Former WWE Magazine Writer Recalls Interviewing Randy Savage Without Permission

Former WWE, Raw and SmackDown magazine writer Brian Solomon was a guest on the 6:05 Superpodcast with Bryan Last, where he discussed how little WWE paid attention to the magazine division of the company.

“Another thing that helped me when I was there with the historical stuff was I think a lot of people don’t realize how much under the radar we were with that magazine. Everybody always thinks of it as this well oiled machine and this really tight ship, which it is, but we were a very small piece of the pie. WWE magazine, the amount of money and revenue we brought in was a drop in the bucket. A lot of times, they weren’t really even paying close attention to us.”

“I remember doing some legends stories. People would be like, ‘Oh my God, they’re not going to let you do that. You better check with somebody before you do that.’ I would just go ahead and do it. I got away with it and I think I got away with it because nobody was noticing. When Randy Savage did his rap CD, ‘Be a Man’, I had the idea of doing a review for it in the magazine and doing an interview with him. Everybody was like, ‘You can’t talk to Randy Savage. Persona non grata’ Part of it was that I was very naive. I was in my 20’s. I got his number, called him up, did the interview, and published it. I remember even in the middle of the interview, he said, ‘Does Vince know you’re talking to me?’ I’m like, ‘No, he has no idea.’ He started laughing his a** off because even he couldn’t believe that I was doing that.”

“I did the same thing with Bruno when Arnold Skaaland died. Arnold Skaaland was revered by the McMahon family and the organization so they wanted to have this obituary. I said I can’t do this without interviewing Bruno. This was before he reconciled with them. This was like 2006 or something. I said, how can I write this without getting a comment from Bruno. I reached out to Bruno and he was incredulous too. He couldn’t believe it and said ‘Are you supposed to be talking to me?’ He was worried I was going to get fired for talking to him. But I went ahead, I did it, and I printed it. In both of those cases, I think for Savage, it was the last time that he ever spoke to anybody in the WWE organization, and for Bruno, it was the first time I believe he had talked to any public facing part of the company in many, many years. I just went ahead and did it.”

Solomon recalled how Shane McMahon once disrespected a Macho Man poster.

“Nobody ever said why. I have to be honest without getting into all that. I never knew any of that while I was working there. I found out years later at least whatever rumors there were. I can tell you it was definitely a name that you can’t bring up. Among the jobber crew of us working there, you can say whatever you want. Among certain people, you definitely didn’t want to bring that name up. We were such marks in that magazine. That division of the company was definitely composed of people who loved wrestling so we would do markish things. We would have wrestling posters on the wall. We had a Randy Savage one up. I remember at one time I was working for Shane McMahon. He was the head of our department for a little while. I remember he came out of his office. He saw the Randy Savage poster tacked to the wall. He walked over to it. He literally poked it as hard as he could with his fingers repeatedly until it fell off the wall, then he stepped on it, and walked back into his office.”