Southwestern Territory

Lyrics

Small screen, July evening view
Up and down Grand Avenue
Where the legends get made
Out with the boys' brigade
Part of the motorcade
Flew home from Texas last night
Slept on the flight
Work like a dog all day
Born to chase cars away
Die on the road someday
I try to remember what life was like long ago
But it's gone, you know
Climb the turnbuckle high
Take two falls out of three
Blackout for local TV

Stand in that cold empty hall
Wait for your name to get called
Burn like hillsides on fire
In the squall of the ringside choir
High as a wire
Nearly drive Danny's nose back into his brain
All the cheap seats go insane
Keep my eyes open and try to think straight
No one drives on the 60 this late
Feel like the last person alive
Francisquito to Glenshaw Drive
I try to remember to write in the diary
That my son gave me
Climb the turnbuckle high
Take two falls out of three
Blackout for local TV

Banter

This is a song about the days of the regional territories in professional wrestling, and I explain this for the people who didn't say 'yeah'. Wrestling became big business when the regional territories got consolidated. Before that, it was strictly a working-class sport. It was very cheap to go to the wrestling matches. You could take your whole family for a twenty-dollar bill. And, uh, there weren't, like, you know, you know these scripted promos with giant spotlights and stuff where people stand on a big stage and fireworks go off after they say their catch line and everything? There was none of that, right, it was like, dudes, nearly naked dudes, and then there was usually one women's match per evening, uh, The Fabulous Moolah was the king- queen of all wrestling women, but they were, um, you know, they would give these interviews with a microphone much like the one I'm speaking into, right, there'd be one guy standing and saying, you know, 'So what do you intend to do this week,' he'd say, 'I will murder anyone who stands in my way, Jeff, and I hope everybody comes down to the Cow Palace this weekend to see just what I will do to Greg Valentine.' There was no way, there was no way that you could miss that these were just working stiffs, right. They were just dudes -- I find a job washing dishes, they find a job throwing each other onto the mat, it's the same basic deal. Uh, it was incredibly compelling to me. This is called 'Southwestern Territory'. (2014-06-15)
JD: I would like to welcome back to the stage my doubtless very confused bandmates.
Audience: [yells of PETER are heard]
JD: Nah, that's Matt. Peter's the tall skinny one.
Audience: Wurster!!
JD: Yeah, that's the other one.
Peter: The other tall skinny one.
JD: So we are in the mid-south territory, which, who did this one belong to? Jerry Lawlor is correct. Andy Kaufmann (?) came out here, Andy Kaufmann came to Memphis. In the days of the regional territories, which were a time when wrestling was a small stakes business. You'd have a promoter, who worked maybe Nashville and Memphis, maybe Biloxi or something, and that was his neighborhood. And then you had Ed Farhad (?) up in Michigan working his territory. And they were small little fiefdoms of wrestling. I lived on the West Coast, it was really hot there for about two years before I got into it. When I was into it, it was in decline. Not that many people showed up and the building was falling apart. The TV was on UHF. It was the Southwestern Territory, which is what this song is called. (2015-04-02 - Mercy Lounge, Nashville)
You wanna do Southwestern Territory while I'm over here? [piano chords] How many of you were here last night? [woo!] You guys have already heard this story. You don't have to listen if you - so. In professional wrestling before the consolidation of all of the individual regions, you had what were called the territories. There was the Southwestern territory, which is the name of this song, there was the southern territory, and they were all sort of, like, fiefdoms. There were these little, individual kingdoms run by these really ambitious guys. I have no idea how they got started, it's something I like to think about - you wake up one morning and you go, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna find some guys, and I'm gonna ask them, do they wanna wrestle? And then they will say, well I dunno if I really wrestle, and you will say, it's not wrestling exactly, you're gonna get hurt very badly, but you won't - the outcome is predetermined. But actually, the pain is otherwise real. And then they will say sure, sounds great, why not. And then you say, cool, your name is Dick the Bruiser. And then the guy says, oh- okay, cool, what do I get paid? Fifty dollars. To get beat up. Yeah. Cool. I'll see you on Friday. This is my theory about the territories. About how it worked. Because there were these guys, who were just entrepreneurs. And who would start these territories, and you could move from territory to territory, but you had to be able to work with these guys. This all got consolidated in the 80s, but before, it was kind of like, if you were on tour in the early 80s, you would drive through someplace, and instead of seeing a Subway, and a Starbucks, and a Burger King, and a McDonalds, you might see a place called Joe's, and you might say, man, I don't know anything about what's going on in there, it could be the greatest meal you ever had or it could kill you, and this was part of the appeal of the territories. And they were small stakes games. The southwestern territory was the smallest of them all, and it's where I grew up. (2015-04-12 - City Winery, New York City)
[audience yelling for various songs] Next song on the setlist! It will be much better! Yeah! Next song on the setlist! [audience laughs] I'm gonna tell you a short story. Not a short story in the literary sense of the form, but it's not terribly long. So for most people, when you think of wrestling, you think of a vast monolith that is in fact run by a dude named Vince McMahon, whose father was also in the business. [boos] Well, now, on the one hand, there's a lot to say about Vince McMahon. Business wouldn't be what it is if he hadn't done the things he'd done. But at the same time, prior to Vince McMahon was called the age of the territories. It was very much like scenes, if you used to read maximum rock n roll, read the scene reports. Go, aw man, stuff going on in Cleveland. But you wouldn't know, because it was pre-internet, and unless you were trading tapes, and I hope that you were [yeah!] you didn't really know what was going on in Cleveland. You read a little report and go, I gotta go to Cleveland and see what's going on. The territories were their own places. The LA territory was one thing, portland was another, San Francisco was totally separate. There wasn't a whole lot of bleed through. The territories were small, and it was a small stakes game. Lotta these guys had day jobs, and at night they would go get themselves blasted to bits. Bruised up, banged up, for the sake of a craft they believed in. (2015-04-13 - Union Transfer, Philadelphia)
This is about wrestling. [woo!] Professional wrestling. [bigger woo!] After the amateur level, you become professional wrestling. It's why you practice your trade. In the days before the whole thing was consolidated under Vince McMahon [boos] I know right, there was a system called the territories, which meant that, they were like scenes. If you think about it, if you read Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, I know you all do, they used to have scene reports, like, here's what's going on in Columbus. And you'd read about it on the west coast and go, awh, it sounds like they have some good bands in Columbus. And that was the only way of finding out about it. The territories were, the country was carved up into these little regions, and it'd be like, you know, Michigan and parts of Indiana would belong to Ed Farhad, who promoted there, that was the Michigan territory. And Vince McMahon's father was from the Eastern territory, they were small little areas, you didn't work outside them all that often, it was a tiny, it was an independent scene. This is about that time. (2015-04-16 - Bogart's, Cincinnati)
This is about wrestling. [woo!] it's about the days of the territories. So in the early 80s, the territories were consolidated under Vince McMahon Jr, and then the territories went away. Before that, the territories were like the scene reports in Maximum Rock n Roll. They were these things where, like, two states, or in the case of California, two parts - southern and northern - would have their own dudes running it, and they had their own plotlines. So it was like, like you were following a comic book, and you had your own regional variation of the comic book, where the character had regional references and knew the places and people that you knew. It was a small little world that you could buy into for five bucks on a Wednesday. (2015-04-23 - Mr. Smalls, Millvale)

Southwestern Territory

Lyrics

Banter

Live Performances

Footnotes