Al Snow Discusses the Origin of Head Gimmick, Talks Relationship With Mick Foley

– Al Snow spoke with Wrestling Inc for a new interview about his wrestling career, his Collar Elbow clothing line and more. Highlights are below:

On his Collar Elbow clothing brand: “I wanted to create a wrestling brand, kind of like how football has Under Armour and basketball has Nike. They all have their own particular brand and the fans of those particular sports wear those brands and kind of identify to each other, ‘Hey, I’m a fan of this particular sport.’ So I thought why not do something like that for wrestling, and kind of create designs that you can wear everywhere.”

On the Head gimmick: “It worked so well because it gave a voice to the frustration I had at that time… For whatever reason, I was very frustrated, very aggravated and very indignant. As a result, I put a lot of that frustration into the character. I would talk to the Head, I would make comments and remarks, things that I would normally not be able to say, I would do as if the Head were saying it. And that’s why it worked, because it was really me and the audience could tell, they could relate and they could connect to it. And it gave me, finally after at that time 15 years or whatever, a definable personality, a definable character that I had not had before.”

On his relationship with Mick Foley: “It’s like every time I turn around, he’s making some kind of remark or some kind of statement in his book or stand-up routine. Practically, people have told me that they’ll go to a stand-up show and he spends more time talking about me than he does anything else.”

On the origin of Head: “We were riding in the car together, it was Sid Vicious, Bob Holly, myself and Mick. Mick was playing around with the Styrofoam head that ‘Head’ is. He’d put this mask on and he was making like it was his girlfriend, making lewd comments and stuff. At the time when I was there in ECW, I was reading books on psychology to try and portray that I had lost my mind, I tried a bunch of different things that didn’t work… I saw a Styrofoam head and remembered [Mick] doing that, and then I remembered a woman who had paranoid-schizophrenia with transference disorder, and I was like, ‘You know what? That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna talk to and treat this Head as if it’s alive and it’s a real person, take it to the ring with me, talk to it, interact with it. And it’s gonna be crazy, not me.'”