Shannon Moore Reveals the Origins of 3 Count in WCW

During a recent interview with Insight with Chris Van Vliet, former WWE Superstar Shannon Moore discussed his career, the origins of the boy band-esque trio 3 Count in WCW, singing the theme song, and more. Below are some highlights from Insight:

Shannon Moore on How He Was Put in 3 Count

“So 3 Count, the groundwork I feel like was me, Shane Helms, Joy Matthews, Christian York-I’m sure you’re familiar with those. Me and Joey Matthews, we were super young. We’re 15, 14 years old, hitting the road together. But we had a group in Nashville for Music City Wrestling. Bill Behrens and Burt Prentice owned Music City Wrestling, and it was a time when Memphis was still going on. So it was a pretty big promotion out in the Nashville area, and we had established something like the Backstreet Boys, that type of boy band. I guess whenever you would watch us in Nashville, you got the boy band feel. We did some music videos that they produced out there, us walking down the train tracks, and that song, ‘You might as well be walking on the sun…’ I’m sure you’ve heard that song. I can’t remember who sang that.”

“[Van Vliet says “Smash Mouth.”] Smash Mouth. Yeah, but we were kind of running the 3 Count gimmick out there at the time, and people looked at us like a boy band. But long story short, Chris Canyon watched Music City Wrestling because he watched everything, and whenever I ended up trying to contact WCW, Chris is the guy that I contacted who ultimately got me my job. I was like, hey, this is Shannon Moore. I don’t know if you know who I am, but Matt and Jeff [Hardy], at that point they were doing jobs up at WWE, going up, just doing enhancement work at that point, and they knew Chris from up there. Matt was like, ‘Yeah, Chris is cool, hit him up.’ So I called Chris and I was like, ‘Hey, man, I don’t know if you know who I am, but I’m friends with Matt and Jeff, and I’m trying to get in the Power Plant. What do you think about that?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I know who you are. I see you on Music City Wrestling.’ So that kind of got me to WCW and having that conversation with Chris Kanyon.”

On Becoming a Boy Band Faction With Shane Helms Evan Courageous

“Yeah, so we originally got hired for an idea. Still haven’t confirmed exactly what it was that Eric Bischoff was trying to do, but from what it sounds like, he was trying to do Tough Enough before Tough Enough was ever a thing in WCW, and at that point, 1999, 1998, I think it was The Real World, like that was the one of the first big reality shows that was on MTV at the time, but it was a bunch of young people living in a house, and they were doing this reality show based on them living together in this house, just partying and everything. I think like the concept was that Eric was going to hire 21 cruiserweights, and he was going to put them in a house, and the journey for them to make it to the big show, which would be Nitro, was going to be filmed and edited. I’m pretty sure it was going to be the drama that comes with these 21 cruiserweights living together in a house. But that was the original idea.

“Shortly after we were hired, a few months after, out of the 21 cruiserweights, there was only I think five or six that they didn’t fire, me and Shane, Jimmy Wang Yang, Jamie Noble, there were several of us that they kept around. So at that point, we were just home getting paid, and they were like, ‘We need you guys to come to the Power Plant.’ That’s kind of how it evolved. We were down at the Power Plant.

“Actually, me and Shane, we were down there for about two weeks, and I got a really bad concussion one day training with some of these guys, which we laugh about it now. But these guys were trying to bully us, and they were really young in the business at the time. Shane and I had been around for a while at that point, so we were pretty decent in the ring, and somehow I got kneed in the temple in one of these drills, woke up in a McDonald’s looking at Shane, and I was like, ‘Dude, where am I?’ He’s like, ‘What do you mean? We’re in Atlanta. Are you okay? You just finished training.’ So I panicked. I remember calling my girlfriend at the time. I ran out, and it was the time of payphones. I remember calling her, going, ‘Hey, where am I at?’ Went back in, and Shane’s like, ‘Dude, you drove here too.’

“We ended up going back to the Power Plant. At the time, my dad, he was quadriplegic. I was like, man, I need to get back home. I’m not staying down here and getting injured. So me and Shane, we went into Paul Orndorff, and we were like, ‘Hey, man, we’re heading out of here. We’re going home.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know why you’re here, anyways. You guys shouldn’t even be here. Go home; everything’s cool.’ I remember I was going through a McDonald’s drive-through, and Jimmy Hart calls me, and Jimmy’s like, ‘Baby, what are you doing? What are you doing? Why did you guys leave?’ I was like, ‘Well Paul said that we could.’ Jimmy’s like, ‘No, he put you on a to-be-fired list.’ Just that whole political game. Paul was gonna try to have us fired for leaving, but it was like either stick around there and get hurt, or get out of there. Me and Shane was like, man, we got to get out of here.”

Do you remember being in the studio and singing the 3 Count theme?
“Yeah, I have no dance skills. I have no singing ability whatsoever. When Jimmy [Hart] came up with this, and at that time, whenever he called me, ‘What happened? Why did y’all leave?’ He’s like, ‘Don’t worry, your jobs are safe. I got this idea.’ The idea was 3 Count. He’s like, ‘We’re gonna get you in the studio. We’re gonna get you guys to sing this song.’ We actually went to Tampa, and it was the actual studio that the Backstreet Boys actually sang their songs in because Jimmy had all those connections, I guess, just in the music industry.”

On How Fans Couldn’t Deny How Good 3 Count Was in the Ring

“Yeah, and I think that was the attraction, and I think Jimmy’s idea, or Jimmy thought that we were going to be a legit boy band because at that time you had the Backstreet Boys, you had NSYNC, you had all these guys. They were selling out arenas, and so Jimmy’s idea was like, hey, you guys are gonna release these legit songs, and we’re gonna hit some of these, like the Mall of America, and you guys are gonna perform, you’re actually gonna do these performances, and the Nitro Girls are gonna teach you how to dance, and like we’re gonna do some stuff with them.

:In my head, I’m going, well, first of all, I want to be a rock star. I wanted to look like this. I wanted to be tattooed, but I’ll do whatever, man. If Jimmy believes in us, I believe in it. And Arn, he had a different view of what 3 Count was. Arn, he understood, I think, the heel side of it, and Arn took it, and a lot of credit to Arn for actually getting us the heat that we would get from it. Because there was a while where 3 Count would go to the ring, and those green circles that we had, they were legit shields. Because we would get you M&M’s, change, sodas, just thrown at us. They’d get lobbed at us because Arn would overdo it. He’d send us out to open the show, and then he’d send us out like right before intermission, and then he would send us out again right before the main event, or somewhere in that at that point on the card.

“By the time we went out that last time, man, like the people were just throwing everything at us, and it was like, ‘Thank you, thank you. We knew you would come around.’ They tried to act like they were cheering for us, and then finally, they would send Sid Vicious down, and no music, nothing, and Sid would just slowly walk to the ring. So you go from this chaos of just M&M’s, sodas, change, just getting lobbed at us, to you would hear a slow eruption of cheers, just following Sid as people started to notice him, and then we’d really like get into it.

“‘Man, we knew you guys would finally love us. We knew that you would finally come around and be 3 Count fans.’ Sid would just stand behind us and we’d sit there and we’d milk it for a minute, and then turn around and then he would just destroy us and just kind of send us out of the ring and the people would go nuts, but Arn just understood, I guess, the amount of heat that that group could get or these young guys that people ultimately really didn’t want to see, especially singing and dancing in the ring.”

After WWE acquired WCW in 2001, Moore would transition to WWE developmental territory HWA. He’d later make his WWE TV debut in 2002 as part of the SmackDown brand.