Incredibly Strange Wrestling

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Incredibly Strange Wrestling
Details
Acronym ISW
Established 1995
Style Lucha Libre/Comedy Wrestling
Location California, USA
Founder(s) Johnny Legend and August Ragone
Formerly Rockabilly Wrestling

Incredibly Strange Wrestling (aka "ISW") is a San Francisco-based wrestling promotion, heavily influenced by masked Mexican Wrestling or Lucha Libre. Its shows usually combine wrestling matches with performances by Punk, Rockabilly, Garage, Psychobilly, and Thrash bands.

[edit] History

ISW presented various comedic characters and satiric matches. The tutu wearing El Homo Loco was one of the show’s mainstays throughout its late 1990s heyday, as was a large female wrestler named the Poontangler who claimed to have many illegitimate children and fought several “paternity suit” matches. The promotion also presented a “Christians to the Lions” match where a cross-toting, ancient Christian fought a man in a lion suit. The Uncle N.A.M.B.L.A. vs. Lil’ Timmy match pitted a gigantic pedophile against a teenage boy. Other ISW creations include The Amazing Caltiki, The Ku Klux Klown, El Pollo Diablo, El Borracho Gigante, Chango Loco (the fire breathing Santerian Psycho), Americon Man, Scientology, Cletus the Fetus, The Cruiser, The Inbred Abomination, Macho Sasquatcho, The Mexican Viking, L’Empereur, and many more. ISW also featured many semi- and pro-wrestlers from the California circuits, and eventually featured several true-blue Luchadors from Mexico.

ISW started at the Transmission Theater (currently known as Fat City) in San Francisco’s South of Market District in 1995. Early on, it was a creative collaboration between Rockabilly-Wrestling-Cult Movie entrepreneur Johnny Legend (director of the Andy Kaufman movie My Breakfast with Blassie) and event promoter/cult movie enthusiast August Ragone (author of Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters), who first worked together on Joey Myers' "Sleazefest" at the DNA Lounge in 1990. After several subsequent Johnny Legend shows in San Francisco and San Jose, which featured masked Lucha Libre thrown into the mix, Ragone and Bret Kieble (who worked at the Paradise Lounge) decided to approach Paradise Lounge owner Robin Reichert with a pitch for a rotating monthly series of after-hours shows, which would include "Masked Mexican Wrestling" (Lucha Libre). Reichert fixated on that particular idea, and told them to put together a show.

After a couple of successful events, they knew ISW (originally called Rockabilly Wrestling) was going to become a monster, so Ragone and Kieble asked music booker/band manager, Audra Angeli-Morse (then employed at the Paradise Lounge/Transmission Theatre where many of the early ISW shows were held), to come aboard and help to manage the business end of the show, while they handled, with Johnny Legend, the creative end. During the first summer, ISW quickly spiraled into popularity, even going on the road for the West Coast leg of Lollapalooza '95 (arranged by Legend), but things were soon to go south. With her exact motives unclear, Angeli-Morse forced out co-creator Legend, who coined the name "Incredibly Strange Wrestling" (approved by cult director Ray Dennis Steckler, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies), despite protests by Ragone and Kieble. Eventually, Angeli-Morse started an aggressive takeover of the event, with Ragone and Kieble eventually parting ways with ISW (even though Angeli-Morse never bought them out, and they are still listed on the original Business License filed with the City and County of San Francisco in 1995).

After the split, Legend ran his own Los Angeles-based version of Incredibly Strange Wrestling and booked matches at monster movie conventions in Southern California (covered in a Flipside magazine interview). In 2006, he produced the world's first Lucha Libre porn movie, Nympho Libre. After returning from a stint in Florida, Legend and his sister, Lynne Margulies (director of the Andy Kauffman documentary I'm from Hollywood, formed the DVD label Legend House. Legend has also revived his own wrestling event, Johnny Legend's Original Rock N Roll Wrestling, which debuted at a Tiger Mask event on August 4, 2007 (held at Crash Mansion LA in Downtown Los Angeles), featuring some of the original ISW wrestlers. Ragone continued on with producing his own Rockabilly events through 1999 (with the fifth annual Greaseball Weekender), and since his ISW days, returned to writing and lecturing on Japanese Cinema and Pop Culture. Over the last several years, Ragone has been authoring liner notes for English-language DVD releases of Japanese films and television series, programmed the Castro Theatre's Godzillafest in 2004, and currently organizes the annual SHOCK IT TO ME! Horror Film Festival at the historic San Francisco movie palace. 2007 saw the publication of Ragone's first book, Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters (published by Chronicle Books), which has been receiving numerous positive reviews, including Time magazine. Brett Kieble is now married and currently resides in Colorado.

Incredibly Strange Wrestling has been a featured attraction during many Summer festival tours, including a low-budget U.S. club tour in 1997 headlined by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Vans' Warped Tour in 2001, and the Deconstruction Tour (Europe) in 2003 with NOFX. After a long hiatus, the promotion has announced some Summer Festival dates for 2007, but there has been little activity from this once vital and seminal event, which has been eclipsed by the east-coast wrestling-meets-rubber monsters show Kaiju Big Battel.

Bands that have played ISW shows include NOFX, The Supersuckers, The Mad Capsule Markets (Japan, first US tour), Me First and Gimme Gimmes, The Dickies, Demented Are Go, The Donnas, Deadbolt, The Queers, Fear, Mike Watt and many more. Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, local shock jock Dennis Erectus and 7 Seconds vocalist Kevin Seconds often played bad guy managers at ISW shows.

Chango Loco y Los Rudos are a band apparently fronted by the wrestler Chango Loco (the fire breathing Santerian Psycho), and are featured on the TKO Records Sampler "Punch Drunk Volume 2."

Bob Calhoun wrestled and announced with the group under the stage name of Count Dante in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His ISW memoir, titled Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, is being published by ECW Press in April 2008.

[edit] References

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