Throwback Thursday: Inside "Be a Man," Macho Man Randy Savage's Ridiculous Rap Album

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

In the early aughts, Randy "Macho Man" Savage cut a very different figure from the flamboyant, neon-and-fringe-clad pro wrestling world champion he had been in the 80s and 90s. His bushy black beard was still there, as was his impressive physique, but Savage had taken to dressing all in black, and replaced his do-rag with a skull cap. After nearly three decades in the ring, he was taking a hiatus from wrestling.

He used his time off, which lasted from 2001 until late 2004, to expand his profile. He broke into film, with a minor role in Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man movie. He did the small screen, too, with credits in television shows called Nikki, Duck Dodgers, and College University.

Then there was his most ambitious effort: a rap album called Be a Man, which was released by Big3 Records in the second week of October 2003.

Be a Man is no contemporary classic. It barely made a blip at the time of its release, moving around 15,000 copies, according to Big3. While the album lacked sales—and sometimes tonality—it remains one of the more unique side projects ever attempted by an athlete. What other outcome is there when a 51-year-old professional wrestler with the voice of a rusted chainsaw penetrates the hip-hop landscape, titling his album after a diss track about the most famous wrestler to ever live.

The album was the brainchild of Big3's founder, Bill Edwards. He was attending a business meeting at the Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, when he bumped into Savage on the way out. Profit potential swirled through his head.

"He has this unique voice that nobody else has," Edwards recalled. "I thought that his notoriety and popularity and everything would carry a record… Just the fact that he was Macho Man, people would come."

Savage was skeptical. He hadn't sung a bar in his life, and he wasn't naïve enough to assume that his menacing timbre could carry a tune. The idea of rapping seemed even more ridiculous. Don't worry, Edwards reassured him. "I've got guys who can teach you."

The "guys" were a four-man production team of industry veterans—Ted Howard, Khalid Keene, Brian Overton, and Jerome "Rome" Henderson—who called themselves Da Raskulls. They were initially dumbstruck to be working with a star like Savage, then giddy. Then they actually heard him rap.

"First thing, Macho says, 'OK, I want you guys to realize—I've got white boy rhythm,'" said Keene. "'You've got to be real patient with me.'"

"As soon as he said the 'white boy rhythm' thing, I knew what we were getting into," Overton added with a laugh.

"Everyone [in the room] looked at me and said 'Are you serious?'" Edwards said, recalling Savage's first recording session. "It was ugly. It was sad." And, given the wrestler's total lack of familiarity with music, it was to be expected. Da Raskulls had the arduous task of dumbing down their entire recording process, in order to build an artist from the ground up.

"Basically, the way I tried to write the song was so that he wouldn't have to do the whole song at one time," Overton said. "The first song [began with] 'Oohhh yeah!' We laid the hook so he had a skeleton track to follow. I said 'Oohhh yeah!' at the beginning of the hooks. We put in the filler lines. I would have him do the 'Oohhh yeah!' on top of mine, we would go back and do the next line. We tried to make the recording process as easy as possible for him so he wouldn't have to rap a minute or two straight."

Be a Man took almost a year to make, which gave Da Raskulls plenty of time to warm to their new protégé. "He was just one of the guys," said Keene, and Savage put the time in accordingly. He cracked jokes in the studio and engaged in the occasional impromptu wrestling match. ("He ended up pile driving me through the floor," Howard said.) He was just as happy to spend time with them outside of work, too, routinely sharing post-session dinners and playing pickup basketball to blow off steam. "It was kind of surprising that someone with his celebrity status would embrace us the way he did," Keene said. "He was a true friend."

The producers also grew to admire Savage's work ethic. Even as he became acquainted with the recording process, Savage didn't have a natural sense of musicality. The structure and the precision were antithetical to the unhinged, extemporaneous promos that defined his wrestling career. Yet Savage was determined to force the pieces together until they fit. He was a baseball player long before he stepped into the squared circle, and a key part of his mythology was the story of how, after an injury wrecked his right shoulder, he laboriously taught himself to throw with his left arm. He approached rap with similar determination.

"He'd show up at 8 or 9, and at 6 he'd still be in the studio," Edwards said. "Everything he did, he did with intensity… His work ethic was beyond what I'd seen in the industry." Later, when Savage and Da Raskulls hit the road on the album's promotional tour, Savage brought along a karaoke machine and a microphone so he could practice in his hotel room every night before the next show.

"It was interesting because, as the project went on, he got a lot better," said Overton. "The first song was rough but every song he did, he started to open up and became a lot more comfortable with the situation. By the end of the album, he could almost do a half a verse straight through."

Which still wasn't very much, of course, but every lyric was hard-earned. If there's one trait that epitomizes the album, often to its detriment, it's how effortful it all sounds. Extra syllables are routinely jammed together. The opening track, "I'm Back," features the couplet "I'm like Deion, Bo and Mike, I can play two sports / And in both arenas I'm a tremendous force." Which is to say that the lyrics could be clunky. The beats were sometimes repetitive, too.

The image of Macho Man telling his producers that they needed "to do at least one for the ladies," which he did, and they did, is an amusing one, but the resulting track, "What's That All About," is far more awkward than it is seductive, what with a fifty-something who speaks in one of history's throatiest growls spitting out lyrics like "I won't creep in the streets, 'cause the feeling's deep / Come home, make love and fall fast asleep."

The album's final track, a tribute to the late Curt Hennig titled "My Perfect Friend," was as cringeworthy as it was heartfelt, although it later did spark a conspiracy when Justin Timberlake was accused of ripping it off.

"Career-wise, it wasn't one of those records that had all the artists in the industry banging down your door for beats," Keene conceded rather diplomatically.

Be a Man wasn't all bad. "I loved 'Remember Me,'" Howard saidof the album's sixth track, a gruff proclamation of Savage's staying power. "It was right in the register of his voice and we were able to go along with that real easy." Truth be told, it didn't really matter whether the album was good, regardless of how admirably Savage toiled to make it so.

"This wasn't anything we expected to get rich off of," said Edwards. "All through my life in music, you gotta do something to try and be different and hope that it works. This was one of those projects."

"I would definitely say it was more fun than work," said Keene.

"Until you mention Hulk Hogan."

Much like their on-screen alter egos, professional wrestlers can have off-screen relationships fraught with melodrama. That was most certainly the case with Savage and Hogan, who alternated between allies and enemies in both their public and private lives.

By most accounts, they were not on speaking terms in 2003. No one knows entirely why. From what the Big3 crew pieced together, the beef involved Miss Elizabeth, Savage's ex-wife and longtime valet, who notably served as a role in the story line that ignited the two wrestlers' legendary feud in the 80s. "The story goes that Hogan ended up stealing her away, and she died of a drug overdose, and he blamed it on Hulk," Edwards said. Like most pro wrestling story lines, only part of it seems to be grounded in reality: Elizabeth Hulette did, in fact, die of a drug overdose earlier in 2003, but she was romantically involved with a different wrestler, Lex Luger, at the time. To Big3, Savage's rage was palpable, and seemed authentic. Even if it was staged, that anger was convincing enough to become Be a Man's centerpiece, inspiring both the album title and its lead single.

"He always wanted to go back in the ring and duke it out for real, and Hulk would never do it," Edwards said. "Hence, Be a Man. The whole message of the song was to call him out."

The title track contained some of the album's best moments—hard-hitting beat, catchy harpsichord riff—and some of its worst, like the cheesy threats to wash Hogan's mouth with soap. It was also, according to Howard, "the one song on the album where Randy said, 'I want writer's credit on this one. I want him to know I wrote some of this one.'"

The track set off a proxy war between Savage's camp and Bubba the Love Sponge, the radio host best known as the flunkie who let Hogan have sex with his wife, recorded it on videotape, and inadvertently sparked a nine-figure lawsuit. In the weeks leading up to the album's release, the Sponge bashed it on a daily basis, even going so far as to call up a local hip-hop DJ live on the air to solicit another negative review. (Much to Bubba's chagrin, the DJ announced that he sort of enjoyed it.)

The flash point came at the album's release party, which was held in St. Petersburg, where they all lived, at a bar called Mr. B's. Throughout the week, Bubba had urged listeners to show up and join him in protesting, and that he'd be supplying T-shirts. There was even a rumor that the Hulkster himself would appear and finally accept Savage's challenge to a physical confrontation.

Hogan never showed up. When Da Raskulls arrived to serve as Savage's backing band, though, they pulled into a mob scene. Led by the Love Sponge, some 250 deranged people dressed in identical Hulk Hogan shirts descended on their limousine.

"It was crazy for us, because we were thinking it's going to be good, have fun, the crowd's going to love us," Howard recalled. "Police came telling people to take the shirts off because they might be liable to provoke a riot."

A good number of them acquiesced, and made their way inside. The pandemonium abated, but only temporarily.

"By the time we started, they had security all in front," Howard said. "By the time the show ended, they were directly in our face, giving us the finger. It was incredible. We could reach out and slap fives with whoever. Someone was right in front of Brian giving him the finger and Brian was giving the finger right back."

"It was a wrestling match on the stage," Overton said.

Soon after, 50 Cent would endorse Be a Man in a brief meeting with Savage at that year's Voodoo Fest in New Orleans. Otherwise, the record didn't make many ripples. Hogan and Savage reconciled shortly before the Macho Man's death in 2011, setting the stage for Hogan to give the induction speech for Savage's posthumous ascension into WWE Hall of Fame. The beef, and the record it spawned, were no longer worth speaking about.

Still, twelve years after the fact, Da Raskulls are regularly reminded about the strangest album they ever produced, and the craziest show they ever performed.

"I always get people, even to this day, that are really surprised," Keene said. "'Man, you really worked on that?' Just his name alone, being affiliated with someone like that, it kind of makes you look good."

Good or bad, there will never be another album quite like Be a Man, because there will never be another MC like Randy Savage. Four years after the Macho Man's death, Edwards still recalls one of his favorite phone calls with Savage, a few simple words that told the entire story.

"Hey, Bill," Savage began, in his trademark rasp.

"Yeah, Randy?"

"How'd you know it was me?" the wrestler shot back, ever so slyly.

"I collapsed laughing," Edwards says now. He replied in the only way that made sense: "Who the hell else would it be?"