Downstait lead singer Zack Call recently spoke with WrestlingNews.co’s Steve Fall on a number of topics including how he got involved with top WWE star “The American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes.
Call said, “Cody was doing his Stardust thing and was frustrated. I wanted to be a professional wrestler for the longest time. Rock star, baseball player, professional wrestler, like, kind of my only three options ever in life and I went really hard at all of them. Being such a fan of this, I knew Cody forever. I was a huge Goldust guy, huge Dusty guy, like that was a little before my time, but I think I’m a historian when it comes to some of the stuff. I studied Cody and loved him all the way through, every single run that he had. I just was like, this guy is awesome. I loved Ted as well in that Legacy run, but I really, really loved Cody. You could just see it in some of his promos. I was like, this guy gives a sh*t. This is really, really good stuff.”
“He gets into the Stardust thing and I loved it. I was a big fan of Arrow when he got to do the thing with Stephen Amell. I was watching Arrow as that was happening, but you could still tell he got the peak of that at that SummerSlam and everything after that, it just kind of felt, whatever. Even the brother tag team storyline was so good and that should have catapulted everything into the main event picture and it just felt like they just kept pulling the rug, the same way they kind of did with his dad the whole time he was there, same way they kind of did with his brother the whole time he was there.”
“I get that not everybody can be the champion, but eventually one of those guys that you sh*t on so much, you have to catapult one of them into that thing and it felt like Cody and Dolph had a really good summer and they didn’t really do it with either of them. I remember that summer JR putting them over and saying one of these two guys will be champion one day and Dolph got injured unfortunately, and then they really pumped the brakes on him. We were representing him at the time. Cody was having these amazing, amazing matches, but mostly he wasn’t working TV. He was promoting stuff and being a sh*t heel. I was just like, this guy clearly gets it. This guy should be a megastar.”
“They get into the Stardust thing. You could see that he’s discouraged by it. As soon as he leaves, he puts out this tweet saying, ‘What song should I use on the Indies?’ Again, we’re kind of a dying brand, but Matt Cardona had given us a little bit of life and I will never be able to thank him enough. He gives us a little bit of notoriety. We get a little bit of traction on Twitter. I see Cody put out, ‘What song should we use on the Indies?” I said to Justin, that’s my brother, ‘You need to reach out to him to see if we can take a crack at this. I know Cody. I never met the guy, but I know his character and I feel like we can nail his frustration.’ We got lucky with somebody recommending him use ‘Thrown’ by Bring Me the Horizon, and I was listening to that album on repeat in the gym every single day, probably two or three times a day back when I was trying to be a wrestler. I knew exactly what he wanted. Shawn and I got drunk in a basement for about two days. I went out and I hit on his dad’s promo, the hard times promo, and I was like I think if this doesn’t work, then I don’t have a clue what he wants. We threw out those lyrics to him and he shortly got back to us with, ‘I love it. Record it. Let’s go with it. He had it in Evolve and TNA Bound for Glory, and then overseas in New Japan, and then Ring of Honor. The Ring of Honor run I thought was incredible, and then AEW All In. It was just amazing that he did everything he promised when he said he had it and he started doing promos about it, and the song started getting over a little bit. He said he would take it everywhere with him and that’s kind of what happened.”
On Rhodes insisting that his theme song comes with him to WWE:
“They got us on a conference call. I want to say Cody and Brian were definitely there. The whole band was there. Me, Sean and Justin, were there. Our representative is Sean, our bass player/singer. He’s also a lawyer so he could help us out a little bit with that, but it’s a little different in entertainment. Then WWE’s people were on and I don’t know who that consists of because it was just a lot of people on a phone call. More or less what happened, Cody went into the meeting. Everybody was kind of being super nice to each other. They were kind of talking the logistics of everything. I said my piece. We as Downstait have a lot of spins with a lot of songs that we’ve done, but we got paid very little to do that before, and that’s fine because we didn’t write any of the songs. Jim did, but we performed them. We felt like if we’re on TV every week, we need to be taken care of a little bit more than what we’re doing, but honestly, we were glorified karaoke guys, and we get it. We honestly did, but there just felt like there’s a piece of the pie that was missing. We wrote this song. This is our baby. I spoke up and I said, ‘Hey, I’m on 11 video games and I work a nine-to-five. I work three jobs at home and still do this music thing. I’m borderline miserable over there. I’d like to be taken care of on this one in any way possible, which is just normal for TV. I said my peace. I was getting pretty emotional and Cody broke the silence and said, ‘Hey, you guys don’t get me without Kingdom’, and it was just one of the coolest moments of my life. I didn’t feel like me standing up for it actually sold it. I think Cody was gonna stand his ground, but I think my sob story probably lent into what he was going to say anyways. It was pretty cut and dry from there and we’ve been taken care of. We’ve been able to still have our nine to five, but live a little more comfortably now that we’re on TV and we own all of our rights.”
On if he has plans for WrestleMania XL:
“So we’re gonna leave that to our announcement on 4-5-24 and all of our teasers. We’ll have to wait and see what’s going on there.”
“I can tell you this. I will be in Philadelphia WrestleMania weekend.”
On his involvement with Seth Rollins’ Burn It Down theme song:
“We just put out a thing asking people what they wanted us to cover. We had a few prepared, but Rollins had won by a landslide. We went down to the basement, the same basement we wrote Kingdom in, and we just put some words on it. Sean had always wanted to scream on a track like that and I really wanted to be Killswitch Engage on a track and just try to get my Howard out on something and we did that. Seth was kind enough to retweet it and give it a little steam. Having never been on TV, I think it’s our biggest song ever that hasn’t gotten pushed by a TV promotion and it’s just because of the popularity of Seth as well and then people really were pushing for him to get that. Shortly thereafter after we did the cover, he got that Burn it Down as a part of the intro. I thought that was pretty cool.”
On if he’s working on any other wrestling theme song:
“We’re getting hit up by a lot of indie guys and we’re able to create something for them specifically so they’re not using generic library music anymore and we’re having pretty good success with that. Maybe somebody even in a WWE family that we’ve just finished one for as well. He’s just starting his wrestling career. I won’t give anything else away, but like we just finished one there. As far as big promotions, we’re always down to create more. I really would like to reach out to somebody that we’ve worked with in the past and do something for them for the future, and I have reached out recently about that. I’ll let you guys figure that out. I can’t give too much away on that either.”
You can check out Call’s comments in the video below.
