Remembering 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper With The Insanity Of 'Rock 'N' Wrestling'

Fans of professional wrestling are still deeply feeling the loss of industry icon and greatest heel of the 20th century 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper following his unexpected death from cardiac arrest at the age of 61 late last week.

It may seem silly to those outside the fandom, but Piper — whose real name was Roderick George Toombs — was a one-of-a-kind entertainer; an expert at making crowds hate him, and love him for it; a precocious agitator, a consummate showman, an archetypal proto-troll of the highest order; simply the very best at being very bad. He was a Hall Of Famer, he brawled at the very first WrestleMania back in 1985, and he was instrumental in the creation of the brief period of collaboration between the then-WWF and the music industry known as the Rock 'N' Wrestling Connection.

For his part in the wider Connection — which originally came about as the result of an in-flight chat between Cyndi Lauper and WWF manager 'Captain' Lou Albano, somehow leading to the pair setting up a match between respective "surrogates" Wendi Richter and The Fabulous Moolah that ended with the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun songstress herself belting Moolah around the head with her purse during a match (you can't make this shit up, I swear) — Piper's primary role, or at least that of his likeness, was lead heel (bad guy) on short-lived animated tie-in Hulk Hogan's Rock 'N' Wrestling, reflecting the famed in-ring rivalry between the Hulkamaniac and Hot Rod. Lauper was actually hugely crucial in the entire thing, even casting Piper and a bunch of his contemporaries in her two-part clip for The Goonies R Good Enough.

Clearly, it was a genuine friendship; Piper is even renowned for having suggested - repeatedly - that Lauper more than deserves a place in the WWE Hall Of Fame.

The premise of the show was simple enough: Hulk and his fellow babyfaces (good guys) — made up of any combination of Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka, Andre The Giant (who, hilariously, hated Hogan with a passion away from the ring), Junkyard Dog, Cap'n Lou, Richter, Hillbilly Jim and Tito Santana — foiling the absurdly nefarious plots of Piper and his cohort of largely racist stereotypes, including The Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff, Mr Fuji, Big John Studd and even The Fabulous Moolah. Pretty much the only thing it had to do with music was repeatedly shoehorning in this clip for a cover of Land Of A Thousand Dances performed by a bunch of '80s wrestlers, as found on totally unnecessary 1985 release The Wrestling Album.

For some reason, Piper was voiced as though he was the COBRA Commander's jacked-up cousin, and his evil interests ranged from rigging city elections and getting into arguments with Hulk Hogan at the gym to basically just being Noodles from Back To The Future II, taunting people from the safety of his car while his stupid mates egg him on. So, not exactly "doomsday device"-level stuff, here. Being one of the WWF's more capable mic-handlers of the time, he also served as the host of 1985's All-Star Rock 'N' Wrestling Saturday Spectacular (featuring "singing sensations" New Edition!) playing equal bits over-the-top wrestling villain, talk-show host and stand-up comedian as he talked casually about The Goonies and The Berenstein Bears.

The era of guitars and grapplers co-existing with such prominence wasn't to last, however; it's generally accepted that by 1990 the era had come to a close, probably about the time of WrestleMania IV. However, the Rock 'N' Wrestling animated show enjoyed a brief resurgence in April this year, when the WWE added season one to its programming on the online WWE Network, but it's been removed as part of the company's attempts to scrub Hogan from its record books (good luck) in light of a pretty grim sex-tape-and-bigotry scandal.

Still, regardless of the ignominy that has since come to surround the titular hero of the series, the show and the wider connection between pro wrestling and the music industry is an unforgettable slice of entertainment history, perhaps encapsulated no better than when Piper himself took to the recording studio to release his once-off single, 1992's I'm Your Man.

Piper went on to do much better work outside both the music and wrestling industries - he developed something of a cult following for his work as an actor, most notably in John Carpenter's They Live and with a recurring guest role in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia as washed-up wrestler Da'Maniac, but we felt it important to nonetheless tip our hats to this vital period, because it's wonderfully demonstrative of the kind of full-throttle madness that so defined Piper's work as a wrestler and entertainer, and it's unlikely we'll see anything quite like it again in our lifetimes.