Customer Reviews

Beer, Blood & Cornmeal: Seven Years of Strange Wrestling

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If you have ever stepped foot in San Francisco, seen these wrestlers in the ring, been to a punk rock show, or lived through this time in the past, you should read this book. You should read this book even if you've done none of those things. It's more than a memoir, more than an autobiography and filled with all of the drama and excitement you would expect -- in and out of the wrestling ring -- from the show and more. So much more.

I lived in San Francisco during the era that this book covers and worked at The Transmission Theater as a bartender for many of Incredibly Strange Wrestling's shows. Bob Calhoun covers this spectacle in such depth and with such precision and detail, it was almost like being in the 90s again, except this time I am a fly on the wall privy to bits and pieces that I never would have known about until reading.

I think the title of the book says it all. This is a great read, and a great ride, through a world that otherwise you'd never get to see. Very well done.

I'm not your average book reviewer but this book is beyond average, It's amazing! I can clearly remember seeing Incredibly Strange Wrestling at the Warped Tour in 2001. I've never had more fun at a wrestling event. Before the matches even started, they handed out tortillas to throw at the wrestlers. It was so much fun. The charachters are hilarious, such as El Homo Loco, a gay luchador would carry a milk jug filled with cum. There was also El Pollo Diablo, who was a wrestler in a full chicken suit, much like a sports mascot. There was no way you could deny the pure entertainment that ISW brought to the masses that day. As I said before, I've never forgot ISW and my friend recently told me about this book, Beer Blood & Cornmeal, wrote by the ISW announcer/wrestler Count Dante. I couldn't wait to find a copy and I haven't been able to put the book down. The Count was a master of the microphone and he really put together a great read. I would highly recommend this book to any fan of wrestling. It recounts the beginning of ISW in San Francisco and covers the entire 7 year run of the fabulous company. I hope that this book helps more people discover the greatness that was Incredibly Strange Wrestling and maybe one day they will make a comeback. I know that I would be first in line at the show with a bag full of tortillas.

I am currently about halfway through this book, but I can already tell you that I love it. That might not be shocking, since the opus involves two of my long-standing guilty pleasures: pro wrestling and punk rock. However, my praise for Beer Blood & Cornmeal goes beyond the subject matter. It also takes into account the actual writing: it's funny!
The book is well written, interesting, and incorporates (counter)cultural aspects of San Francisco and the US in general to flesh out the story. If there is any negative aspect to this book, it's that I only wish I had been in the San Francisco area during those years and experienced ISW in person. I know I would have been to every show, and secretly tempted to somehow become involved, trying to conjure up a character worthy of facing Macho Sasquatcho or the other brilliant, twisted creations.

In this fine punk-wrestling memoir, combining aspects of punk tour diary, independent wrestling reportage, and cultural critique, Calhoun deploys his satirical gifts upon himself, his fellow grapplers, San Francisco hipsterism, and the country at large, always to hilarious and thought-provoking effect.
As the book opens in early 90's San Francisco, Calhoun, fed on an intellectual diet of Marvel comics, monster movies, and pro wrestling, is a striving loser whose stated ambitions are for nothing more than local celebrity - some color to brighten the drab modern American existence of commuting and wage-earning. He leads a band in the persona of a mail-order martial arts huckster from comic book ads, works his way through the San Francisco club scene, and in time falls in with a crowd of urban niche hipsters, the punk/greaser retro-gearhead founders of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Conceived partly as a tribute to/ripoff of Mexican-style pro wrestling, ISW grows over the years into a local and regional nightclub attraction, gradually incorporating more of Calhoun's non-sequitur concepts. Not content with the scuzzily rarefied, insiders-only vibe of early ISW and SF hipsterdom in general, Calhoun and others in his camp use the ISW platform to stage increasingly bizarre, satirical, and transgressive spectacles. Scientologists, organized religion, and white rappers all get the treatment. In a process mirroring the evolution of independent rock toward the mainstream, ISW edges closer to a material success which confounds everyone involved. Personality conflicts multiply, and the efforts and rewards involved are not always evenly distributed.
As is appropriate in a story about pro wrestling, the psychology of obsession is laid bare here. While Calhoun's ambitions may have been modest at the start, ISW coaxes the instinctive showman out of him. A different process occurs with Calhoun's friend and fellow wrestler Tom Corgan. Another regular guy pulled by his love of pro wrestling into the orbit of ISW, Corgan suffers from an eventually tragic lack of perspective on the silliness and sublimity of wrestling in a Bigfoot costume. Corgan begins disturbingly to wear his Macho Sasquatcho costume to parties and family skiing trips, but he also has a deep insight into the pre-rational aspects of pro wrestling- it is Corgan who promotes the introduction to ISW of "blading" (wrestlers' surreptitiously cutting themselves with hidden razor blades to add real blood to the show) during a grueling European tour before increasingly hostile crowds.
Of course, by the time of those tense European dates, the US was gearing up for a deeply unpopular war in Iraq. When Beer Blood & Cornmeal begins, there is barely an internet on which to list ISW's shows. By the end of the book, the country, and the Bay Area in particular, has been transformed, by the internet and then by Bush's America and the war on terror. Among the very least of the results, SF rock clubs close their doors in the face of astronomical dot com rents; punk goes corporate with Clearcom-sponsored package tours.
Calhoun doesn't presume to explain how youth cultures obsessed with nostalgia and the veneration of the junk art of the past can ever have come to grips with the seismic changes of the 90s and 00s; but our culture's gradual evolution away from one which has room for the outsider and the self-destructive smartass is a subject never far from his mind. This is a deeply funny and sad tale told with insight, originality, honesty, and humanity.

Bravo to Bob for bringing back to life an era that is gone but shall not be forgotten. If you have ever wondered what it was like to try and make it. To struggle for something that leads you to a treasure but not the one you seek you should read this book.

Well played Count Dante...well played.

Kid Anarchy

I will confess that I only first bought this because Bob Calhoun had been a buddy of mine some 25 years back. But I was very pleasantly surprised to find that in those interim years he had become a very good (and particularly humorous) writer. This book was the funniest book I've read in years, and I've read other comedies on bestseller lists. I am 100% uninterested in wrestling and this book did little to change that. What it did do, however, was convincingly bring me into a world that was unique, cutting edge, and generally not my scene (ie, I wouldn't have been exposed had I not read the book). I see that the one bad review is from a wrestling enthusiast, and I'm not going to discount his review because I can't speak to how accurate or appropriately philosophical the book is on wrestling...but I think that misses the point. Though set in wrestling, this book is about much, much more. Entrepreneurial spirit? Maybe that. Outcasts taking center stage as stars? Maybe. Self-destructive (and plain destructive) behavior? Sure, there's some of that too. Mostly, it's exactly what the cover says...Bob's years in this very odd but very American (strangely enough) occurrence known as ISW. Very funny. Very cool.

I can't count the number of pro-wrestling related books I've read in recent years - well into the dozens - but I can name the most enjoyable: "Beer, Blood & Cornmeal!" Bob Calhoun (as Count Dante) becomes a psychotronic George Plimpton, finding himself smack dab in the middle of one of the wildest pro wrestling movements in history. Many boys dream of joining the circus, and Calhoun thought his circus would be that of rock & roll, but in the unexplainable phenomenon of right time - right place, he landed center stage in San Francisco's Incredibly Strange Wrestling promotion. With "backyard" wrestling lacking skill and polish, and "old schoolers" losing sight of the sacred law of pro wrestling - entertaining a crowd & putting butts in the seats - Calhoun rides this short wave where punk met wrestling. And as well, crashes with it at the end of the short life. He admittedly confesses to a near-total lack of the extensive physical skill traditionally required for the sport. But you know, he "gets it." He gets that wrestling at any level is a glorified freak show (and I say this with total love in my heart). At this one moment in time, he was able to change his music gimmick a couple clicks to jump in and give us a glimpse of perhaps the freakiest wresting freak show of all time. Calhoun really nails the pettiness of 90-plus percent of all pro-wrestling (the major piece of the pie not owned by Vince, TNA & Ring of Honor). But what I was most impressed with was how he did it with a kindness usually not extended to this outer ring of the Uranus of entertainment. He also saw the talent and goodness in his band of freaks. My guess is that he was lucky to land ECW Press for this book, allowing him to be honest in a world that hates honesty like children hate drunks. Simply and plainly, I loved it! If I had a time machine Incredibly Strange Wrestling would be one of my first stops on my trip backwards. Daniel Boyd

This is a wrestling book, but so much more. Set against the colorful background of the San Francisco music scene of the post Nirvana 90's, and intertwined with the fortunes of the dotcom boom and bust, Bob Calhoun gives an insider's view of the birth of the cult phenomenon known as Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Taking the do-it-yourself punk rock ethic as serious as a heart attack, the founders of Incredibly Strange Wrestling mixed Mexican Lucha Libre stylings with American Professional wrestling and added a healthy dose of punk rock comic book insanity to create an ironic and hilarious brain child that matched Sasquatches against crazy chickens, fed Christians to the lions, and rocked the house every night.

Calhoun, aka Count Dante, is an outsider at first, and a show running MC and booker in the end. But all along this twisted tale, he's an intelligent and accessible everyman that guides the reader through a wonderfully alien world of rancid night clubs, flea-bitten tour buses, around the country and the world to the pinnacles of sold-out shows from the Fillmore Theater to the Toronto Skydome.

Wrestling fans will be thrilled by the recounting of matches they'll wonder how they ever missed. Musicians and music fans will recognize the story of a rocker just looking for a chance at stardom. And readers everywhere will identify with a young man striving to follow his dreams in the face of obstacles both incredibly strange and mundane.

This is a wrestling book and so much more. "Beer, Blood, and Cornmeal" is a story you have to read to believe.

I read this book because i try and read all wrestling boxing, and MMA books. I decided to give it a shot. What a mistake. This book is almost as big an embarrassment as Incredibly Strange Wrestling itself was. While admitting they were no good, Calhoun still tries to pass himself, and the people he performed with, off as wrestlers. Yes wretling is a work. However it is still a talent, that not just anyone can do, and in most cases, takes a great deal of training. However this was not wrestling. It was a bunch of goofs who had no lives so the tried to be entertaining. ISW made me ashamed to be a wrestling fan. Calhoun also, while on purpose or not, makes comments that come across as insulting wrestling fans. Great job, insult the people who you should hope would by this book. He also takes shots at people in the wrestling industry of were all to eager to put down ISW, and there attempt at wrestling. The people in the industry put it down, because these people had no business claiming to be a part of it. He mentions how in the Observer they were repeatedly voted as worst wrestling organization. I never voted them for that catagory. Because they were not wrestling. THey were idiots rolling around in a wrestling ring doing tasteless, insulting, and using racial and sexual stereotypes to try and big funny/entertaining. Calhoun also tries to use wrestling terms however he has no clue how clueless he is, as he is wrong and or missuses several of them. I found humor in Calhoun making fun of the gramatical errors people used when emailing him. Well, if that isnt a case of the pot calling the kettle black, then I dont know what is. So I am sorry but a bunch of fat slobby women, overweight creepy guys, and a bunch of idiots rolling around in a ring, does not make it wrestling. Neither does one of those overweight creepy guys writing a book make him an author. I was ashamed to have people associate ISW with wrestling before i read this book, but this made me ashamed to be human. But this book did serve on purpose. Now me and my friends, both in the wrestling bussiness or jsut fans of it, now have come up with a word for when we see fat, non athletic, talentless people trying to wrestler. We now call them a Calhoun.