woebegone jabroni presents

“Can you imagine anything uglier than a nearly sixty-year-old Ziggy Stardust?” – David Bowie

It is January 2024. The fifty-three year old professional wrestler and rock dilettante Chris Jericho is standing on the deck of the cruise ship Norwegian Pearl somewhere between Miami and Costa Maya.^[1] It is the second night of the fifth annual Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Rager At Sea. This will be one of three performances over the four-night cruise by Jericho’s group Fozzy. It calls to mind the Stephen King story ‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’: some wayward travelers miss their turn on a road through a dark forest and end up in the town of Rock and Roll Heaven, a village peopled by the restless spirits of dead rockers. They soon realise they’re trapped in this isolated place, and in the evening when they’re led to a rock concert on the common they learn that ‘time is different here […] when the guys really get cooking, they could go on for a year or more.’^[2] In what is revealed to be a Rock and Roll Hell with no hope of escape, the doomed passengers hadn’t done anything to deserve this.

Jericho leans heavily on his microphone stand, delivering Soft Cell’s 1981 hit ‘Tainted Love’ in the pitchy and breathless manner of a timorous karaoke star. He is exactly where he aspires to be. He appears in the guise of David Bowie, as photographed by Masayoshi Sukita, wearing an ostentatious Kansai Yamamoto design. In the Sukita photograph, the twenty-five year old Bowie appears at the height of his power, tilted towards the camera with one hand on his hip and the other on his inner thigh; the Yamamoto costume is of a candy-striped iridescent material, red and green, with double-wide shoulder pauldrons and a broad collar. Bowie’s insectoid face is framed by the red Ziggy Stardust mullet, and on his forehead, a luminous gold medallion over his third eye, like a silicon microprocessor connected to the godhead.

On Jericho, it’s cheapo, tacky, Spirit of Halloween; Yamamoto’s futuristic textiles are replicated as a disposable plastic tablecloth material stretched over his heaving gut, and his red wig is more suggestive of McDonalds or Wendy’s. Across his face is an Aladdin Sane lightning-slash, but where on the album cover Brian Duffy rendered it across Bowie’s face from right-to-left, Jericho’s is backwards, left-to-right, like it was hastily done in a mirror. Every detail is so precisely wrong, down to the glittering silver go-go boots, a mismatch from a KISS Kosplay. It’s just another day in Chris Jericho’s life in a Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp, and people paid money to see it. Three times in four nights.

When news of this reaches land, the reaction is what we’ve come to expect from Chris Jericho doing anything. Above a video of Jericho straining to deliver The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ one user on X (formerly Twitter) writes, ‘it’s time to leave chris jericho in 2024.’^[3]

Chris Jericho was not left in 2024, nor in 2025. When he made his return in 2026 (because since his first return in 2007, Chris Jericho is always returning) he was billed as the mononymic Jericho. ‘It’s like a self-titled album,’ Jericho told The Ringer’s David Shoemaker.^[4]

In 1973, David Bowie returned from his dramatic, pro-wrestling-phony retirement (‘not only is this the last show of the tour, but the last show that we will ever do’) and informed his label and management ‘that he was dropping the “David” part of his name.’^[5] From Pin Ups through to, ironically, David Live, he was credited on the label simply as Bowie.

“Chris Jericho […] continues to reinvent himself – he’s wrestling’s David Bowie.” – Cody Rhodes to ESPN. January 16, 2019.^[6]

“David Bowie [has] been one of my inspirations since I was 25 years old, when you realise that you have this guy that’s a genius and who constantly changes what he’s doing to keep the fans guessing.” – Chris Jericho at the Fight for the Fallen media scrum. July 14, 2019.^[7]

“I’m a huge David Bowie fan. Not even a huge fan of his music, per se.” – Chris Jericho to The Athletic. November 9, 2021.^[8]

“I am a huge David Bowie fan, not necessarily knowing every Bowie song and every Bowie album, but the just the concept of David Bowie always reinventing himself.” – Chris Jericho on the True Geordie podcast. July 10, 2022. ^[9]

Chris Jericho has written three volumes of autobiography, which makes him one of the few people who has written more books than he’s read.^[10] David Bowie is not mentioned once in any of them. For context, Iron Maiden, Stryper and, above all, the Beatles are all mentioned dozens of times as points of influence in his life and career. Michael Schenker of The Scorpions and the Michael Schenker Group gets name-dropped once towards the end of the third book.^[11] Indeed, David Bowie is not mentioned at all in Jericho’s literary oeuvre until his 2017 attempt at writing a self-help book, No is a Four-Letter Word: How I Failed Spelling but Succeeded in Life. ‘A few years ago, the WWE asked me to talk about The Undertaker,’ Jericho writes. ‘I commented that he was “the David Bowie of the wrestling business.”’ He continues:

“Ever since Bowie released his first album and became a star(man) in 1969, he changed his look and sound on every record he released until his death in 2016. From Ziggy Stardust’s androgynous alien rock star, to the drug-addled Thin White Duke of the mid-’70s, to the well-dressed lothario of the Let’s Dance era […] Now if you really think about it, throughout the years The Undertaker has shared the same metamorphosis. From his debut in 1990 as the white-faced, red-haired walking corpse, to the goateed Satanic priest of the Attitude Era, to the American Badass motorcycle man […] Mark Calaway constantly evolved his character and stayed meaningful.”^[12]

We can argue with the use of the word ‘meaningful’ here. After declaring The Undertaker to be a David Bowie, Jericho goes on to describe how he is also a David Bowie – first he was Y2J, then he had a beard, then he had a bowl cut. Every year brings a new series of catch phrases and hairstyles as he goes from strength to strength.^[13] Isn’t it the slightest bit demeaning to the memory of David Bowie, to suggest that The Undertaker putting on some leather pants and pretending to be a biker is comparable in any way to his oblique strategies? It gives one side an extraordinary amount of credit it’s done nothing to earn and diminishes the other to an insignificance.

Let’s be real. The conditions don’t exist for there to be a David Bowie of pro wrestling any more than there could be a Miles Davis of wrestling. We’re talking about the man who said to ‘never play to the gallery’ because it’s ‘dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations.’^[14] That’s an aggressive posture to take, and it’s totally at odds with Jericho’s platitudinous ‘change your facial hair to keep things fresh.’ Professional wrestling is a conservative and risk-averse business, which is why it generally remains ten to twenty years behind the rest of the culture.

There’s a gleeful sort of abandon with which David Bowie would stake his credibility that is totally at odds with how business is done in pro wrestling. ‘I’ve never been worried about losing fans […] I never gave a shit about what people thought of what I was doing. I’d be prepared […] to ostracise everybody that may have been pulled into the last album,’ he told Q magazine in a 1989 interview.^[15] On that occasion, he was there to promote his new album with Tin Machine. He had reached the height of his commercial viability in the 1980s, sang to Tina Turner in a Pepsi commercial, then drew a line under it and walked away.

As Bowie put it, ‘what I had to do was to experiment. To discover new forms of writing. To evolve, in fact, a new musical language.’^[16] Say you aspire towards a new language of pro wrestling in a locker room and you’ll be laughed out of the building. There’s room for some degree of experimentation in pro wrestling, sure, because everyone’s grasping at how to get over. But the flip side of that is that once something gets over, wrestlers and promoters will play a hot hand right into the ground. You can’t really compare Bowie’s attitude towards reinvention to Jericho’s, which is that ‘the more pairs of tights I own, the more action figures they made of me.’^[17] They might as well be speaking different languages.

Tin Machine is now used as a shorthand to malign rock-and-roller self-indulgence, a sneering condescension towards the long-suffering audience who just wants to hear the hits. Whether the band was any good or not, it was a necessary manoeuvre out of a creative dead-end to strike out in some other direction, any direction, just to get some motion. It doesn’t really make a difference to Chris Jericho, who’s a huge fan untroubled by the complications of the musical content itself; to him it’s just another character. ‘The Tin Machine, the Button Eye. You never knew who David Bowie was, but it was always him,’ he babbled before a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con.^[18]

David Bowie is one of Chris Jericho’s biggest influences. We know this because he mentions him in damn near every interview he gives. But we also can observe that Chris Jericho’s understanding of David Bowie is fairly superficial for someone who name-drops him as a self-explanatory point of influence. He never brought it up at all before Bowie had passed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. After all, people can ch-change.

In a 2019 Instagram post, Jericho poses proudly alongside a pencil drawing of David Bowie drawn for him by Calgary draughtsman Lee Olson.^[19] The drawing is of Bowie with his finger to his mouth in a playful shushing gesture. It’s an image lifted from a photograph by Gavin Evans, who called the picture ‘my most counterfeited image ever,’^[20] The image has been endlessly reproduced as fan-art, bootleg merchandise, and even — allegedly — a Michael Moebius painting that was subject to a copyright claim in the Berlin Federal Court.^[21] It might be the most often imitated and duplicated photograph of David Bowie — after Brian Duffy’s Aladdin Sane, of course.

In a later post we see the picture hanging on Jericho’s wall in a place of honour next to his gold record for Fozzy’s Judas.^[22] It’s clear that the comparison means something to him.

The idea that David Bowie consistently played a discrete series of characters on-stage and on record is a common one. It becomes a cliche to the point you almost wish he didn’t write ‘Changes’ (but only almost) so that people would have to reach a little harder to try and understand and describe him.

As Chris O’Leary observes, Ziggy Stardust was less a developed character than ‘a flipbook of images,’ vague even by ‘the meager standards of rock “concept” records.’^[23] The story of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars is mostly a post-hoc creation, assembled as much by Bowie in interviews as it was by the overheated minds of fans themselves. In other words, they were creating lore. Or, as O’Leary says, ‘Ziggy is the creature of is audience, they write him into being.’^[24]

You can see this happen over and over. Ziggy Stardust is a scanty character but there’s still a story being told with a beginning, a middle and an end. We even know what he looks like — screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo, like some cat from Japan. On Diamond Dogs, there’s another pieced-together narrative at play, with dystopian streets of Hunger City crawling with mutants, but what the hardcore fans really seized on was Halloween Jack, a persona mentioned in passing on the title track with even less depth of characterization than Ziggy.

In a performance on the Dutch TV show TopPop, Bowie lip-syncs to the album’s single, ‘Rebel Rebel,’ but he’s made a significant change to his look. ‘I had conjunctivitis so I made the most of it and dressed like a pirate,’^[25] Bowie later recalled. But with the subsequent collapse of the high-concept Diamond Dogs tour, this became the enduring image of the area. Working out of an auditory medium, the image becomes reified. It flattens out any distinctions of characterization and makes the music subservient to it. The David Bowie Wiki on Fandom sums it up: ‘He is described as being a “real cool cat” who lives in Hunger City. […] He has a very similar appearance to the other personas Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane.’^[26]

Sometimes the character functions as a cordon sanitaire to protect the fans from the complexities of the artist. The Thin White Duke is, again, mostly a look with a thinly-defined persona attached to it. ‘I wanted to go back to a kind of Expressionist German film look […] black waistcoat, black trousers, white shirt, and the lighting of, say, Fritz Lang,’^[27] Bowie explained. But that character was complicated by Bowie’s unhinged cokehead behaviour, a very public fascination with esoteric Nazism. ‘The character was known for pro-fascist statements in interviews,’^[28] as the David Bowie Wiki describes it. The man wasn’t stricken by drug-induced paranoia and delusions of grandeur — it’s not the side-effects of the cocaine — he was simply inhabiting another character. They might not know the vernacular, but they intrinsically understand him to be living the gimmick.

The image changes. The image is what we respond to. But the image is the most immaterial part, and we miss what’s going on that makes David Bowie important. Bowie said he wanted to experiment with new ways of writing and work towards a new musical language. That’s where the juice is: the unexpected chord changes, the chopped-up lyrics, Robert Fripp playing not a note but howls of feedback on “Heroes”, Tony Visconti using the Eventide Harmonizer to ‘fuck with the fabric of time,’ Brian Eno’s generally destabilizing presence — all the collaborators and influences and interventions that go into what is fundamentally a pop song and make it into something like you’ve never heard before. He wasn’t just a guy who changed his hair colour to sell more records and other merchandise. He wanted you to think!

The origins of the Painmaker are fairly simple. ‘I was sitting in the crowd so I wanted to look as much like [BUSHI] as I could,’ Jericho told Sports Illustrated. ‘I put the black lipstick on and darkened my eyes with dark eyeliner.’ Screwed-up eyes like some cat from Japan, in other words. ‘I showed that to Gedo and he said, “Do you want a hat?”’ ^[29]And there he was.

‘The Painmaker was conceived as what a serial killer would look like if he was a pro wrestler,’^[30] Chris Jericho later told Movieweb, and on Howie Mandel’s podcast he elaborated: ‘The Painmaker is an intergalactic former serial killer. He’s changed his life, and he’s not a serial killer anymore, but now he travels the galaxy hunting down other serial killers in different galaxies.’ Putting a hat on a hat. ‘The idea is to make it into a movie at some point […] The possibilities are endless.’^[31]

The possibilities are endless because it’s barely an idea. An empty vessel has infinite possibilities because it has no contents and therefore has the potential to contain anything. The issue is you have to actually do something, create something to fill that vessel. You can’t just talk about it. The rest is just lore to be put on a wiki by a teenager with no life. The Painmaker is a crazy scary guy who’s wearing a hat. At least David Bowie bothered to build Halloween Jack a world to live in. The elevator’s broke so he slides down a rope.

In Chris Jericho’s first volume of autobiography, A Lion’s Tale: Around the World in Spandex, he recounts trying to get back to Japan after his last FMW appearance in 1992 ends without an invitation to return. Inspired by his confrère Dr. Luther, who at this point is wildly popular with the Japanese wrestling magazines, Jericho decides he needs a gimmick that will really pop on the page. He comes up with The Parasite.

“I painted my face with Alice Cooper style makeup and carried around a can of WD-40. When the time was right, I’d hold a match up to the spray and create a blowtorch. What I was going to do with the torch, I have no idea. I never got that far.”^[32]

Alongside the photograph printed in the book, with a gurning goth Jericho holding up a flaming spray-can, the image of the embryonic Painmaker becomes clearer. Of course, Jericho realises there’s not much juice to the gimmick; he goes back to the drawing board and comes up with The Phoenix. Icarus-like, Jericho flies too close to the sun and his glue-gun feather and costume-jewelery outfit barely survives a photo shoot on a windy day. His source of inspiration? He watched an Iron Maiden concert film with Bruce Dickinson wearing ‘an Egyptian bird mask.’ ^[33]

When Chris Jericho announced the return of the Painmaker to face Tomasso Ciampa in an escalation of their 2026 blood-feud, the reaction was largely one of muted resignation — Jericho’s back on his bullshit. ‘It’s not like the Great Muta […] it doesn’t feel that different enough from the Jericho we know,’ said Wai Ting of POST Wrestling. ‘When you have Chris Jericho with clown makeup going nyehh trying to convince you that he’s scary, I just think it makes him look really silly, right?’ His co-host, John Pollock, read out a listener comment by Andrew From Cape Breton:

“In AEW, you have a special kind of bad gimmick; the kind where the person has not only thought of this gimmick, but believes in their heart of hearts it’s great. Chris Jericho puts on clown makeup and wears a funny hat and believes he’s this badass killer. He did that promo with his full chest, so excited about the return of the Painmaker, that I can’t help but smile at the silliness and lack of self-awareness.”^[34]

Andrew has a point, of course, but does Chris Jericho really lack self-awareness? In No Is A Four-Letter Word he digs into his insipid 2016 return to WWE: ‘It was hard not to scream from the rooftops that I wasn’t actually out of touch, but rather I knew exactly what I was doing.’^[35] As he tells it, he was planting the seeds for a heel turn by trotting out his dog-ass tired catchphrases and lamely trying to start new ones, like the generationally juiceless ‘rooty tooty booty’:

“I knew it was stupid. […] It’s like the story Paul McCartney told about rock critics in 1967 proclaiming the Beatles to be old news […] while in reality they were secretly in the studio recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”^[36]

For the purposes of this tortured allusion, Jericho’s Sgt. Pepper that he’s hiding as his ace in the hole when he finally makes his heel turn: ‘stupid idiot,’ ‘drink it in, man’ and ‘the List of Jericho.’

Of course, this may all just be another post-hoc rationalisation of idiocy that otherwise defies explanation. At the time, his response to the half-hearted fan reaction to the subtle wordplay of ‘rooty tooty booty’ was to go on his podcast and say: ‘If that’s bad humour and you didn’t laugh, oh, I’m sorry. Go watch some Kierkegaard^[37] or something like that. Go watch some Peter Sellers movies.’^[38]

Either way, there is one parallel between Jericho and Bowie. They both know exactly what it is they want to go out there and do and they don’t really care if they alienate the fans when they do it. Well, okay, Jericho seems to care a little bit…

On July 26, 2026, Jericho has his match with Ciampa at Redemption. When Chris Jericho comes to the ring carrying what appears to be a Little League baseball bat, the trepidation begins. Jericho climbs into the ring and removes his futuristic sad-mime mask to reveal Alice Cooper makeup. The reaction shot of Tomasso Ciampa at ringside shows an expression that reads as exasperation. The match begins.

At first, it’s a fairly rote plunder match. Jericho plays around with a fire extinguisher and sprays it in Ciampa’s face. Ciampa puts on a Bruins jersey and piledrives a stuffed Youppi doll to provoke the Montréal audience. Then things get a little hairy.

Jericho produces a bag of thumbtack-studded hockey pucks^[39] and the juice starts flowing as both Jericho and Ciampa start to puncture each other, grinding the thumbtacks into each others’ foreheads. Jericho goes to ringside and produces a mirror (the reification of the image!) to shatter over Ciampa’s bald, bloodied head, and Ciampa finds a DeWalt power drill under the ring to presumably trepannate Jericho’s skull.

The ring is now filled with debris. Both men are covered in blood and broken glass and thumbtacks and now they’re wrestling for control over the drill. Jericho spews toxic green mist into Ciampa’s face (he’s not the Great Muta!) and picks up the drill. He presses it to Ciampa’s skull. Suddenly all the planets are in alignment and I can hear the music of the spheres. This is it, I realise. The Painmaker really is an interstellar serial killer. He’s the scariest guy I’ve ever seen in my life.

‘If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in,’ Bowie said. ‘When you don’t feel your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just in the right place to do something exciting.’^[40] I don’t sense any urgent, pressing need on Chris Jericho’s part to be a deathmatch wrestler. I don’t even see him getting big and fat (well, you know) and becoming a walk-and-brawl guy like L.A. Park. But when he removes himself from the comfort and familiarity of burping up catchphrases and pushes himself towards something we haven’t seen before, it’s some of the most exciting work he’s ever done.

Does the Dame have a hand in that? Probably not.

It’s Feburary 5th, 2026. Chris Jericho is touring the David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse in London. He stands in front of a screen playing the ‘Life on Mars?’ video. ‘Life on Mars,’ he says reverently, before turning his face to a bizarre rictus. ‘So much amazing stuff here. Literally levels. Hundreds of thousands of artifacts at this place. Truly mindblowing.’^[41] The possessions of a guy who died ten years ago recede into history to become artifacts. He’s still mystified.

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