2012
2012
One year ago today, myself and Luke uploaded a near-2 minute song to YouTube, a song I think the working title was “So Take Care, Woo Woo Woo”, never when we began did we image what the song would become.
We were in a clothes shop, a friend of ours was paying for something and we were standing about, Luke made a simple remark about wanting to film something as the clothes shop looked like a TV show set, I then suggested why don’t we record a song for WWE Superstar Zack Ryder’s new YouTube show. Each week he was showing 30-second clips where he would nominate a ‘Broski of the Week’.
We submitted the video, 4 times the requested length so Zack contacted me back saying make a shorter one. Singing the remake so loud at night was a shock for my new house mates. I had just moved into the house so it probably wasn’t a great sign of things to come.
Zack Ryder used the clip in Episode #13 and the response was amazing. The first thing I saw was the next morning before work, I logged onto Twitter and saw The Miz tweet the words of the song.
Just take caaaare…spike your haiiiiir RT @ZackRyder: FINALLY IT’S UP! EPISODE 13 OF Z! TRUE LONG ISLAND STORY! YouTube.com/longislandicedz
— The Miz (@mikethemiz) May 13, 2011
I couldn’t believe it, I thought; ‘No way, have we been included?’. After I watched it, Stone Cold Steve Austin tweeted that he saw the episode, and Stone Cold was someone I’d watched religiously as a child and yeah it was Zack’s show, but for those 30 seconds he was watching me – and I had the honor of interviewing Steve Austin, 6 months prior to this, but there was something special knowing he’d seen that video.
That was just the start. That weekend Zack messaged me asking could we record a longer version as some of the guys had been asking for an MP3, I remember I was at a bar and was after a few drinks so my response was a little dramatic about how great we were going to make the song.
So myself and Luke met up and in the space of two hours, wrote the full song, recorded the full song and filmed the video. The process was so quick we couldn’t of asked for it to go any better. That week after we launched the music video and released the song on iTunes, I had an amazing response from fans and wrestlers themselves. Obviously, Zack Ryder asked for the song but I also got requests from John Cena, Justin Roberts and messages from Evan Bourne and Eve Torres saying they bought the song. I’d love to know the list of WWE Superstars who have the song on their iPod. It was a strange week, since I was 9 years old I watched WWE Superstars and for that few days these stars were watching our video. It was surreal.
You think that would be the end of it, hell no. Myself and Luke made sure (and still do) that we milked this song to the maximum! We managed to record a adapted version for Zack’s friend Michael Chiapetta’s show. We recorded a special jingle for Arda Ocal & Jimmy Korderas’ ‘Right After Wrestling’ radio program – and even a Christmas parody version!
This past January when WWE were planning to launch their new YouTube channel we began talking with WWE about obtaining rights to use the song, Zack’s show was one of 8 original programs to feature on the channel and we may never step foot in a 20×20 ring, but we signed a WWE deal and that was a really cool thing to do, they even said we may have a feature on the .com website sometime – we’ll see, maybe!
Then most recently, we performed the song live at Ireland’s first ever WrestleMania live party in Dublin the night of WrestleMania 28, in no other environment would we get to perform the song and have several hundred people song the song back at us. It was really cool – to top it off, to his credit, Zack Ryder recorded a special introduction video for the show that we played in the venue that night.
So 12 months on from the video that would later become ‘Just Take Care, Spike Your Hair (The Broski of the Week Song)’ and to answer the question that I presume is on your mind… no, we won’t stop milking it yet.
Your favorite Duane,
Duane



