmates didn’t share his enthusiasm for the project, however. They seemed convinced they were, I dunno, musicians or something like that. Later that month, Only’s career as a wrestler began and ended on the same night, in a steel cage with Dr Death Steve Williams. It went about as well as you can expect from an untrained bass player fighting a man called Dr Death in a cage.
The bizarre spectacle came to an end only a few weeks after it started and ended in much the same way most things concerning WCW ended. Acrimoniously and with threats of legal action. Misfits guitarist Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein (Paul to his mum) did meet his future wife Stephanie while on the road with WCW, so it wasn’t a total write-off, but it wasn’t far off. Sometimes, the world only has room for one theatrically minded cultural juggernaut with more muscles than taste, and in 2024, the Misfits are still active, which is more than can be said for WCW.
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