If last week’s Melody Monday was about realizing nostalgia can lie to you, this week is the exact opposite.
This week, we’re talking about a cassette tape I absolutely wore out as a kid: WWF Full Metal.
And I do mean wore out.
I was obsessed with wrestling growing up, so an entire cassette full of WWF entrance themes was basically made in a laboratory specifically for me. This was long before you could pull up any theme song you wanted on YouTube in five seconds. If you wanted to hear a wrestler’s entrance music outside of Monday Night Raw or a pay-per-view, you needed something like this.
And I had it on repeat it. Over and over and over again.
Full Metal is one of those things where I can hear the opening second of every track, and immediately get transported back to being a kid again. Not just remembering wrestling, but remembering how wrestling felt back then. These guys weren’t just performers walking to a ring. They were superheroes, villains, lunatics, giants and larger-than-life characters, and their music was a huge part of what made them feel that way.
The cassette opens with We’re All Together Now, which is pure mid-90s WWF weirdness. It’s catchy, upbeat, a little corny, and completely of its time. I don’t know that I’d ever put it on a regular playlist today, but if it comes on, I’m not skipping it either.
Then you get to Thorn in Your Eye, and now we’re talking. This song itself was the track that defined an era, but that era came a couple of years after the release of the album. It was an absolute banger too.
This was one of the RAW themes during that transition into the Attitude Era, sometime in 1997 and lasted until I believe sometime in 2001, and I still think it absolutely rules. Heavy, aggressive, chaotic, instantly recognizable. It sounds like Monday Night Raw should sound. To this day, I honestly think they should bring it back. You can modernize the graphics, update the production, change the sets, do whatever you want, but give me Thorn in Your Eye blasting over the opening of RAW and I’m immediately paying attention. In fact, if you could do some mash up of the original RAW theme’s opening, The Beautiful People, Thorn In Your Eye and We’re All Together Now I think you’d have a song that personifies what Monday Night RAW should be.
From there, Full Metal basically becomes a greatest-hits collection of mid-90s WWF entrance music.
Diesel Blues is exactly what it needed to be. Big truck horn, bluesy guitar, slow swagger. You hear it and immediately picture Diesel walking down the aisle like he owns the building. It’s not complicated, but entrance music doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to tell you who someone is before they ever reach the ring. The music fit Diesel, and in 1995 to me Diesel was the man.
Then we hit The Lyin’ King for King Mabel. Nope. Every album has to have one, and for Full Metal it was Mabel. I’d usually, not always, stop what I was doing and walk over to the stereo and fast forward over it. Then rewind because I went too far. Then fast forward a little bit, rewind a little bit… then say screw it and listen to the last 10 seconds of it. Moving on.
1-2-3 for the 1-2-3 Kid is one I still have a soft spot for cause I always liked the Kid. It’s got that lighter, energetic feel that matched him perfectly at the time. Then you get Goldust, which remains one of the best character themes WWF ever produced. Creepy, theatrical, strange, slow, dramatic. You could hear that music before even seeing him and know somebody unusual was about to walk through the curtain.
That’s something Jim Johnston was unbelievably good at. A lot of these themes didn’t just sound good. They sounded like the wrestler, which was his entire creative process. Supposedly he’s open to returning to WWE, and for some stupid reason WWE doesn’t seem interested. A lot of today’s entrance music is completely forgettable, outside of a few wrestlers whose themes actually fit them perfectly, like Oba Femi.. Bring back Jim Johnston and make entrance music memorable again. It’ll be time for Royal Rumble in a few months, and no event showcases the modern suck of entrance music than that. The clock hits zero, music starts playing, and everyone is waiting to see the person because the music makes everyone collectively “who the fuck is that?”
The Smoking Gunns get Smokin’, which is pure cowboy wrestling music and completely ridiculous in the best way. Again, this is why wrestling themes were so much fun then. Nobody was afraid of being obvious. Cowboys? Give them cowboy music. Undertaker? Funeral march. Razor Ramon? Give him something that sounds like he should be driving through Miami in a convertible with a toothpick in his mouth.
Then comes one of my absolute favorites on the entire cassette: Psycho Dance. I loved this track then, and I still love it today. Psycho Sid already looked like a man who might snap at any moment, and Psycho Dance fit him perfectly. It’s heavy, weird, intimidating and just unhinged enough to work. I played this one constantly as a kid, and unlike some things you love when you’re young, I can still listen to it now and understand exactly why.
Then you get Razor Ramon’s Bad Boy, another all-timer. That guitar riff is Razor Ramon. There are some wrestlers where you almost can’t separate the character from the music, and Razor is one of them.
Hart Attack follows for Bret Hart, and again, instantly recognizable. That opening guitar squeal followed by the riff is burned into the brain of anybody who watched WWF in the 90s. Bret could walk through the curtain tomorrow with that theme playing and it would still work.
Hakushi’s Angel is probably one of the more underrated tracks here. It’s atmospheric and different from everything around it, which matched Hakushi perfectly. He was a complete badass character too when he debuted in 1994. Then comes Graveyard Symphony, and there’s really nothing to say about Undertaker’s theme that hasn’t already been said. Bells. Organ. Funeral march. One of the most perfect wrestling themes ever created. You hear that bell and everything changes. An iconic theme song for a legendary performer
Then we get Sexy Boy. I mean, come on. Shawn Michaels was my favorite during this period and really remained one of my favorites until he retired. He’s second only to Curt Hennig for me. This song is forever immortal in my mind. It is ridiculous, arrogant, cheesy and absolutely perfect. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet somehow, it worked for decades.
The cassette closes with With My Baby Tonight, Jeff Jarrett’s country song, and honestly, I’ve always liked it. It’s catchy as hell. You can make fun of Double J all you want, but that song gets stuck in your head, and I still remember the In Your House where “he” performed it live. Still have my VHS tape that I recorded from the PPV. In reality, it was the Road Dogg singing the song, and he did a good job with it.
And that’s basically Full Metal.
Fourteen tracks, and with the exception of King Mabel’s theme, there really isn’t much here I don’t enjoy. What makes this one different from Spice last week is that the nostalgia actually survives the replay.
I don’t listen to Full Metal today and wonder what I was thinking. I listen to it and completely understand why kid-me wore the cassette out. These songs were attached to people I watched every week, people I pretended to be in the backyard, people whose moves I tried on pillows and stuffed animals, people who felt absolutely enormous to me at the time.
And maybe that’s the secret to wrestling music. A great entrance theme is never just a song. It’s the first few seconds before somebody larger than life walks through the curtain. That’s one of the things I miss most in wrestling today. Too many wrestlers feel normal, too many themes sound interchangeable, and too few entrances make you sit up before the person even appears.
Full Metal captured that feeling better than almost anything else I owned as a kid. I can put it on thirty years later and immediately remember what it felt like when these people seemed enormous, when the music hit and you knew exactly who was coming.
And if somebody at WWF is reading this, seriously: put Thorn in Your Eye back on RAW. Bring back some of the grit while you’re at it.
It still rules.
What wrestling cassette, CD or soundtrack did you wear out growing up? And what entrance theme still immediately takes you back? Sound off in the comments.
