Insight with Chris Van Vliet - Downstait - The Band Behind Entrance Themes For Cody Rhodes, The Miz, Dolph Ziggler & More!

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Downstait (@downstaitband) is a band from Fort Wayne, Indiana. They are known among pro wrestling fans for creating entrance themes for Cody Rhodes ("Kingdom"), The Miz ("I Came To Play"), Dolph Ziggler ("Here To Show The World" & "Perfection"), Alex Riley ("Say It To My Face"), Chelsea Green ("Hot Mess"), Britt Baker ("The Epic"), Buddy Matthews ("Secret No More"), Dustin Rhodes ("Goldstew"), Matt Cardona ("When The Lights Go Down") and many others. The lead singer, Zack Call joins Chris Van Vliet to talk about how Downstait formed as a band, how working on the MTV show "Bully Beatdown" lead to the first wrestling entrance theme they did, being discovered by legendary WWE Music Producer Jim Johnston, how Cody Rhodes was able to keep his "Kingdom" entrance theme when he returned to WWE, the Easter egg of the WOAH in Cody's theme, his Mount Rushmore of entrance themes and much more! Quote I'm thinking about: "Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent" - Victor Hugo For more information about Chris and INSIGHT go to: https://chrisvanvliet.com If you enjoyed this episode, could I ask you to please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcast/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and makes a huge difference in helping to spread the word about the show and also to convince some hard-to-get guests.  Follow CVV on social media:  Instagram: instagram.com/ChrisVanVliet Twitter: twitter.com/ChrisVanVliet Facebook: facebook.com/ChrisVanVliet YouTube: youtube.com/ChrisVanVliet TikTok: tiktok.com/@Chris.VanVliet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All systems are good. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Van Blitz. Oh, yeah, welcome back to another audio adventure on Insight. I'm CVV, Chris Van Fleet. So good to have you with us. And I'm wondering, are you like me? Are you the type of person who listens to wrestling themes in the car or while you're working out? Because if you are, we have such a good one for you today.

You clicked on it. You know with this episode. episode's all about. This is the band behind some of the biggest themes in all of pro wrestling, like of course Cody Rhodes Kingdom, which is really caught on over the last year or so with the wow in the entrance. But Downstate also does the themes for the Miz. Dolf Ziegler times two, both of his themes. I am perfection and here to show the world. Alex Riley, Buddy Murphy, Britt Baker, Chelsea Green, and the list goes on and on. So many others, such a great one today. Please snap a screenshot, share this online, tag us so we can share it out as well so we can

retweet it and put it on our Instagram stories. Downstate is at Downstate Band. I'm at Chris Van Fleet and speaking of social media, I announced on there that my very first action figure from Rush Collectibles dropped this week. I can't believe this is real. It is so awesome. I'm so pumped about it and it's available right now for pre-orders. So go check it out at rushfigures.com.

That's rushfigures.com if you live in the U.S. or Canada. If you're in the UK, it's rock and roll collectibles.com. The pre-order is only happening until June 19th. And then that's it. So if you don't pre-order it now, you will never be able to own this piece of history. Sure, it's history. But it looks so cool. I'm so proud of it.

And I just want to thank you guys for all of the support. and for making something like this even possible. So I appreciate you being with us on the podcast, on the YouTube channel, and also for supporting super cool things like this action figure. So let's dive into this. It's the lead singer of Downstate. Please welcome. Zach, call.

You know, I think the most appropriate way for us to start this would be with a, what? With me? Yeah, of course. on. You're like, let me warm my voice up and do this. It's never going to be good, man. I yell at kids all day.

Oh, come on. Give us one. Whoa. So good. Man, I'm so excited about this. Thank you so much for coming on. Oh, man. A big fan of yours.

So I was super excited when you asked, man. This is awesome. I bumped into you at RussellCon and you're like, oh my God, we follow each other on Twitter. I'm like, well, would you ever? want to do an interview. Like, yeah, I'm like, oh, this is great. Because I think there's a lot of people that only think that Downstate does Cody Rhodes'

entrance name, and that's it. It's an everyday occurrence whenever we go to a wrestling event that we get, wait, you do that too? We've been in the business since 2008. So list them all off here. So let's just start with the man himself, the awesome man, the Ms. Man. let's go my god came to play he came to play baby uh he he started off and he was on fire he had that united states run and he really like we could have been dead in the water i think right there and then

if if he fell flat on his face which he did not by any means and i think he excelled within a year up to the top after he hit that u.s run um and then we went right to dulf This was the I am perfection theme. We did I am perfection. And I guess there was a little bit of kerfuffle backstage about you can't have perfection in your title. That's Mr. Perfect. So he had not listened to anything that Dolph had had for the six years prior to that he had that song. So we changed it to Here's Show the World.

And then Alex Riley. So these were all real lumped in real quick. Alex Riley took off after he broke away from Ms. And say to my face, which we won a slammy for in 2012. That is such an underrated theme. It's such a good song. It's an amazing tune. We played that one live when we were out on the road quite a bit.

Every night. I don't know why quite a bit came in. We played that like. That is quite a bit. Every night is quite a bit. It was the cleanup spot every night. It was like, oh, damn. guys can go.

We played that. We still have not received our slammy, W.W. So we want it. Hold on. Well, who has this slammy? Nobody in the band. We won Song of the Year, entrance of the year in 2012. And does Riley have it?

I'd have to ask him. I think is he going by Riley or Kevin? I'm not sure. I think it's Kevin, Kevin, Kylie. I think he's getting back into the biz, though. It seems like it a little bit. That'd be great. I had him on about three years ago and he was talking about it,

but he was dealing with some health issues at the time. So hopefully that that's taken care of now. Yeah, I hope all as well. Is the slammy just sitting in a WWE warehouse somewhere perhaps? I don't think that they give out material slammys. I think it's just the thing for TV. I really do. Unless you're on heart, I don't think that they, I want it so bad.

What do we do after that? We went to, I did a run for, broken dreams. They played it for a while and then they sold it in W.W.E. Magazine when it was still a thing. It might still be a thing, but they sold a link

and a page for my version of Broken Dreams, which I think you can still purchase if you want. And then I did dashing Cody, the, whoa, you know, they smoking, smoke of mirrors. There it is. Yeah, yeah.

We worked on, it's really, really funny. because all these dudes are really, really good friends. But Sean was out working. Our bass player was out working in a publishing company. And while he was out working, they had offered us another tune instead of flying me out to do it. Sean does all the like scream parts in all of our songs. For whatever reason, they asked him to do something on Morrison's song, which was that,

no, listen, that the super dorsy vibe that they're, going for. So we did that and then we got to Ryder and that happened. We had just did a cover because fans on Twitter were like, hey, can you do a hard rock cover of radio? And I love this character.

I used to super mark the biggest mark in the world. When he debuted on ECW after the Major Brothers thing, he had the one pant leg and the head band. And I was 18, 19 years old and just being an idiot, but I went and cut a pair of my

pants gosh and put a headband on it I was like I don't know why but I love this dude right here so we we followed him for a long time and about eight years into his career we covered a song just being fans and then he got it on

the true Long Island and then eventually WWE had heard it and then they let him use our version of radio on TV which is really really cool sorry I'm doing along No, this is great. It's banger after bangor after banger. I love it.

So that was the end of our WWE run in about 2015, 2016. There was a few more, can you do it, will you do it, are you the right fit? And it, for one reason or another, didn't work. And then we went over and just started doing independent stuff. And that's actually Cody, right when he broke away, he put out this Twitter thing. And we were kind of a sinking ship, to be honest. And Ryder kind of gave us a lifeline. Like as a band in general?

Yeah. I mean, we had some success and we get a little bit of notoriety just from being involved with WWE. But we hadn't put an album out since 2013. And we weren't really think about writing. We have a, I'm an administrator at a school. Sean's a lawyer. And my brother runs a body shop. And we were doing that.

This is what happens when the rock stars grow up. correct and we got old and and living in a van or in a tour bus is kind of tough on older guys especially guys with families like my brother sure so uh i just was on twitter and i was in my feels a little bit i'm like dude we're not done yet like something's going on we just got on smackdown uh two weeks ago with the radio cover like and we did that in a bedroom we didn't have any like wdddddd didn't fly us out we did that on our own like we could still do this. Cody put out a tweet, seeing what entrance music show you use

on the Indies. Yeah. And he said something about Throne by Bring Me the Horizon. And I was wearing that album out at the time. I knew, one, by being such a big fan of his since he showed up with Bob Holly.

Like, I knew this dude's character. I'm a wrestling historian. I know what he wants to sing about. And I know that what he's going through a little bit, just because dirt sheets sometimes are right. But at the same time, like, this dude should be getting a better opportunity. So we send him a tweet just through whomever we had already worked for and we said,

hey, man, can we give this song a shot? And we sent him a snippet of what we were thinking about. And I sent him my words over. And that hard time's bring Breed Betterman is just straight cop from his dad's promo. Yeah. Like, so it's like, how can I not without being like patronizing the situation and being a dummy, how can I just sell this character a little bit to the guy that is doing it? So Sean and I sat down and went on a little bit of a wine binger and set something back to him

within like four hours and he highlighted the lyrics that everybody's singing now. And it's just like, okay, we still got it. We went and recorded it, sent it back to him. He took it to Russell Kingdom to Battleground. That's the TNA one, right? TNA is a slammerversary. Slammerversary. Like, he took it everywhere with him.

I remember his debut in TN or an impact. It was incredible. And it gave us enough confidence. It's like the old dog can still play with him. the young dogs. So we did that. And then he started taking it everywhere with him. And the song was catching on.

And just that underground little bubble of people is like, hey, man, this is a really good tune. Yeah. It got the ball rolling enough. AW was starting kind of at the time. We did something for Britt. We do her song right now. Cody's brother.

Gold Dust, which is my brother's favorite wrestler, Justin, who's also in the band. He asked us to do something for him, which I think he could have died that day and been cool. Buddy Matthews, we've done a couple for him. One has been put out and he used it. And the other one that we have, I still swear, is one of the best songs I've ever written. But he did, what's he in now? The Black House of Black. and he's using their thing.

We have a banger for him right now. Oh, geez, there's a whole bunch of end up. This is a lot. Like, that's a lot of thing right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A whole bunch of NWA cats, mims. I wrestled him when I wrestled, which I did, by the way. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we've done for everybody.

So Ms. was the first one. Ms. was the first one. And how did that come together? So, I don't know if you remember. bully beatdown on on MTV. Right out of high school. What was the name of that UFC fighter?

Mayhem. Yes. Yes. Mayhem. Yes. What was Mike or Matt? Mayhem. I can't remember.

We have all the world's information in front of us. So let's see. Jason Miller. I was way off. I wasn't even going to take a stab at it. So bully beat down. Yes. They had reached out our

producer, Sahaj, he's from the band Ra, like the Sun God Raw. They had some, they have success. He's super successful in the rock world, but in the early 2000s with his band, he was taken off, do you call my name? I don't know if you remember the tune, but he had a lot of radio and commercial success with this song, and he had made his networking before he went kind of into the producer world of things and through some of the his connections right when we signed right after we did our first tour with him he said hey um i've got this band that maybe you should use and he's talking to his friend seven at mtv for composition or whatever they were doing and he had heard a few of our things he goes i think i got a song for him and it was the bully beatdown uh beat down song

Like the theme song. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the TV show theme song. Man, does MTV pay well for this? Nobody pays well, man. No, no, not at all. We got paid for the flights in the room and board, basically. And then once that's over, like, they do, they give you such, it's MTV, it's WWE.

Like, and we, at the beginning, that's such a good thing. They give us the platform to basically get out of four ways. in Indiana. So I'll never hate. How does bully beatdown lead to the miss? Well, we kind of knocked it out of the part. And that's a little bit of tooting the horn, but like you got to have a little bit of asshole.

And tune away. But like he said, here's a skeleton, but it's karaoke. Go do it. And it's like a limp biscuit tune. So like wrestling fan 101 and growing up, you know,

a 90s kid. me and Sean, Sean's got this Chester Bennington voice and he can get into Fred Durs a little bit and I'm down here, Darius Rocker every once in a while, but I can scream and I can sing these good R&B melodies.

It was a perfect match, man. When we sing it the first time in Boca Raton, Florida, like maybe we get it. Who knows? We're just trying to finish an album. We sent it out and they're like, yeah, let's room with that for four seasons.

Like, all right, cool. Wow. So Jim had heard that and said, hey, these guys can do kind of your stock. Because he still wrote at the time, he was writing saliva tunes and Lent Biscuit tunes. And he was really getting into this band, Lincoln Park in 2009. Like, real story. Wow. Jim, come on, man.

Don't be that behind the times. But he really got into Lincoln Park at the time. And he thought that I came to play was the one. Like, hey, let's do a Lincoln Park song. It doesn't sound like Lincoln Park at all. No. But basically what ended up happening is when he set the skeleton of that song. My brother, also a humongous wrestling fan, said, I know what he's looking for here.

I don't know the kind of pace that he's looking for and the Lincoln Park sound that he thinks he wants. Let's just go ahead and try that. luckily Jim gave some 18 year old boys a shot and Justin was ballsy enough to throw off Jim Johnston you're talking about yes yeah yeah the legend the goat yeah how do you get connected with Jim Johnston so he heard the bully beatdown thing and somebody had told him like hey that was it was just rant wow from from hearing that and he's like I could use those guys on so he was always just I mean he's collaborate with a lot of different people and a lot of different band, a lot of different singers.

I guess he's just always listening, keeping his ear out for new talent. Yeah. I mean, that's how you stay in the business for 40-something years, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, the dude's brilliant. He was

such a, he was such a fun combo to just trying to I guess grab his genius in some forms or another, but like some of them were so, I say this with all due respect. Like it was so elementary the way that he would break down a song.

And then sometimes like, you're a creative man. Like sometimes you overthink something that should just be like red, white, like black white, red, you know what I mean? And he broke it down all the way to there and he goes, now go. Now go. And it's like, oh, all right. Yep, we can go from there.

So with that one, that was just a song that already existed. this wasn't the Ms. coming to you and saying, all right, I want a song that sounds like this. Nope. Did you even know it was for the Ms? Yeah,

yeah. Okay. To the point where when they were flying us down, I didn't know if we were writing a song for him or what was going on. So I wrote on the American Airline Napkins. I wrote a whole skull crushing finale song. That's still pretty good.

Wow. That never recorded or anything. that but I wrote the whole thing on the way down was like dude I got it we're good and we showed up he's like okay thank our producer's like that's cool but you guys are you guys are just doing this all right right on so what does it look like when a wrestler comes to you and says all right I want downstate to do my entrance thing um it's it never gets old I can tell you that it's the coolest thing in the world especially when like our guys come to us like buddy um is one of the like brit you can see coming from a mile away so when we got to do her song i was

like oh man she's we're riding her coattails forever we're we're super lucky with all these people that we end up doing the music for that they're so good at their craft sure yeah that we just kind of you know right in the wake for a while um buddy though i thought he was so underutilized and when we got when he reached out and said hey you guys want it i was like yeah dude whatever you want let's go but so does it start with them saying i want it to sound a little bit like this could you include some you know themes like some lyrics like this most of the time um so we will give them to try to help them along because their creativity is is and i don't want to bash anybody here but like their creative

is there is their dance is their athletic yeah of course yeah most of the time and some of them can yeah they are masters at that crap right and you are masters at this other craft and and so what we asked them to do is like hey what song would or what wrestler's song would you like to have if you could ever have one what song right now do you love and what are you trying to tell me with your character because i already know you're as a fan this is my what I see your character to be right now. What do you want your character to say? And then we go from there.

Now, are the wrestlers themselves paying you for this? Does WWE, AEW? How does that work? So that's insider trading and you'll never know. It just depends on the guy or the girl for the most part. We're also not the worst businessman in the world. If somebody is an investment, like a, you know, it's a sure thing, we got you. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. And I hate to, you know, even throw that out there. But, like, sometimes people need stuff quickly. And if they need something so quickly, then, you know, we're going to charge, you know, you need this by Monday, which is like the Alex Riley thing. Sean and I were on our way to a vacation and WWE called us at Friday

we flew out Saturday morning to California to record say it to my face we sketched it out Sunday night we recorded it Monday morning on a red eye we got back home Monday night we were listening to say it to my face on TV. Man so like how does WWE decide we want to use a band

for this instead of the in-house person that is on our payroll to do this? I would hope that the turnover isn't that great, that he is so overwhelmed that he just needs to delegate or facilitate his stuff that way. But sometimes I think I want to give him all the credit like, hey, these guys can nail this. It felt like that after we had nailed those three specific to Dolf. uh, Ms. Dahlf Riley. Yeah. He went kind of back to back to back with us on that within

inside of like eight months, I think, um, where he just was able to, you guys, let's, let's try this out whenever he seemed deemed fit to like, for us to, to do something for it. It was, yeah, it's weird. It's super weird because not everybody wants a hard rock song, which we're, we're trying to, uh, break that mold as well. No. You guys are so good at this.

Yeah. Come on. Well, I appreciate that. Go ahead. I'm fascinated by the idea that the Cody Rhodes, whoa, is so over now. And it's amazing to me that it took six years for this to happen. And nobody talks about the fact that this was his theme song when he was on the Indies.

This was his theme song in Ring of Honor. This was his theme song in Impact Wrestling. this was his theme song in A.W. Nobody was singing along to the woe until he was in DIPA. Correct. So that's planned, by the way, us being as big of fans as we are. Like Smoke and Mirrors has had that woe in some form or fashion. We didn't do that on an accident.

That's a callback joke. Like, it's all the way. Like, let's bring this all the way together. For wrestling fans to be so Easter egg. Honey, like, to catch on when it got to W.D.E., it's like, it's so cool. And I guess, I guess Kevin Dunn is a humongous fan of the tune. So he's put the emphasis on it during the entry. Yeah, it's now part of the entrance.

Oh, man, for sure. And you always see Triple H talking about, like, what are the big, you know, what are the big moments in your entrance? And, I mean, obviously, Triple H has the moment in his entrance, the water spit. But, yeah, they incorporated. yes, that and the fireworks and the punchdown, oh, it's so good now. But I'm just amazed that, like, you know, everyone loves singing along.

I was there at WrestleMania and like 80,000 people. They were all singing along to it. It's just amazing to me that it took that long for people to catch on. I can say that I want to give a little bit of credit to Chicago and Revolution. It might not have showed up on camera, but when we played him out to the ring,

at AEW, people were singing. That's a cool moment. Like singing live in front of a wrestling crowd, that's cool. Like I think back to, I was at WrestleMania 18. That was the first WrestleMania that I went to and saliva played there. And then, of course, you think back to like the DX band singing and Motorhead. Johnson was playing guitar on that. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the goat. So good. Just looking like a nerd. He looked like a teacher. Ding, ding, ding, dine, d'n, d'n, so good. Yeah.

But now you, then that was you guys. Then you were in that position playing live in front of the crowd. I have a few bucket list items and performing a guy out to the ring. I want to play on SNL still. We still, we have an album coming out right now. Oh, please, plug away. Who knows where we'll be. We're still, you know, working on.

music we write every day um we're still getting stuff out like that it's not just you know work for wrestlers we still write concepts up for ourselves but i always wanted to do conan when he still had music i always wanted to do s and i always wanted to play somebody out to the ring at mania specifically but damn if chicago crowd 16 000 people isn't a pretty good uh runner up prize when there were all the rumors about cody going to wwee one of the one of the of the biggest things was, is he going to have his theme song? And then, WrestleMania 38 and Dallas, wrestling has more than one royal family. I was like, oh, there it is. Oh, my gosh. Wow, they're acknowledging that AEW exists, basically. Yeah, man. So it's even more cool because he did

the whole throne thing, right when he, like, AW was taken off. I can't remember what pay-per-view that was. It was double or nothing. Double or nothing. The very first one. Man. So hearing it, so we, I don't want to give away too much, but we were aware that Kingdom was coming. And we were in a little bit of a legal battle. And Cody Rhodes is absolutely the fucking man. We were on the phone with lawyers and agents and WWEs lawyers and composers before.

And we have been with them since 2009, and we all have regular jobs. And we just wanted our cut of the pie on this one. We know what happens when you, we're not Joan Jett. We're not in living color or in, uh, living color. But like when you use a real song, they get paid, those artists get paid. Yeah. It's not a part of WWU work. This is a song that we wrote.

It's a licensing thing, right? Like they get paid every time you hit play on that. Correct. So if someone wins, it gets played twice, double your money. That's what we want. We want winners. But we just wanted, we were ready to walk away from Kingdom and say, thank you. And we're going to go back to doing our regular jobs.

So Cody might have come out to something different when he returned to WW. It was pretty close to it. And then Cody, we held a silence for a little bit. And I'd said my piece. and I'm my, you know, my hearts on my throat. And I'm not ready to give up this song. You know, I've worked so hard on the song. We worked so hard on the song.

And Cody just basically breaks the silence and he goes, well, you don't get me without kingdom on this conference call. All right. And he swore up and down right when he started using it, but if I go back to WWE, I'm taking kingdom with me. And, I mean, he's been nothing but truthful with us. time, but you never know when it, you know, when it comes down to the moment, you never know what's going to happen. And about two weeks before we had this big make-a-break moment,

and it might have been two seconds of silence. It might not have been the 10 minutes in my brain right now, but like he probably felt like two hours. Oh my God, dude. Isn't that one of those situations that they always say in a business negotiation that when they're silence, the first person who talks loses? Yeah, not on this one. Well, if it was you to talk, maybe you would have lost. But your guy, your guy came through for you. Cody came through, and that's the only one that really mattered in the room at the moment. So, yeah, he said, you don't get me without Kingdom.

So I don't know if this is too, like inside baseball or insider trading, but like the other songs weren't licensed. It was just like, you know. It was work for hire. Wow. Wow. Yeah. The Mrs. song was getting played a lot. Mm-hmm.

It sure was. And Dolph Ziegler doesn't ever get injured. No. Marathon, man. Yep. That's amazing. But I mean, look, it's all come back around here. It's seven years since you wrote Kingdom.

And it's now your number one song on Spotify. I would say for most wrestling fans currently, it's number one or very high up on their list of songs they want to listen to all the time. I made a meme. I should have tagged you guys in this. I made a meme. with the Christian Bale American Cycle where he's listening to headphones.

I saw that. I saw that. It got like 3 million plays on Instagram. It was like my AirPods and then me walking to the gym. Yeah. And it's Cody Rhodes Kingdom. That's so cool, man. Well, I'm happy.

I think people, it doesn't matter, like, it does matter, obviously, that Cody is Cody. But I think it's a good tune, man. I think it's a really, really good tune. We're super duper proud of it. Is that the one you're the most proud of? Yes, by far.

And I know this is like picking your favorite child. I get it. So my favorite child of all time. So I go on my rambles. Chelsea Green, I wrote this song called Hot Mess for when she initially left WBE. Now she's back. And she fought for this when she returned at the Rumble. Sorry if I'm revealing too much there.

but I wrote this song, Hot Ness for her, and it's so goofy, funny. It's just basically her T&A character, which was so good. It is so good. And we just started going back and forth a little bit about what she wanted her character of me, and at one point, my brother had chimed in. He's like, you want stripper music. And she was just like, yes, absolutely. So we kind of wrote this cherry pie-ish song.

and it's more or less about the most drunk brunch girl. Brunch girl. It's called Hot Mess. I brought some comedy chops out a little bit. And then I kind of did like this Barbie girl type of thing with her and Matt to do some dialogue back and forth. And it's funny. It's so good. And I got my producer to sing on it with me.

and she loved it. I loved it. I was super proud of that one. That one for just having the most fun and as soon as the pen goes to the paper, it's the finished song. That one for me most recently is a favorite of mine, but Kingdom, that's my baby.

It's Sean's baby. It's Justin's baby. There's not a better way for the business of Downstate to collab on a song and make something so perfect, honestly. What happened with this Seth Rollins theme song, which is out there, but just never ended up getting used by the video. It was another thing like radio. The fans had asked us to cover a few, which, man, they had asked us to do a whole bunch of stuff.

And Ryder had always come up. And Rollins had always come up. So we said, okay, we'll sit down and we'll write some lyrics over this and write this, this hook. look and we wrote burn it down and screamed it and we're still a little bit pissed off about it. Is that you that's screaming it currently? No, certainly isn't. It sure is not. It sounds just like Sean too.

We wrote that and performed it downstairs and in a basement. And it just felt so weird. Like he had retweeted it and put it over a little bit and it was really, really cool. And we got, we got our, um, our spins off of that by doing just fan service. Yeah. Mostly to ourselves, but to everybody that wanted us to, uh, you know, perform his tune. The song's pretty good. I'm super proud of that one as well. I think it came out really, really hot. Um, but not a month later, he was doing the burn it down right before he came out. And that was the only part. I'm just like, because it used to just be a pause. I don't know if everybody

remembers this. He used to be. and then there's just a pause. This is awful, but you get the point. Yeah. But the burn it down fills the space there. I don't think that Sean will ever be over that because he just did it kind of on a whim, but there's definitely a plan there.

Yeah. But as far as that goes, that's just fan service and we asked whoever wrote it, I believe CFOs did that bit. We just asked them and their buddies. We asked them a, it's basically a 50-50. Hey, can we cover your song? You get half the royalties if it gets any sale.

They're like, yeah, dude, whatever. Go. Yeah. So that's how that works. You know, we talk about 80,000 people singing along to Kingdom at WrestleMania 39. How about WrestleMania 39 opening with your song, Ms. and Snoop standing in the ring? Like, this is the thing. it's Snoop Dog.

Yeah. Absolute legend. They could have used any Snoop song that they wanted. They played your song instead. Right. I know, right? Platinum artist and they did, I came to play instead. They could have played any Snoop song.

We were in L.A. They could have played, you know, California Love or something. Nope. No, not today. Nope. This is the bigger star in that stadium right there at that moment, I guess. That must be pretty cool, though, to have your song Open Mania. We still haven't really.

There's moments as fans. Like Sting's debut has here to show the world in the background. I'm super proud of that. The biggest pop in cash in history has got here to show the world in the background. John Cena Rock, Ms. Main Event. It's got us like we've got a lot of moments. That plays twice that night.

Yeah, man. Nobody talks with us. Miz walked in as the WWE champion. and walk out as a WWE champion, WrestleMania 27. And I don't think we ever show him nearly enough love. That dude has put us over since we started. I came to play and still to this day,

if he's talking about rock and roll, whether it's true or not, and I don't have enough dialogue with him, but whether it's true or not, that dude, every time he's talking about rock and roll, he throws us in there. Wow.

That's incredible. That dude has taken care of us since the jump. But what's even more funny, I always thought, like, since mania, so we open, I came to play, starts with Snoop Dog in it. People, it's kind of weird because it's Snoop Dog that it's kind of an underground thing. Snoop Dog put a verse on Kingdom. What? Yeah, Snoop Dog.

Is this, if we can go find this somewhere? Yeah, it's on YouTube. What? Yeah. Wow, I'd no idea. There was a random day, Cody was doing that game show with him. on TBS or TNT. Oh, the Go Big Show, yeah.

And they were judges together. Yeah. And we get a random text from Cody one day. He's like, hey, man, do you have the masters of kingdom? Oddly enough, we didn't. We recorded it so long ago in Cleveland and our buddy who had moved out to L.A.

to start doing some more production stuff. He's like, dude, I can't find it. So we had to go re-recorded Kingdom him on the spot to send to snoops people and snoop laid a verse down and then he he he played snoop he played cody out to the ring on like a fight night or something like that but he he wraps over kingdom man yeah does he say something something cody roads no i think uh i don't think he ever listened to the chorus he just did the verse um that's one of that means because of bt most people

just think the lyrics or something something Cody Rose. I do too, man. I forget my words all the time. You should sing that sometimes. I will next time we perform it. I definitely will just do something, something and point to the guy that gets it. I love that that's become such a thing. Like anytime I post any sort of video on TikTok,

YouTube, Facebook with Cody in it, something, something Cody writes. Yeah, oh yeah, always. What was your reaction when you first saw this? just pure laughter. And then the rest of the band makes fun of me all the time because literally I won't ever go up there with like a teleprompter or words, but they, they're going to make fun of me like, hey, man, sing second verse first again.

One of the words or a song. You guys need to go on tour just singing wrestling themes. So I'm glad you brought that up. And your business mind is spectacular. And I'm not going to act like this isn't a credit to you right now. saying, hey, when we do, when WrestleMania happens, we definitely should just go out and do. Like when I saw you

and I walked you, you're like, oh, do you know what Matt Cardone is? I'm like, actually, he's at the table next to me. And I was like, you guys need to go on tour a WrestleMania weekend. This would be such a big hit. With all the tunes that we do, I think that people would have a great time. Yes. To us for 45 to an hour just playing wrestling tunes.

Exactly. That crowd, how so you all the way get it. But like how good of a, like wrestling family. Yeah. It's incredible. They embrace everything. Like, they genuinely do love it, but like, man, they're going to support it.

Yeah. They are going to support it no matter what. I think to get back to your, your great business idea, not mine. We have discussed it prior to, and it's kind of fallen by the wayside. But, like, I think that WrestleMania 40 should have a down. And look, Russellmania 40s driveable for you. Let's go. So I think it's in Philly.

Oh, boy. So, and it's not that often that there's an East Coast WrestleMania. I mean, I guess there was New York. It was very cold. Tampa, I guess, is technically East Coast, but Florida's not. I don't know, is that really East Coast? No, it's Florida. Yeah, it's Florida, right?

It's Florida. So this is drivable. So I feel like there's something there. Maybe it's not a full-on concert, but maybe it's, you guys are part of a Dolph Ziegler event, and you play a bunch of songs. You're part of a major brother's event. You play a bunch of songs. Combine them all that way people think that we have fans.

Come on. You know how many people are watching this right now? Oh, my gosh. Yeah. A lot of fans. Oh, man. Are you guys open to taking commissions right now? I'm sure there's a lot of indie wrestlers.

I'm sure there's just a lot of wrestlers, period, that would go, man, I would love a downstay song. So I don't want to reveal too much about who we're working on. But we, I'll give. So you remember Joe Alonzo? He took the big joke slam on his neck recently. We're working on his tune right now. We're big fans of that guy.

We've watched a few times just in. He's not a heel in real life. I love Joe. No, he's a great kid, man. Joe's great. That kid's fantastic. We're working on something for him right now. And we got a few others in the mix.

We're always trying to find the next guy a little bit. Joe, we're a super big fan of him. He at one show particularly with about 250 people in the crowd, he was working heel, read the room and turned it on its head and was baby by the end of the night. I was like, that's, wow. If you want to know what it looks like, that's what it is right there. He just listened to the room. Yeah.

So that's tougher to do. Everybody, you can train a lot of athletes to go in there and wrestle. This guy listened to the crowd and worked it. So big fan of Joe. We're finishing something up for him right now. Okay. Zach, when you talk about being a lifelong wrestling fan, clearly you get it. Who were your guys growing up?

Going to be some of it's super boring. I was a pretty good athlete, so I always appreciated guys. D. Malenko. was my dude i loved watching cruiserweight stuff but like a thousand holds dude when he would go and just slow down a match and turn it into like you can't do that because i'm so good at wrestling even as like a nine and 10 year old kid i was like yeah that guy and he was always a heel for the most part um booker t i was a wcw kid at first uh booker t was huge for me and then kevin nash those are my three guys. Okay.

Which is all different spectrum, but like, one, they all could, for the most part, Booker T and Kevin Nash own the room without ever wrestling. And then when they wrestle, they delivered for me. So you're a big WCW guy. I was a huge WCW guy. Yeah. Like Goldberg during his streak, I ate that shit up. Like, that was awesome. Conan, when we come out and do anything, uh, man, uh, disco inferno. I thought he had incredible match. Alex right.

I thought like these matches are like you can watch them on Saturday, Thursday, Monday, and you're getting a great performance out of whoever the local guy is with not. Like you remember when the guy didn't have wet hair? Like he was. Yeah. When the guy didn't have wet hair and didn't get an entrance. He was already. Like, oh man, this dude's in trouble.

But like that guy, like they would always put, have good matches with these. guys. I love, love, love watching them. And then when I got into WWF, I kind of switched what I loved a little bit. Xbox was big for me. Jeff Hardy was big for me. And then The Rock. Like, and as I got older, Triple H and Mankind are my guys because I got it a little bit more. But there's so many matches for those two dudes.

where like there's a whole big hatred for triple h for not ever putting guys over like how many dudes did that dude make on his way and during and then same with mankind that guy nick put everybody over and it never mattered that he lost it never mattered that he lost it was always like he was always a threat um so yeah and man people sleep on wcw i know they like to point to a lot of the bad booking towards the end. And yeah, it wasn't good. But there was so much other great stuff going on.

Like the natural born thrillers, like come on. So good. That first hour of just cruiser waits, I tuned into that. And that was brilliant. I would tune into that. And then I would switch over to raw

and I would switch between the two. Oh, for sure. But like seeing all of those guys, like the first time I saw Shane Helms pull off the vertibaker, I was like, what the heck is that?

I feel like he actually did break someone. spine. He killed him. The entrance theme is vertebraker. We'll break your spine. Vertar breaker does the trick every time. And I'm like, yeah, he's breaking people's spines.

I got to, I, I would be reminisced. I feel like, I'd feel horrible if I didn't put over the juice right now. Moving to the kids. Yeah, dude. So the kids on that I coach right now call me juice. He was one of mine. When he did the mask reveal, I remember, I believe it was Bobby. just saying look how ugly is the whole time

he's not a bad looking dude but I remember as a kid to him just saying that dude is ugly I was like oh what's a pretty guy looked like then I thought it was hilarious Bobby putting that over a little bit but yeah I was a big juice guy too who's the wait that first hour man you couldn't touch that first hour

that's good TV man so good as a wrestling fan and as a musician this is going to be difficult give me your Mount Rushmore of entrance themes. And you can't put any downstate on there. So in no order. Can I just do my favorite?

Yeah, of course. Okay. Yeah, these are your four favorites. Okay. Your four, your Mount Rushmore. So Jeff Hardy at Armageddon, when he had the words over,

it's no more words, right? Yeah, yeah. I love that tune. So good. Absolutely love that tune. It's the first time since I was young that I popped when he won the WWE title. So that song specifically, I watched that whole ride up to him winning the title and I was invested like I was 10 years old again. That works.

Booker T's without a doubt might be the greatest thing. Might be the greatest theme of all time. Dude. It's a good theme. It's so weird. It's so weird. Dittlidoo. And what are they saying in the background?

Like ice cold. I believe so. I don't know. Nobody ever knows. Okay. Wow. Jeff Hardy, Booker T. Okay.

Cains always got me. Which one? The first one. Without the singing. Yes. Okay. When they put all the singing in stuff, it kind of bugged me a little bit. Because

with Figure 11, they're an awesome band, but it was just like, they're fellow Canadians. I love Finger 11. Do you remember when, hold on, I'll finish this up.

Do you remember MTVX? MTVX? It was like MTV2, but just for rock. Well, look, I grew up in Canada, we'd have MTV

until I was like 20. So, yeah. We had MTV Canada. Not the same. Everybody just said, sorry. time inflated jewelry. Sorry about that.

Sorry, we just got to play nickelback and finger 11 all day. Oh, nice. So it's a toss up now between just gutter reactions between three for me. The Rock Stone Cold. I'm guessing

the Rock's like electrifying one. Because Rock's had a bunch of themes. Yeah, yeah. The Rock's heel theme, people sleep on the LA one is cooking. Yeah. dude. Yeah, the slow, yeah. Yeah.

Stone cold, of course. And stone cold with the glass, but you remember Triple H's like McMahon Helmsley? One, two? Is this one? Yeah. Most people, and I made a TikTok about this, most people don't realize that they're saying, one, two, is this on? Like, it's a mic check.

Like, one, two, is this on? No. You just blew my mind. everyone thinks it's like Cessuan or one what's one two

one told I don't know that's one two just blew my eye all the way my mind is blown that that is my favorite triple H theme my time entrance thing by far

because they they didn't just do the green lights that they do now for the game or even bow down they had an actual light show going on, which is my dad would hate me. He was a lighting director, but like them doing all the different colors in it always worked for me as a kid.

And he would tell me that I don't have any sense of lighting. But like that worked for me big time. Look, I appreciate that you named seven songs there. That was amazing. Well, there's an extra three. There's probably another three presidents that were good enough to be on the number. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure they're, yeah, for sure.

I mean, Triple H is the game. Undertaker's theme, I think you'd be remiss to not mention that's a classic theme. Goldberg, dude, like another WCW one, the original one. Yes. Those WCW themes were terrible. Not great. And Goldberg's kind of broke the mold because it was. They nailed it.

And I don't want to, they were just cop another song. I remember the first time I watched a Thunder in. person and I didn't know who DDP was and I was just like oh I know this song you're like oh Nirvana cool yeah let's go oddly enough that's the first song I'd love to know the story behind that song because that

basically is Nirvana yeah right and then Chris Sherrykel came out to Eden flow right or something like that it's just a pearl jam tune but I mean was was it actually no no you just switch it up

it enough to not get in trouble I need to talk to DDP about this. Oh, man. It smells like story on this. Not yoga. Smells like not yoga. It smells like not yoga. Dude, this has been great.

I'm so glad we were able to catch up, get to know you a little bit more, and get to know the man behind all of the themes and the band behind all of these themes. I'm excited. I felt like we just had a really good conversation and hangout right there. It was a lot of fun. It was great. feel if we could talk for another seven hours about bad WCW themes. What else to talk about? How about TNA themes?

Oh, I don't want to go into that. Some of them, some of them are. There's some real bangers there. Yeah, AJ Sehals theme. Get ready to fly. We worked with, oh, John, who did, he did Brian's song, Brian Meyer's song, and that's how we ended up doing. There's some more songs that I didn't even mention I feel bad about now. We did the major players theme for their TNA and now their indie run. Also an incredible tune.

But we collabed with Brian's old writer from TNA. John Krieger, I believe, is his name. Please edit that out if you could. I don't remember his last name right now, but we worked with him on this and collabed and made this awesome tune as well. But yeah, TNA notoriously does okay. It's a nice way of putting it. Yes.

Yeah, it's a really nice way of putting it. Well, as you know, I end every conversation talking about gratitude because it's such a, you know, big part of my life. I have this new sign here behind me. I just painted the walls in my office here. I used to be white. Now it's whatever color this is. Three things that you're grateful for, Zach. Three things I'm not, thinking three things that I'm grateful for.

I we never quit. In the weirdest way, a lot of us don't have, and this is getting a little bit deep, but we don't have the greatest family upbringing. So downstate is our family. So it takes a family to actually to understand what family is. Family is definitely the thing that we gained from going through all this together. And now we're riding this awesome, awesome wave. and we went through all the struggles together.

So not quitting, family. And then, man, I don't want to just single them out. So I won't. Just the boys and the girls. Specific to everybody have already named Ms. Dolph, Cody, Britt and Chelsea for carrying us, Matt, Zach, man. They have carried all of us. They've carried all of them.

They've carried us to heights that we never saw coming and we're happy to be. We didn't sink their ship. They, you know, they rose our tide for sure. Oh, I love that. What is a downstate, by the way? It's eighth grade boys trying to be smart with algorithms on YouTube because system of a down was out. and down breed was out and downstate spelled correctly was already taken if we live in upstate Indiana it doesn't make any sense we were just trying to just trying to come over the

band name that sounded like a band name if yeah and we're dumb 12 year old kids but if you were to search down hopefully we made a song big enough by like the third search man oh man look that's amazing yeah And I think that one of the things I want to acknowledge you for during this whole conversation and what you guys have done as a band is there's a lot of people who are not willing to work for an opportunity, not willing to work for free, perhaps, not willing to work for what they perceive to be their price or their rate. And you're basically saying, give us the shot. Let us use this opportunity to springboard into something else. And I just want to acknowledge

you guys for that. Well, thank you. it's not it's not arrogant it's confident we know what we can do yeah yeah well uh it's banger after banger after banger after banger after banger so man you guys should be so proud of everything you've done and uh keep up the great work man well thank you so much man and uh we hope we keep putting more out there we go hope you enjoyed that chat with zach call and i feel like now i want to go on put on Kingdom or just a downstate playlist of all kinds of entrance themes. So good. And I love hearing the stories behind these themes because they can literally make or break you as a wrestler.

Think about it. A great theme, a great entrance. Boom. I'm invested. I'm in. Bad theme, bad entrance. What the heck's going on? Who is this person? I don't even know if I care. But the great thing about downstate is it's bangor after bangor after bangor. So if you liked this conversation, If you liked hearing the behind the scenes of how all this stuff is made, go also check out my interview with the goat, Jim Johnson. That was such a fascinating one and think about all the themes that he has put together. Please also share this with a friend. Make sure you're subscribed as well.

Tag us on social media so we can share this out. They are at Downstate Band. I'm at Chris Van Fleet. And I love this quote from Victor Hugo. Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. and that which cannot remain silent. Be great, be grateful. We will see you on the next one for some more insight.

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