Amanda Mack
I showed up to the Fozzy show in a fucking Modest Mouse shirt. No, it wasn’t a statement. I had been wearing it all day and had made plans to change, but I called the Lyft to Victory North and the car that got pinged was a lot closer than I was expecting. There wasn’t time to change, so I wore the fucking Modest Mouse shirt. When I got to the queue and took in the bro-turnative turnout, all in Nine Line Apparel and an incredible amount of Pop Evil shirts (they came through recently), I decided maybe it should be a statement and it should say, “I know I’m out of place, but aren’t we all in a way? We’re here to see one of the anomalies of our music collection unless there’s a stable of other joke-turned-legit metal bands fronted by professional wrestlers that I’m not aware of.”
Fozzy was the brainchild of Rich Ward of Atlanta rap-metal band Stuck Mojo. In 2000, professional wrestler Chris Jericho, whose real name is Chris Irvine, was invited to play with them and after giving the band a few spins, he came on as a permanent member. He fronted the band under the pseudonym Moongoose McQueen, a pompous, gaudy rockstar who felt like a very fitting companion to the persona he’d been wrestling under for around ten years at that point, Chris Jericho.
The band also came with lore: all the songs that Fozzy performed, mostly covers from metal bands of the 70s and 80s, were songs they’d written only to have them stolen by bands who’d gone on to make millions off of them. I was at the peak of my pro wrestling obsession in the early aughts, so I got to see much of this unfold in real-time. While it was highly entertaining to watch Chris commit to this schtick and indulge in his very well-documented love of metal, it firmly limited them to being a parody act. Maybe that’s the reason that between the second Fozzy album, Happenstance, and their third one, All That Remains they abandoned the Moongoose McQueen bit and backstory. 2005’s All That Remains was the band’s first album of songs entirely penned by them. It produced the very minor radio hit “Enemy,” but more importantly, it officially kicked off Jericho’s journey to prove he could do more than imitate what he thought a rock star was; he could be one.
Saying that Fozzy’s show in Savannah, Georgia was highly anticipated feels like an understatement. The excitement started way back in 2018 when the short-lived venue, The Stage on Bay, tried to bring them here but folded a few weeks before the show, an outcome the owners felt was due in part to the fickle nature of the locals. In 2020, new venue Victory North announced a date for September which, for obvious reasons, got postponed to April of 2021. Because of the continued chaos of the worldwide event I still don’t feel a need to mention, it was finally moved to October.
Black Satellite, a metal band edging on industrial out of New York City, was tasked with opening this show and open it, they did. Lead singer Larissa Vale has a growl that cuts through the center of earth to high five Satan and then punches you in the face on the way back up. Under the moodiest lighting of the night, they performed songs from their debut album Endless along with their 2020 single “Void”. Just as I was thinking to myself, “Gee golly, they sure would sound swell doing a Rammstein song”, they ended their set with a killer cover of “Sonne”.
I think South Carolina band, Seven Year Witch, currently holds the record for the fastest win of a crowd I’ve ever witnessed. Whatever air of apprehensiveness hung over the audience as we watched the quartet take the stage, it was quite literally high kicked out of the air by frontman Aaron Langford‘s David Lee Roth-esque acrobatics.
They blasted through their set with a dizzying wall of crackling 70s rock n’roll, accompanied by Langford’s southern-fried cheeky banter between songs. You would think a band with that kind of aesthetic would lend well to a cover of a Led Zepplin song or perhaps even a Lynyrd Skynyrd cut that wasn’t “Freebird”. But Seven Year Witch, adding another tally to their count of expectation-subverting feats for the night, covered “I Wanna Fuck You” by Akon.
The Lonely Ones, formally known as Bobaflex, is probably a good band. There’s a lot to suggest that they’re a great band, but having to follow Seven Year Witch felt like cruel and unusual punishment. It actually made me wonder if the Virginia-based band had done something to upset Jericho & Co. to have that placement on the lineup. The Lonely Ones were the last of the openers and were left to scramble for anything the audience was willing to give up ahead of the headliner. It seems that even they had felt the breeze off of their tourmates’ blistering performance since frontman Marty McCoy joked (presumably) that it wasn’t fair how good they were. But as far as I could tell, there were no dampened spirits on stage. They still passionately delivered their brand of sailing hard rock, including a stompy, clappy, arena rock number that was either named after the band or served as the inspiration for their new name. Just as it felt the audience was beginning to recoup and really receive them the way they deserved to be received, a turn helped by a rousing rendition of “Flash” by Queen, it was the end of their set.
With the crowd all nice and slickered up after two and a half hours of drinking and openers, Fozzy kicked off their set with their newest charting single “Sane”, following it up with “Drinkin’ with Jesus”. While this was my first time attending a Fozzy show, this was not my first time seeing them perform live. I tried to stay away from anyone’s phone recording of an entire set, but I’d seen enough videos on YouTube to know what to expect from Chris as far as his stage idiosyncrasies and attire, but something I was strangely unprepared for was the between-song banter with the crowd. Or rather the lack thereof. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so taken aback by Chris showing up to a Fozzy show to melt faces and saving his sharp-tongued wit for his podcast, “Talk is Jericho,” and the squared circle, but I was.
Most of the show’s very tight (and laminated) setlist was largely made up of tracks from their top 10 most popular songs on Spotify: “Nowhere to Run,” “Do You Wanna Start A War?”, “Burn Me Out,” “Painless.” They did, however, road-test two new songs, “The Vulture Club” and “Purifier,” which are slated to be on what will be their eighth studio album. Having been together for about 20 years now, the band has songs that qualify as old-school gems. The one they pulled out for this show was “Enemy” a four-minute track that became ten minutes with a squealing guitar duet from Rich and Billy Grey.
They closed with a Sin and Bones favorite, “Sandpaper,” but I knew they weren’t going to let us leave Victory North without hearing “Judas,” the band’s most legitimate mainstream hit to date. Fozzy also knew this because they left the stage for barely enough time to give the audience a 
chance to chant for the song in their encore. This was the high spot of their set, the song that got some of the barely-nodding heads in the audience to come alive. People took out their cell phones to flip them around and record themselves singing along with Jericho. It might have been obnoxious had I not gotten the feeling that Chris loves this part of the show just as much as the crowd. If this was not the moment he felt the most like a rock star, it’s certainly the moment he looked the most like one, holding the mic over us and beaming as we yelled the words back at him. As a nod to their roots, Fozzy’s parting gift was their only cover of the night, AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds,” which Jericho whipped out an impressive Bon Scott impression for.
I’m so happy that I get to report that Fozzy gave us a rock show and not anything from the list of other spectacles I dreaded it being. It wasn’t a parade of gimmicky, knock-off bands in the vein of Steel Panther. It wasn’t a vehicle used to shill Chris’s role in AEW. It was a sweaty, devil-horns-waving rock show curated by a band pretty far removed from feeling like a pro wrestler’s weird ego trip anymore.
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