Busted Open satellite radio show with Chris Jericho
Hosts: Dave LaGreca, Doug Mortman, and Reby Sky
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Chris Jericho on leaving the WWE? "Well yeah that’s what I wrote about. Back than some of the guys don’t understand, some of the fans don’t understand that there really was a war, a wrestling war. It wasn’t just on TV. There was a competition between the guys in the business. When I came from WCW into WWE I had all this hype, all this pomp, all the circumstance and basically a big target on my back, which I didn’t realize at all. All my friends were still in WCW and I didn’t really know anyone in the WWE that could tell me that stuff and nobody did.

"There was a big political mine field blew my leg off on this one, than boom blew my nuts off on that one. So everything I did do wrong I kind of did because I was under the microscope. I wasn’t schooled in the style of WWE. Their style was completely different to WCW, which really and you could see that page that DDP went through when he first came in. He was the WCW champion and when he came into WWE he didn’t know what to do. It was like that because no really helped you in WCW about what a match was like, about how to bump and feed as a heel. You know how to do promos and that sort of thing.

"If you look back on my entrance a lot of people say it was one of the greatest entrances of all-time. When I watch it back 'Yeah it was good, but I cringe at how I reacted to some of the things. It was almost like Popeye the sailor like Brrrrr, Arrr.' I had this over exaggerated cartoon face and I can see Vince [McMahon] as well as I know him now can see him going 'Oh my god. This kid is killing it.'

"I can see things were wrong right off the bat and they continued going downward from that because I just…as much experience as I had, I never had the experiences with that much politics. That style more than anything. I’m not going to blame anybody and say, 'People are after me and it’s not fair.' It was warranted because I wasn’t prepared for where I was and the spot I had at that point in time. The only thing in my defense was that no one was really telling me that, or helping me along with it. I had to figure it out for myself."
 
On WrestleMania. They needed something to jump start it again like The Rock. Do you feel like it’s part of that? "Absolutely, but what’s wrong with that. I mean last week I listened to your guys’s show and you guys were complaining as critics do that WrestleMania had no jump to it. Vince McMahon is a genius. You can say what you want and whatever you want to say. He [Vince McMahon] will always pull stuff out his ass. You wait and see what he [Vince McMahon] comes up with at WrestleMania. You think The Rock is the last thing is going to be the big selling point. No way!

"I’m sure he’s [Vince McMahon] got two or three other things up his sleeve for this WrestleMania. I think this WrestleMania when it’s all said and done buzz is going to blow the last three out of the water. Nobody thought that up until last week when The Rock came out. What’s going to happen next week? What’s going to happen the week after that? There’s still five weeks until WrestleMania. Wait and see what he does because he’s not going to let the fans down at WrestleMania time. He [Vince McMahon] never does."

Chris Jericho on putting guys over. How many people did you put over? "At this point you become bullet-proof. I could lose to you in five seconds and walk out with more heat that I have before I walk into the ring. You can’t, you can’t, most of those losses, like there was this big thing 'Jericho is losing.' Guess who booked that? Me. I don’t need to beat Evan Bourne. What is it going to do for me to beat Evan Bourne? What does that do to help the company? Nothing! If Evan Bourne beats me maybe that gives him a platform do something else?

'I beat Heath Slater. Big deal! Heath Slater beats me all of a sudden you say, 'Oh geez Heath Slater beat Jericho! You keep an eye on him.' It’s not going to hurt me in the least ever, ever, ever. If I go back to wrestling 25 years from now there’s still going to be nobody that can take my spot because when you know what you’re doing and you get that confidence. Confidence is the most important thing for wrestling, singing, acting, and writing. Once you get it’s hard to be brought down you know."

On wrestling going PG. The Shawn Michaels match at the Great American Bash, the really bloody match. That match started the whole PG Product. Were there any ramifications from that match that changed wrestling into a less bloody product? "No not that we heard. It wasn’t intended to be that way. It was just one of those one’s where Shawn [Michaels] hit a gusher and there you go. It added to the intensity of the match. It was that angle, basically just, it was like a mutated strain that just becomes, starts with a little seed and it becomes this crazy, giant, massive, plant that is out of control that the angle wasn’t supposed to be anything. Then Shawn [Michaels] did the tweaking of the knee, then I started calling him a hypocrite, started calling the fans hypocrites.

"Then I had the idea to throw him through the Jumbo-Tron, the obscenely expensive Jumbo-Tron 5000 cause I wanted to stop doing the highlight reel and then it went onto the match you were talking about where you got all this blood. And then we did thing with his wife Rebecca where, you know, I wasn’t supposed to give her a fat lip. Things happen. I moved too fast. She moved too fast or whatever it was she got clocked man. I nailed her. Shawn [Michaels] and I felt so terrible because she, she…I f---in' knocked her block off, man.

"But once again it looked exactly like that, so that added intensity to it. I think that the best angle I’ve ever done. Actually, Jack Lanza who’s been in the wrestling business 45-50 years said, 'It’s the best angle of all-time.' I think you can make a case for that. I think you can make a DVD of that entire angle, all the promos, all the matches, all the things that happened, and give it to bookers or to young wrestlers and say, 'This is how it’s done.'

"At the same time Edge and Undertaker were doing the same thing on Smack Down. You can do the same thing with them. So on RAW you had Jericho Michaels; on Smack Down you had Undertaker/Edge. It was a great time for the business around 2008 because you had these great angles at the same time, long terms angles, which we don’t see a lot anymore man."

On John Cena failing trying to cut a Rock-type promo: "First of all, John Cena is great. He’s a great wrestler, great performer. I knew that from the start, I wrote about that in my book in 2002, when I knew that he was going to be something special when no one else did. I actually had to call Vince and ask him to let me put him over at the first pay-per-view in Detroit, I think it was called Vengeance, and he’s like, ‘why?’ I said, 'Because, he’s got something.' He says… ‘You want to put him over? Ok, whatever? Do what you want.’"  

"And, I put him over, and then he did some other stuff on Smackdown, and then he got busted right back down into being the whacky roll up guy as I would call him when he would use all of these roll ups for his finish, and where you know, whatever teams sports colors were in the city he was in, he’d wear those tights. Then he did the rap thing, then he took off from there and became who he is. So you know you can cut John Cena down cause it’s the cool thing to do like but it’s like cutting down Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber is a talented mother fucker and he’s 16. Get over it, he’s going to be around when he’s 46."

Chris Jericho on Chris Benoit: I couldn’t write a book without addressing that, Chris was my best friend in the business, and had been since '93, '94? (speaking about his excerpt in the new book) What I try to do is humanize Chris. He wasn’t this rampaging monster things, he was a great guy, a very humble, polite, very positive, and that’s why it’s still so impossible to comprehend the things that happened the last couple days of his life, and no one will ever understand that, but I wanted to bring in this human element, where, this is this guy until those last couple days… and how did I deal with it, how did I feel about it."

Jericho on how he feels about Benoit being removed from WWE history. "I don’t blame them, I don’t blame them 100 percent in the least… I mean it is a shame because he was such a great performer, but how can you watch those matches, I don’t really want to see those matches anymore. I know people probably still want to watch him on YouTube, but Chris almost brought down the entire industry, so I don’t blame Vince for not wanting to hear that name or see that face again."

Chris Jericho on his tweet that on TNA, if you don’t think you work for the best company that no one will ever think you do: "Not the first time, I mean Bobby Roode did it this week, the girl (Madison Rayne) said it about the best female organization if she came from there… The point is…they’ve been doing that for years and years and years. When I worked for WAR in Japan, the company was half the size of new Japan, but for me, WAR was the best company in the world, and if anybody talked badly about my company, I’ll fight you. And if we had any kind of interaction with New Japan, I wasn’t trying to work for New Japan, I didn’t give a shit about working for New Japan, all I cared about was working for WAR, and flying the banner as high as I could.

"When we worked for ECW, you’re making hundreds of dollars a night, you’re not making much and there were hundreds of people out there, maybe a thousand at the arena, but you would die for that company. It wasn’t a gimmick, it was a revolution, and anybody that worked there in ‘95 will know what I am talking about. You believed in that company, you believed in Paul Heyman, you believed that we were the best company in the world, were we the biggest, no, did we have the most notoriety, no… but were we better than anybody else, yes. And when you talked that way, and you act that way, the fans believe it.

"Those fans would have died for ECW back then I guarantee it. That’s the attitude you have to have. I don’t care if TNA is the worst company in the world, I don’t care. Once you sign a contract for there, you work for Dixie Carter, and you do the best you can to make people believe it’s the best company in the world, and if all you’re doing is bitching about WWE, then go fucking work for WWE, or act like a has been that used to work there. TNA should be the best place in the world to work, and if you don’t believe that, the fans won’t believe it, they’re not gonna buy your product, they’re not gonna believe your product, and they’re not gonna watch your product."

Jericho on whether he'll make his return at Elimination Chamber or is it going to be on Raw. "Now that’s the thing people ask me, 'When are you coming back to wrestling? When are you going to do this? When are you going to do that?' I got asked today, 'The rumor is you’re the new singer of Velvet Revolver?' Even if I was the lead singer of Velvet Revolver, even if I was coming out of the Chamber, why would I tell you assholes?"
 
Other topics covered in this extensive 32-minute interview include if CM Punk is the best heel in the business right now, himself as a heel, Ric Flair, and touring with Fozzy.

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