Ox Baker Triumphant
Lyrics
I will rise from the swamp where they dumped my private plane
I'll be clutching the life preserver in my teeth
And I will find the highway
And I will flag down a truck
Worry lines on my forehead, blank stare underneath
And when I come back to town
I'm gonna cast my burden down
A little worse for wear
Practically walking on air
I will thank my ride and crawl my way back inside
To the guts of the building where my enemies
Hide in the dark like roaches
And I will signal the camera crew
And everyone will do what he's been trained how to do
Sweat dripping from my face[1] as my moment approaches
Click your heels[2], count to three
I bet you never expected me
A little worse for wear
Practically walking on air
Banter
- This is a song about a professional wrestler named Ox Baker. Master of the heart punch. You get hit with a heart punch, you could possibly die. That's the word on the street about Ox Baker, is that if he hits you with a heart punch you could land in the hospital or the grave. That's a hell of a thing to have happen to you if you just went in, maybe trying to wrestle scientifically, and the god-damn good-guy baby-face going in there. Wrestle, you know, like the holds and the moves, and Ox Baker comes around and he's six-foot-four. And he has a handle bar moustache. And he'll punch you straight in the goddamn heart as soon as look at you. That's the thing about Ox, is that you're there to score a victory, you know, and to gain glory for yourself and for your family name. Ox Baker has a t-shirt that says 'I Like to Hurt People'. So you guys have different ideologies. One of you has this ideology of like good and evil, and probably courtly love and all kinds of other things. Ox's ideology is primitive and dark and springs from the rocks underneath us, and we can't even understand it because we graduated from it a long time ago. But Ox is very interested in these darker, more primitive, base, earthen ideas. But he doesn’t express it that way. He expresses it by punching you in the goddamn heart. So it's probably going to be hard times for you, when you get into it with Ox, 'cause he doesn't really care. You care. Ox doesn't care. The guy who doesn't care has a big advantage in life, generally speaking. He has a disadvantage as far as like, feeling at home with the world, but a big advantage over you. This is a song that imagines that Ox Baker has been taken away somehow and dumped because they wanted to get rid of him, because they don't understand his philosophy, right? But Ox will come back. That's really, that's my message. That's why I'm in this business in the first place, to let everybody know that Ox is coming back. He will come again in a sort of glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. (2013-06-03 - 9:30 Club, Washington DC)
- When I was a kid, I was really into pro-wrestling. But pro-wrestling was a very cheap game in those days. There were not script writers working on the tagline for the guy to have when he makes his entry with the lighting rigs and the fire pots and everything. There was just a wrestling - well, it was a boxing ring that they were using for wrestling in the Olympic Auditorium, and some lights. That was kind of about it. It was kind of the indie rock of sports. And the people who showed up thought it was the greatest thing in the world, but everybody else didn' think so. And the way it worked was, in LA, we had a very unimportant bunch of wrestlers who no one ever heard of outside of Southern California and maybe a little bit in Arizona. But, in every wrestling market, there comes a time when some guy swears if he loses a match, he’s gonna leave town and you’ll never see him again. And what it means when a guy does this is that he had family to visit someplace and he needed a month off. Maybe he had something going on in his life. So he's in the New York market and he says to a then-young entrepreneur named Vince McMahon, Vince, I gotta go out to California to see some people. Can you set me up with some dates out there? And Vince would say, oh yeah, there's an organization out there. And so, suddenly this guy you’ve only seen in the magazines is being interviewed, and he seems to have some beef with our local wrestlers. But even as a kid, you go, well, you don’t know any of our guys! Nobody out here has ever heard of you except me, because I make my mom buy me the wrestling magazines. Otherwise, you're just some guy, and you're all mad at Chavo Guerrero, who never did a thing to you. Right? But his anger was contagious, because it was senseless, because it seemed to originate in itself. It was a perfect emotional feedback loop. Ox Baker comes out and says 'I'm gonna defeat Chavo Guerrero' - my hero - but I liked him, because he came out so filled with hatred. He never heard of us or our piddling little LA franchise, and he started talking, and what came out was just blind, incoherent - and I mean that in a real sense - rage. The line that I'm always quoting that he said - because this is when I learned from my stepfather what the word inarticulate meant, in a good moment between the two of us. I was watching Ox Baker and trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. My stepfather had this look and he said, 'Oh, that's so sad.' And I said, 'Why is it sad?' And he said, 'Well, he's inarticulate. Being interviewed is not a thing for him, but he has to do it anyway.' So, what Ox Baker said to we, the viewing audience in Los Angeles, was: When I tell you that the blood is gonna run from Chavo Guerrero's eyes, you better come down to ringside and bring your handkerchief so you can dip it in the blood. My stage patter aspires to the condition of this great utterance. Anyway, this song envisions Ox Baker having been kicked out, having been told, we have no more use for you here in Florida, so go find a gig someplace else, and Ox taking the whole thing kind of rather more seriously. Thinking, you know, maybe I'm actually going to have to wrestle these people to prove my point. (undated)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. "blood dripping down my jaw" (2013-06-03)
2. "click your goddamn heels" (2013-06-03)