Jim Johnston was one of the guest interviews on Matt Koon‘s latest episode of Total Engagement on MLW Radio. In his interview, Johnston talks about how he goes about composing theme music for bad guys versus good guys, his relationship with Vince McMahon and much more.
On if he can read music:
I can “read” the music. Can I read music like put a piece of piano music in front of me and have me play it? No not in the least, but I can read it like I know and I guess I moved forward in a big way when I first started doing more orchestral stuff particularly when I would have be able to write out a part for even having a solo cello player in much less than doing it for the entire orchestra.
It’s like, “okay, that’s a C…that’s a D…no, that’s a C-Sharp, okay.” That’s the speed at which I read. However, if you just give me something with a chord chart and if I hear the melody one time then I’m pretty much good to go.
On creating the Ultimate Warrior’s theme:
Well with Warrior, I think I knew what it was before I even picked the guitar up. I saw some footage and the only thing in my being I was thinking was this *beats the Warrior rhythm*, and my mind wasn’t even that far down the road if that was a guitar or is that a drum, but something about this piece of music has that in it. Because that’s what he is – some sort of crazy piledriver on cocaine or something. Then I picked up a guitar and just the chunky notes and some accent notes over it.
On his relationship with Vince McMahon:
Well, he’s a complex character. In my opinion, he makes life a whole lot harder for himself and other people around him because he can be such a hard ass, but in the strangest imaginable way when I think of Vince, I’ve got plenty of sort of lingering issues with him at this point, but essentially I think of him as a friend. As a friend who kind of went south on me, but I think we were friends to the degree that Vince can be friends. I think it’s very difficult for him to have friends because he’s been knifed in the back quite a number of times and so I think like a lot of people who have had those kind of experiences, that they’re reluctant to trust.
I think like all things, Matt, that the power of habit in our lives is absolutely extraordinary and if you’ve been doing those things that are bad habits you would think logically you would stop doing those things, but we don’t. We keep doing them and so it’s all about trying to do good habits. There’s so much positive there and I feel bad on many levels that our relationship ended the way it did.
On getting cut out by WWE and feeling his role slipping away:
Well I was getting cut out. That was by design. Not necessarily Vince’s design, but by other folk and hey, it’s his company. He can do whatever the hell he wants with it. It isn’t like he owes me a job or something, but at the same time, fast forward and I hope that someone over there is smart enough to see what they’ve got, because now they have a bunch of generic music that means nothing.
I was feeling things slowly slipping away. And I was in a lot of stuff that was sort of invisible on getting the Network up and running. There was a ton of work involved at getting a Network filled up with content and going back and you know, just day to day crap stuff of going back to old themes. Going back to old themes, going back and finding the mix somewhere and making something that was mono stereo, and yeah I felt it was slipping away. That I was kind of being fairly well sabotaged and it was working.
On his exit & what the original gameplan was for theme music on the main roster vs. NXT:
I don’t think that early on that they or you know it’s easy to say ‘they’, but it all comes down to Vince, because there’s no big decisions, so how people spin things to Vince, you know he can only make decisions based on the information he has, I really didn’t have access to Vince through this period, but others did. When Hunter was running NXT, he was working with the CFO$ to do that music and then the original plan of course was when someone comes up from the farm league which was NXT, we take a fresh look at them, their character, they get new music and then that just evolved in a different way when you got called up, you came exactly as you were, with your existing music, your character intact and I think that’s when overall, in my opinion, where the product started getting horribly generic and homogenized. They just started wholesale bringing people in and there were just this incredible slew of new characters all the time and you can only go down the road so far with saying these two guys hate each other, when the audience has no reason whatsoever to believe or understand that these two people hate each other other than, ‘man, I really hate that guy. I really do.’ You have to have a story. You have to know why ‘hey, Joe stole Ed’s girl and now Ed is really mad.’ Okay, I get that.
