lord of the dance

(via The Mountain Goats “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” (Official Music Video) - YouTube)

Here is a thing that happened in my life: I was sitting around the kitchen table with a guitar and my two-year-old son a year or so ago, and I found this riff I liked, and I wrote some words to go with it, but I couldn’t sing the verses over the riff because the words fell into these palm-mute pockets, so I demo’d the progression over a shaker effect which I used as a metronome/click track, and then I overdubbed a vocal and some decorative second guitar and sent it to Peter and Jon and Brandon. A while later we all met up at Overdub Lane and recorded it,  and it came out really nice, so when it came time to releaseBeat the Champ everybody agreed that was the song to let everybody hear first. So we let “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” out into the wild and within about a day something awesome happened: Chavo Guerrero, Sr., the subject of the song, heard it, and started retweeting people’s reactions to it.

The song is a true story: when I was ten and eleven years old, Chavo Guerrero was my hero. He was a good guy, and he beat down the bad guys and made them leave town. At the Olympic Auditorium, he held the Americas Title and stood for what was good and honorable in this world. It meant a lot to me that he (and his son, Chavo Junior) were enjoying the song, so I DM’d him to say thanks.

A day or so later we got up on the phone, which would itself have been unbelievable enough for my inner 10-year-old, but that was when I got the idea to ask him if he wanted to be in the video.

I consider myself pretty decent with words but I don’t think I can find the right ones to say what a profound experience it was to hear Chavo say “any time, brother” over the phone from his home in Arizona, and to meet up with him in L.A. and get stories from him about his dad Gory and about the old days at the Olympic, and to finally shoot this video, in which he rescues me from a certain beatdown even though my character’s playing the heel. I don’t wanna stand between you-all and and Scott Jacobson’s awesome video much longer, but before you go check it out, please join me in raising a glass to Chavo Guerrero: champion not only in name but in his word and deed, and now a friend. The video features Chavo and me and Rob Corddry and Jon Wurster and Peter Hughes, and Ray Rosas and Ryan Nemeth and Ted Travelstead and Sarah Walker too, and was the most fun thing to make, as you’ll see. N