Jim Johnston’s first interview since his WWE release was put out earlier today on the Prime Time w/ Sean Mooney podcast.
You can listen to Jim’s interview at the top of this post or by clicking HERE
We have included Reddit user Truthamania’s recap of the interview below.
Related: Longtime WWE Music Composer Jim Johnston Reportedly Released
It’s a great listen, covering:
- Jim’s background growing up.
- How his first music teacher actually burned down her home and committed suicide.
- How he began his music career.
- How he was first introduced to Vince, his relationship with Vince over the years, and how much Vince hates country music (LOL).
- The first music he wrote for the company (a saxophone theme for WWE to use at the NATPE Convention, and then a theme for Wrestlemania. He doesn’t remember the first wrestler entrance theme he composed).
- How he was not actually a WWE employee until the company went public, and was simply a freelancer who was paid per song by Vince.
- Jim’s notorious stage fright, how he was able to overcome playing live with the DX Band at WrestleMania and his opinions of the infamous National Anthem they played.
- How he came up with themes for guys like Warrior, Austin and Undertaker (things get a little awkward throughout the interview when Mooney keeps calling out his favorite themes and none of them were actually Jim pieces – Hogan, HBK, Boss Man and others).
- Scoring No Holds Barred and working 23 hours a day for a week to complete the music.
- How he actually left Titan Tower and the WWE Studios three years ago and all of his most recent themes (Jinder, Corbin, etc) were actually composed at home in a private studio he built himself.
- Despite having a nice resume with 32 years of composing for a major TV show, nobody in the TV business really knows who he is and in some ways, his career is starting from scratch in getting to move on. He blames this on WWE refusing to have TV credits for their production staff like other TV shows do.
- The future: “Anyone who wants music, call Jim”. He has a backlog of songs he wants to get out into the public (not WWE themes), country songs, orchestral pieces, movie scores he wants to release, and his overall goal is to make some connections and get into more scoring.
- He asks to give specific shout outs to Stone Cold, Chris Jericho and Taker as three talents who were always “incredibly gracious, kind and polite” to him. He calls Taker “an incredibly sweet man who’s always been incredibly kind and gracious.”
- He has a website coming soon at www.JimJohnston.com and can be reached at jim@jimjohnston.com
Jim also plays several pieces on piano and guitar during the interview itself, which was a nice surprise.
While I wouldn’t say Jim comes across as bitter or negative in this interview, you can tell there is definitely pain there over his release from WWE: “A complaint I have about where the business has gone is that the music has simply become a commodity. It has less to do with the character and selling the character, it’s now something that coincidentally plays while somebody comes out.”
How it all ended between WWE and Jim:
“Towards the last years I was there, communication really fell apart and I think that’s what really got us on a bad road.”
“I’m very pollyannish, and I tend to trust people until, unfortunately, I’ve been shown that I shouldn’t be trusting. There were people that I really thought were friends who turned out not to be friends.”
“I had a brief conversation with Vince and it was over. All I’ll say is that I think there were a lot of ways to end it, and the way that it ended was, I think, there were better ways to end it to where everyone could’ve walked away with a much better feeling. After thirty two years, it feels like a lost opportunity to me and I don’t really understand it.”
