The Jim Rose Circus & Jake "the Snake" Roberts Hit the Showbox Next Week
Photo courtesy JimRoseCircus.com.
This was yesterday afternoon, around 2:30. After four or so dropped phone calls, Jim Rose had pulled his circus off the highway near Mt. Shasta to have an abbreviated conversation about the act he's bringing to the Showbox at the Market next week (Wed. July 8, 8 p.m.; tix $15 adv, 21+). In the background, we can hear cars barreling down I-5, and the conversation is occasionally interrupted so Rose can yell something back to his new co-star, legendary pro wrestler Jake "the Snake" Roberts.
Though the now-infamous Jim Rose Circus got its start in Seattle in the early Nineties (Rose still owns a house south of the city in which he periodically resides), it's been quite a while since Rose brought his sideshow revival through town for a performance. The last record we could find of a show was from 1999. We asked Rose when he was last here to perform, who thought about it for a minute before replying, "Fuck, I don't remember, man."
"Usually when I tour, I'm in Europe or South Africa or Australia, because I have more of a theatre career over there, I'm in the same city for three months playing a theatre," he explained. "I've got more of a rock-n-roll career in the United States." It's been 17 years since the Jim Rose Circus took off after joining the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. Since then, there have been guest spots on The X-Files and The Simpsons, tours with Nine Inch Nails, headlining spots at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a TV show. These days, Jim Rose mostly works in publicity; last year he did a promotional tour for Dos Equis.
But Rose is back on tour playing the rock clubs where he got his start, with The Jim Rose Circus Vs. Jake "the Snake" Roberts, a hybrid sideshow-meets-pro-wrestling extravaganza.
While wrestling isn't exactly new to the Jim Rose Circus--they'd previously featured "Mexican transvestite" and "lady sumo" wrestling acts--this show grew mostly out of the attention Jake Roberts received after Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler won accolades last year. Whether directly credited or not, Robert Smiegel's script was clearly influenced, at least in part, by the career of Roberts, from his glory days as the crowd-pleasing bad guy in the WWF circa the mid-1980s--when he feuded with everyone from "Macho Man" Randy Savage to Andre the Giant--to his travails as a drug addict and alcoholic later in his career.
Jake "the Snake" Roberts in the mid-1980s.
That wasn't the end of it. Despite several bouts of rehab, Roberts fell off the wagon as recently as September 12, 2008. After announcing he intended to fall off the wagon on a Cleveland morning talk radio show, he arrived clearly intoxicated at an event. His opponent refused to challenge him in the ring, and Roberts was caught on video being derided by fans outside the arena.
"That movie The Wrestler came out, and Jake the Snake's phone started ringing off the hook," explained Rose. "There were a lot of calls from Hollywood, and that's not really the wrestler's circuit. And so he was looking around for who he could trust, and Jake and I have known each another since Moby Dick was a minnow--we both got a mutual best friend SiNn BoDhi, formerly Kizarny of the WWE--so SiNn called me up and said, 'Hey, we're getting calls from stuff that doesn't fall into the wrestler's wheelhouse and [can you] help us navigate all this?'" One thing led to another, and they decided to hit the road together with a new show. While Rose asked us not to share the details of the performance, he said to "expect a sped-up roller coaster with a fist-fight and pretty girls and circus stunts."
Oh, and a snake. A very big snake. Big enough that it justified its own press release a couple weeks ago. "Well, I've got two of them," Rose clarified. "The one we're going to be using onstage is probably 20 feet and 180 pounds. I've actually got a bigger one."
"It's just too big" to use in the show, he added. "That one's 430 pounds or something like that."
