Wrestling Away Fans With a Song in Their Fists

Days off are a rare treat for “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, a professional wrestler of such stunning success as a pop culture phenomenon that he probably could rival the right honorable Gov. Jesse Ventura both in and out of the ring.

But on a recent afternoon when Austin did have a breather, the hulking Texan didn’t think twice about hopping a flight to Burbank to spend a tedious day in front of a film crew. After all, the rock ‘n’ roll dream beckoned.

“I told them I didn’t care if it was my day off,” Austin said during a break on the sound stage. “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be in a rock band, so being in a rock video is a dream come true.”

It’s also a dream come true for the rock band involved--a fairly obscure German group called H-Blockx--not to mention giddy executives at the World Wrestling Federation and several record companies. That’s because these days the WWF and its rasslin’ heroes are flexing their muscles on the nation’s pop charts with some startling results.

Earlier this month, “WWF--The Music: Vol. 4,” a collection of theme songs for WWF stars, debuted at No. 4 on the album chart, topping the first-week sales of some big-name releases (Counting Crows, Foo Fighters, Jewel’s holiday album) and pushing acts such as Santana and Britney Spears down the chart.

While the first three volumes of the odd album series sold more 2 million copies combined, the success of the new collection was still jolting to many observers.

“I’d say it is a sign that civilization as we know it is coming to an end,” joked Bob Bell, a music buyer for the Wherehouse chain. “Forget Y2K, this is scarier. But, really, what it shows is the power of adolescent males.”

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That audience dearly loves the slickly produced, sweaty melodramas created by televised wrestling, with shows such as UPN’s “WWF Smackdown” drawing up to 7 million viewers. Those fans also fill arenas for live matches and gobble up toys, posters, T-shirts, videos and, it would seem, albums.

The WWF isn’t the only enterprise to recognize the allure of sports-related music packaging. The rival wrestling league, WCW, has a new collection, “Mayhem: the Music,” on the charts, and Tommy Boy’s “Jock Jams”--a collection of what might be called stadium-appropriate songs--is in its fifth volume.

But none of those have cracked the Top 10 the way the new WWF album did, so it’s no surprise that several follow-up WWF projects are already in the works, including one slated for January release that features rappers interpreting the wrestler theme songs. Snoop Dogg and DMX are among the artists reportedly on tap for that collection.

No one is more surprised by all this than Jim Johnston, who for 15 years has been setting WWF mayhem to music.

The Connecticut-based Johnston writes and performs all the original tunes that accompany WWF shows and events, laboring to find the precise musical motif to best accompany wrestlers such as Edge and the Undertaker as they lumber toward the squared circle.

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That has translated into 300 songs and snippets a year, and--because “WWF--The Music: Vol. 4” bears his name--his very own Top 5 album, listed right there between Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys.

“I can imagine that throughout the music industry people were looking at the chart and saying, ‘Who the hell is Jim Johnston?’ ” said the 45-year-old composer, who honed his craft working on television commercials and animation.

Johnston wrote the 14 songs on the new album and handled the lion’s share of the playing. He says he loves the eclectic nature of his job, which requires him to play more than a dozen instruments and delve into rock, rap, honky-tonk and other genres to tailor music to each wrestler. But he concedes that the work can also be limiting (“I don’t get to do a lot of ballads”) and he wonders about the context in which the new album is heard.

“Clearly, we’re selling enough records that we’re probably getting outside the range of hard-core fans in their bedrooms who are just listening to it as they fantasize that they’re ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and whack their little brothers with a chair,” Johnston said. “At least I hope so.”

Despite first-week sales of 215,000 copies for “WWF--The Music: Vol. 4,” the album tumbled to No. 17 in its second week in stores--which suggests that while the fan hunger may be intense, it is also short-lived. The makers of the album hope to reverse that trend with the video featuring H-Blockx and Austin. The album track features the band singing the wrestler’s theme “Oh Hell Yeah.”

The video features a King Kong-sized Austin striding among Los Angeles skyscrapers while the heavy-rock band plays on a rooftop.

“It’s an awesome video, and we’re hoping for heavy rotation on MTV,” Austin said as he sipped bottled water during a break in filming. Nearby, a group of fans patiently waited to get autographs on posters, sealed action figure boxes and other “Stone Cold” memorabilia.

To Austin, the music of the WWF is vital to its greatest strength: character development.

“The people who put it together are awesome,” he said. “The production is so slick, the writing and plot lines are seamless, and the music is fantastic. It gets people on their feet to cheer. Or, you know, if it’s a bad guy, to boo.”

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All of this was fascinating and somewhat unsettling to the members of H-Blockx, who were unfamiliar with Austin or the WWF when approached about the project. They were immediately intrigued by the prospect of reaching the WWF’s huge and youthful audience, but were also a little leery of the credibility issues.

After a decade of building a European fan base with its metal-leaning rock and testing the States on the latest Warped Tour, the quintet pondered whether to make its big bid in the U.S. market with Johnston’s song and Austin’s presence sharing the spotlight.

“We were thinking about that big-time,” singer Henning Wehland said. “But we looked at everything and we thought it was credible. [The WWF] is not a joke, it’s not a disease . . . but it is pretty huge.”