
The telephone rang at the home of Jimmy Hart, the wrestling manager and musician, in Clearwater, Fla., one day in 1995. Hart was working on some songs with his friend J.J. Maguire before he picked up. Maguire could hear only Hart’s end of the conversation. When Hart hung up, Maguire recalled, he looked like a deer paralyzed by headlights.
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“What now? Maguire asked.
“Well,” Hart said, “that was The Hulkster. He said he wanted to come over and talk to us.”
They were not sure why. The man on the way to Hart’s home had been the biggest star in the wrestling business for a decade. Hulk Hogan, the 6-foot-7, 300-pound platinum blond behemoth, was the main attraction when Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation took off in the 1980s. He body-slammed Andre The Giant at Wrestlemania. He sold a generation of young fans on the necessity of saying your prayers, eating your vitamins and ripping your yellow T-shirt in half. He starred in movies and television shows.
At that moment, though, Hogan was entering the back half of his career. He had left the WWF for its main rival, World Championship Wrestling. His knees ached with every leg drop. He was looking for a project that reconnected him with his youth. Twenty-five years later, Maguire can still recall Hogan’s pitch. Maguire and Hart shared a couch. Hogan sat in a chair across from them.
“Brothers,” Hogan said, “before I’m done with all this, I want to do some music.”
Eight years later, a musician named Jesse Krakow received a gift from his older brother, Jonah. The Krakows had loved wrestling as kids growing up in California. Jesse watched a closed-circuit broadcast at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1986 when Hogan toppled King Kong Bundy in a cage match at Wrestlemania 2. As he grew up, Jesse faded away from wrestling after a while. He became a bassist who worked with artists like Shudder To Think and Bootsy Collins.
“Did you know that Hulk Hogan has a rap album?” Jonah told Jesse. “You have to hear this shit.”
They sat and listened to the record spawned from Hogan’s meeting with Hart and Maguire, an album called “Hulk Rules,” credited to Hulk Hogan and The Wrestling Boot Band. Krakow was captivated as Hogan rapped about giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the beach and crooned about the death of a young fan. The music lasted only 29 minutes. It stuck with Krakow far longer.
“That album was just so weird,” Krakow said. “And we always loved it. Every couple years, I would come back to ‘The world just lost another Hulkamaniac.’ It was almost as weird as like Captain Beefheart or Diamanda Galás or some David Lynch shit. Like, where does this come from? And why?”
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He could not shake his fascination with the songs. They were spare and strange. So in the summer of 2018, he snuck away from his wife and children for a couple of hours at a time and descended into his basement in West Orange, N.J. He was working on a project so bizarre he did not exactly know how to explain it.
No longer was Hogan at the pinnacle of the wrestling business. He had spent a good chunk of the 2010s consumed by scandal. His defamation lawsuit defunded the website Gawker. World Wrestling Entertainment terminated his contract in 2015 after he was discovered on tape using racist slurs (the WWE brought Hogan back in 2018, but Hogan remains banned by WWE’s main competitor, All Elite Wrestling).
The problematic behavior of Hogan dismayed Krakow. Yet he still felt captivated by the mystery of his music. He wanted to produce a track-by-track re-imagining of “Hulk Rules.” His lodestar was easy to find.
“The connective tissue between all the songs is that Hulk rules,” Krakow said. “When you have such a basic template, it gives you license to get away from it as far as you can. Because ultimately, it’s always going to come back to Hulk ruling.”
“Music’s always been one of my great passions in life, almost as big as wrestling,” Hulk Hogan wrote in a 2003 autobiography. “If you love something, you usually get good at it, so I guess it was inevitable that I’d turn into a pretty decent musician.”
Terry Bollea, the boy who became The Hulkster, grew up in Tampa. His father was a pipefitter. His mother cooked steaks on Fridays. Terry started to play bass guitar in his teens. He joined a band called Infinity’s End. They covered Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf. Bollea gigged through high school and college. By his 20s, his cover arsenal had expanded to include the Allman Brothers and Uriah Heep.
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Hogan still felt drawn to another calling. He started lifting weights and training to wrestle. When he turned pro in 1977, he sold his music equipment to pay the rent. His career took off. Hogan became a star across the country and in Japan. Along the way, he met Hart, a manager who would become known as “The Mouth of The South.” Hart had spent time in the 1960s as a singer in a group called The Gentrys, which would later include Maguire as its drummer. Hart and Hogan became fast friends.
As his star ascended in the squared circle, Hogan maintained ties to the music world. He accompanied Cyndi Lauper to the Grammys in a sleeveless tuxedo. CBS ran two seasons of an animated show called “Hulk Hogan’s Rock N’ Wrestling,” with Brad Garrett voicing the Hulkster. He graced the cover of the WWF’s “Piledriver: The Wrestling Album II.” And he harbored fantasies about returning to the stage.
At one point, Hogan told Vice in 2014, he lobbied Metallica to become their bassist. He wrote letters to Metallica’s management company and recorded a demo tape. He did not hear back. “I would have quit wrestling to play in The Rolling Stones or Metallica like that,” he told Vice.
For “Hulk Rules,” though, Hogan entrusted the project to his two partners, Maguire said. The group huddled at a studio attached to Hogan’s home in Florida. They spent about a month on the project. The credits list Hogan as the bassist, but Maguire says he crafted “98 percent” of the music, while Hart wrote the lyrics and made suggestions about tempo. (An interview request sent to Hogan through his website went unreturned. Hart did not respond to multiple emails; Maguire said that Hart no longer conducts interviews.)
Hogan served as the music’s inspiration and main protagonist. His name is featured in the title of six of the 10 songs. He aided some of the lyrics and provided a framework for other songs, Maguire said. Hogan asked the duo to write a song about life on the road. From this edict came “Wrestling Boot Traveling Band,” which sounds like a credible Jimmy Buffet bootleg and also became the namesake for Hogan’s sidekicks.
The styles on the album run the gamut. This was by design, Maguire said. “When we went down to comprise the songs, we realized that we needed to come up with something that would appeal to a lot of different tastes,” Maguire said. “You’ve got heavy rock on there. You’ve got rap. You’ve got funk.”
Hogan’s then-wife, Linda, sang the lead on a power ballad called “Hulk’s The One.” Hart grabbed the mic for “Bad To The Bone,” which is not a cover of George Thorogood’s hit. Hogan spat bars on “I Want To Be A Hulkamaniac” and “Beach Patrol.” For “Beach Patrol,” Hart repurposed Hogan’s opener — “I was cruising down the beach, looking for some action, had my radio set on a rap-rap station” — from a song he had written for another wrestler, Terry Funk, in 1984. The song also samples a track culled from Sega’s “Sonic The Hedgehog.”
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Two songs were written before the process started: “American Made,” which Maguire penned as Hogan’s WCW entrance music to replace his iconic WWF theme “Real American,” and “Hulkster In Heaven,” a ballad of mysterious provenance.
“Hulkster In Heaven” is one of four songs in which Hogan takes the lead. It is the only one in which he sings. Hogan writes in his autobiography that he was inspired after meeting a “Make-A-Wish kid with cancer” at a show at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1992.
Here is how Hogan describes the scene:
“He was supposed to be sitting ringside when I went out to wrestle, but I didn’t see him there. After the match, I came back and said, ‘Where’s the kid?’
“They told me, ‘Oh, he died before the match got underway.’”
As Hogan tells it, he retired to his dressing room with Hart and started writing. Hogan authored a tribute to his fallen fan:
I used to tear my shirt,
But now you tore my heart.
I knew you were a Hulkamaniac
Right from the very start.
In the chorus, Hogan laments that “I wish Hulk’s love could bring you back again,” while insisting “when the Hulkster comes to heaven, we’ll tag up again.”
There was a slight problem with the story. The WWF ran only a few shows at Wembley Stadium in 1992. Hogan did not appear on the card for any of them; he spent the majority of the year away from the ring. It is possible Hogan met the fan at an earlier or later event. Maguire said the song was actually written in 1994.
Regardless, the tune serves as the emotional denouement of the record, the penultimate track that rattled around the brains of wrestling fans for years. Maguire said he still hears from them.
“I had no idea that anybody would even care this many years later,” Maguire said. “I’m just blown away by the interest of people who weren’t even alive when we did the music.”
With the record in the can, Hogan and the Wrestling Boot Band needed distribution. Hart contacted Michael Omansky, a friend, wrestling aficionado and marketing consultant in the music business. Omansky reached out to Fred Munao, the founder of Select Records. Munao and Omansky had collaborated on publicity for releases from the crank-call icons, The Jerky Boys.
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“We thought it could be really cool for Hulk,” Munao said. “His popularity was amazing. I remember when I would go places with him, people would just flock to him. It was incredible. So we took a shot with it.”
Munao, Omansky, Hogan and Hart flew around the country meeting with representatives from retail chains. They secured preferable placement of the record in various stores. Hogan did radio interviews. He made an in-store appearance at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The release coincided with a WCW pay-per-view in Huntington Beach, Calif. Munao paid a skywriter to fly over the event promoting the album. Here the music-industry vets bumped up against the traditionalism of the wrestling business. “They intentionally didn’t show the plane overhead,” Omansky said.
When they put out the record, Munao and Omansky were under the impression that WCW would help advertise it. They soon learned that the company wouldn’t “come to the party,” Omansky said. Munao saw a missed opportunity. “They didn’t get it,” he said. “It was just out of their realm, I think.” (Attempts to contact Eric Bischoff, who ran WCW at the time, were unsuccessful.)
Munao enjoyed spending time with Hogan. They shared stories about riding motorcycles and working out. Hogan shared tips he culled from Sylvester Stallone. Munao saw in Hogan a genuine charisma. But he did not sugarcoat the reality of the marketing efforts. “Cost me a lot of money,” Munao said. “But it’s one of those things.”
Omansky provided a rosier view of the performance of “Hulk Rules.”
“We sold about 300,000 copies,” Omansky said. “So it was not platinum. It was not gold. But it was not a loser.”
One of those copies got to Jesse Krakow in 2003 and stayed with him into the summer of 2018. He listened to the record, over and over, trying to dig deeper into its heart as he tinkered in his basement studio or took the train into New York City. He studied the lyrics. He memorized the chords and transcribed the arrangements. He thought about art and why some pieces of art last.
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“It’s a cult classic,” Krakow said. “I would never say this record is ‘bad,’ because I don’t think shit is bad. I think it’s just weird. It’s fucked up. It’s confounding.”
As Krakow re-imagined the album, he leaned into the enigmas. He took Maguire’s conceit of utilizing different genres and pushed it to a logical conclusion. His version of “Wrestling Boot Traveling Band” ditches Buffett for the barbershop quartet. “Bad To The Bone” dips into proggy funk, while “Beach Patrol” emulates the blues. He re-arranged “American Made” into reggae. And he gave “Hulkster In Heaven” what he referred to as “the Kate Bush treatment,” heavy on synthesizer and falsetto.
“I wanted to see if there were songs within the songs,” he said.
Krakow posted the finished product on Bandcamp in October 2018. The reception went how he thought it might. “Hulk Rules” was “Hulk Rules,” even when given a new life. Those who did not understand the record never would. But those who got it would never forget it.
“A lot of people thought, ‘Why would you do this?’” Krakow said. “And then my wrestling friends were like, ‘Dude, that’s fucking genius.’ And that’s why you do it. I’m not trying to sell a bunch of records. I’m trying to make a couple wrestling fans happy.”
(Photo of Hogan and Cyndi Lauper at the 1985 Grammy Awards: Barry King / WireImage via Getty Images)
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