Jon Moxley On How He Got “Wild Thing” As His Entrance Theme
In an interview with Cincy 3:60, AEW star Jon Moxley talked about how he came to get X's "Wild Thing" as his entrance music. Moxley revealed that the original plan was for him to use the song as a one off for his match with Kenny Omega at AEW Revolution, only the rights didn't come in till later. Once they got the rights, AEW decided that Moxley would continue to use the song.
"So we're doing this Exploding Barbed Wire match," Moxley said. "And I was being compared to the innovator of that, who's called Atsushi Onita, who's a Japanese wrestler who came out to that (song). A month before Tony (Khan) was like, we're talking about it and Tony, who is the owner and booker and so forth, he goes 'should we get 'Wild Thing' for that?' Just for one night for the Exploding Match. And I was like 'no that's too derivative. No it's too much.' And then a week before I started thinking about it again and I was like 'well it might be cool for one night. People might get the reference. Just for that one night I was like 'let's do it.' By then it was too late and we couldn't get the rights for it or whatever.
"But then it came through a couple weeks later, and I was in the ring with Yuji Nagata. And I thought it was the 'Season of the Witch' playing. I was like 'why is Season of the Witch playing right now?' And after the match, I heard it was like the original, the Troggs 'Wild Thing.' I was like 'oh, they must've got 'Wild Thing' after all. That's my music now.' And they then changed it to the X version, the Major League version. So it kind of just happened by accident. But if the people like it, I like it. So that's all that matters. I'm into it, it's cool."
Moxley was also asked if the intention was always for AEW, now on a hot streak with three consecutive weeks of Dynamite reaching #1 on cable on Wednesday nights, to take the world by storm. The former AEW Champion confirmed everyone hoped for that and talked about how exciting wrestling now was, both due to AEW's momentum and their working arrangements with other companies.
"That was the hope, otherwise I wouldn't have come here," Moxley said. "Coming here was like 'well this an opportunity to help and really do something and create something and be part of a thing that's helping wrestling.' Creating something new, being on a team from the ground floor. I could've just waited around and been like 'let's see if this thing works out and then maybe see what they're doing.' I was like 'no. If I'm going to be in, I'm in. If I'm going to commit, I'm going to come in at the ground floor and if we fail, we fail. But we're going to try to succeed. I could feel the momentum, I could just feel the energy from the very first night in at the very first Double or Nothing. It was like, you could feel it man. And 2020 hit everybody hard man. That could've killed us with not having TV, but we figured out a way to run TV and everybody kind of pulled together and worked to figure it out. Now that that's like finally kind of over, that was a long, tumultuous kind of period. And then we had to go against, we've got this Wednesday Night War thing going on. So we're in the trenches, we've got no fans, we've got a pandemic, we've got this other company trying to hurt us. And we came through that smelling like roses.
"Now it's all positive on the other side. It kind of galvanized everyone together. Now it's like, the train is rolling man so you better get on now. The wrestling business is changing right now and it's all for the better. I think it's going to be picking up new fans along the way. It really feels like anything can happen in pro wrestling right now, as far as like different people from different promotions going back and forth. Whether that be New Japan or Impact or AAA or whatever, it literally feels like anything is possible right now. So it's cool time to be in wrestling, cool time to be a fan. You can feel that something is going on right now. It's all very interesting.
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Cincy 3:60 and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription