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Wrestling Legend Terry Funk's Terribly Un-Funky, Decidedly Un-Hardcore Musical Career

Posted: Nov 7th 2015 By: Nate Patrin - Vice.Sports.com

It's weirdly comforting to know that if you are younger than fifty years old, you have never known a world in which Terry Funk was not punching somebody, somewhere, in the face. He is one of the few men alive who can really be said to have been in the ring for nearly every development and trend in pro wrestling from the late 1960s onward, from old-school grappling to hardcore table-breaking brawls and all points in between. If you're familiar with Barry Blaustein's often-bleak documentary Beyond the Mat, Funk is the one participant who seems the closest to a happy closure: his knees are shot, and he seems completely incapable of tearing himself away from the ring, but his legacy's so secure that a retirement match seems like a natural way to cap off his decades-long career.

That was in September 1997. Within a year, Funk returned to the WWF to alternately feud and team with longtime hardcore-match adversary Mick Foley?and then retire again. He'd repeat the cycle with stints in nearly every promotion of note the past 17 years: ECW, WCW, WWE, Ring of Honor, TNA, New Japan, All Japan, even Juggalo Championship Wrestling. A match against Jerry Lawler just last month was the latest to be billed as Funk's last. If someone is 71 years old and is still cool with The King hucking a fireball in his face, it's probably best to leave the question of retirement in his hands alone. Who else could convince him, and who'd have the gall to call him crazy if he reneged all over again?

Still, it's not always clear whether Funk's regular forays into "things most people would consider really bad ideas" are a result of people being unwilling to say no to him or the other way around. Of course, one person's bad idea is another person's notch in a belt made of barbed wire. If a man is willing to participate in a match where there is a very real risk of being exploded all to hell, his motto might very well be "why not." Hey Terry, want to nearly suffocate Ric Flair with a plastic bag? Hey Terry, want to wear pantyhose on your head and flail around with a chainsaw? Hey Terry, want to cut a record?

Now, keep in mind that Terry Funk has a history of being a hell of a promo, a pretty good tough-guy movie bit player, and flamboyantly, world-historically batshit-charismatic. Alongside his brother Dory Funk, Jr., Terry was such an attention-getting tornado of violence that one of Japan's biggest rock bands composed an entrance theme for them: Creation's two-part 1978 single "Spinning Toe Hold" is the best instrumental the Brothers Johnson never recorded. Promotional gambits like these proved lucrative for All Japan Pro Wrestling, which used the Funk Brothers' penchant for making people bleed as a major counterpoint to the high-flying technical masters of competing promotion New Japan. So why settle for a single inspired by Terry when you could release an entire album sung by him?

Great Texan was released in 1984 on the Invitation label?the same Japanese record company that put out, among other things, the first several LPs of cult-favorite heavy metal shredders Bow Wow and new wave oddballs Plastics. Do not let these associations fool you: Great Texan, despite being packaged as a collection of shit-kickin' tuff-guy anthems, is a baffling mixture of off-kilter quasi-disco, watery session-band almost-rock, and ballads destined only for the jankiest of karaoke machines.

What does Terry do on this album? Well, he talks. He also sings, but I repeat myself. Half of the tracks are written by Jimmy Hart, the notorious "Mouth of the South" who would follow the Funks to the WWF in 1985 as their manager. Hart also had a legit rock background: he was a member of the Gentrys when they hit it big in 1965 with "Keep on Dancing," and later fronted them for a faithful cover of Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" on Sun Records.

Hart's compositions on Great Texan generally skew toward good-time juvenile delinquent comedy and ladies' man territory. Funk, 40 years old when he recorded the tracks, sings from the alternating perspectives of a rebellious teenager mad at his teacher ("We Hate School") and a man beset by a bizarre composite woman with Herschel Walker thighs and Liberace's smile ("Beat It" soundalike "Barbra Streisand's Nose"). It doesn't always make sense coming from a guy like Terry, but his opinions on the education system and conventional beauty standards are at least kind of in keeping with the philosophy of a man unafraid to goad an entire arena into making it rain folding chairs.

It's a trio of tracks?the smooth-jazz ballad "Roppongi," co-written by Hart and Funk; the slow jam "Touch Your Heart (Sayonara Boku Ienai)"; and the disco-pop clunker "Change Your Mind"?that really push Great Texan into total weirdness. The latter two songs require that a man whose voice has bellowed out some of the most memorable threats and insults in the wrestler-promo pantheon comes across as a sensitive lover. This is a level of self-aware absurdity so deeply at odds with nearly everything one can possibly associate with Funk's public persona that it achieves some heretofore unexamined level of kayfabe; to hear his proto-Hank Hill rasp muttering through ESL Quiet Storm pillow talk ("we grew together, and we blended just like wine") is almost intimidatingly awkward. Terry Funk truly does not give a fuck, one might imagine a prospective opponent thinking, if he can put out a recording like this without fear of retribution or embarrassment.

As he recalled decades later in his autobiography More Than Just Hardcore, however, Funk didn't exactly burst with pride at his time in the recording studio. "[Great Texan] contains some of the most godawful singing you've ever heard," he admits. "Jimmy Hart wrote the songs for me because I was too cheap to pay for the rights to songs that people had already heard. All the songs on that album had one thing in common?they all sucked."

At the end of the sessions, Funk was presented with an electric guitar that he couldn't play?possibly the same one he's photographed holding on the sleeve of the LP?and took it back to the States with him. Seeing a longhaired man carrying a guitar and some over-the-counter painkillers, U.S. Customs immediately subjected Funk to a cavity search. It was probably the last time anyone mistook him for a rock star.