AEW has been licensing music for some of its top stars recently. Orange Cassidy uses the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” as entrance music and Jungle Boy now uses “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora as well. According to comments made by Chris Jericho, however, attempts by AEW to license songs by AC/DC and Van Halen have not been successful.
Jericho commented on this recently while on the Two Man Power Trip podcast.
“We tried to get ‘Back in Black’ for our return promo after we attacked The Pinnacle in our dressing room,” Jericho said about the popular AC/DC song. “They wouldn’t even give us the time of day.”
“There have been other ones,” Jericho continued. “We wanted Van Halen right after Eddie [Van Halen] died, we wanted to use ‘Runnin’ With The Devil and they came back with $500,000. That’s just a polite way of saying ‘No fuckin’ way.’ AC/DC didn’t even come back with that, but then I see them on an Applebee’s commercial using ‘Back in Black.’ I guess they are fans of the baby back ribs. I thought the concept of back in black fit us; we’re coming back focused, serious, and darker.”
Tony Khan has previously spoken about difficulties in licensing music for AEW as well. He had the following to say during a post-show media scrum from Double or Nothing:
“You can’t just want to buy a song, you have to get responses and you never know who’s going to bite on it,” Khan said. “Sometimes they’ll make—sometimes people don’t even respond and they wait a long time to get back to you. In some cases, you’re really far apart on money.”
