Gene Jackson gives a brief introduction and gives an explanation on how this site and the Cheap Heat Radio show came to be.....
By: Gene Jackson
First off, if your reading this I would like to welcome you to CheapHeatRadio.com and the Cheap Heat Indy Newz Board. Now if your here reading this there's a chance you may already know who I am, but I'm not going to assume everyone does. This week is a bit of introductory week for all the columnists and I will be no exception, so with this first 'Cheap Heat' let me tell you a little about who I am and how the show/site came to be.
My name is Gene Jackson and I started wrestling in 1997 as 'the War Machine' in Mississippi. I wrestled in various promotions in MS, AL, and TN. Eventually, I added the Gene Jackson because it was never my intention to be the 'War Machine' that was supposed to be a temporary thing that stuck around longer than I planned. In the early 2000's, I got married for the first time and moved away from Mississippi to Alabama, at that point trying to wrestle and be married didn't mix too well so I left wrestling. Over time I began to miss it so I began writing wrestling columns online for 'Hollywood' Jimmy Blaylock's website, 'hollywoodjimmy.com'. As I tried to come up with a name for my column I watching some old videos on youtube and was watching one from an angle Neil Taylor and I did for the IWF, where I made a "shoot" comment that we weren't wanted there cause we "get all the heat"......which led Announcer/sometime wrestler/sometime referee "Outlaw" J.D. McKay to say "yeah, you guys get heat, but it's all CHEAP HEAT!" So I thought to be a smart ass I'd title my column, 'Cheap Heat w/Gene Jackson'. I wrote those columns for a year or two but then it got to be a hassle sending them in and what not so I left 'hollywoodjimmy.com' and started my own 'Cheap Heat' blog.
Around this time Brian Tramel had started up RasslinRiotOnline which was intended to be like a Mid South version of the 'Wrestling Observer'. BT asked me if I'd like to bring my writing to RRO and I gladly accepted. I was given the freedom to post whatever and whenever I wanted. I didn't have to compile it all into one monthly column and send it in....as things happened or as things struck me I could go there and write about them and post things while they were still immediately relevant. After a year or two of writing for RRO, I started exploring other ways we could bring news and content to the site. Other sites were posting printed interviews with wrestlers but no one was doing live interviews, and around this time 'shoot interviews' were highly popular. I thought it would be interesting to be able to hear shoot interviews with guys that RF Video and Highspots might not be willing to pay big bucks to do them. I toyed around with several things until I discovered 'blogtalkradio'.....it was at this point 'Cheap Heat Radio' was born.
I had so many things I wanted to do with the show, but my work schedule and other various factors limited my time on what I could do. I began doing weekly shows, sometimes twice weekly. One of the interesting thing about the show was the variety of guests.....one week I may interview someone like Nick 'Eugene' Dinsmore or Jimmy Hart, while the next show might be Neil Taylor or Insane Lane. I had a lot of fun doing the shows....I got to give friends of mine a place to put themselves over....I got to interview legends from my childhood that I grew up watching....and I got to interview and get to know workers I'd only previously read about. My main rule of thumb for these interviews were to come up with questions that I wanted to know the answers to....if I'm genuinely interested...then hopefully the listeners will be as well. That's always been my biggest gripe with some of the shoot interviews were guys interviewing wrestlers they had no clue about....asking questions they didn't know anything about or care anything about. So rather than an engaging interview...it just seemed like a string of predetermined mindless questions...where the answers had no consequence.....sometimes the next question on the list had already been answered but the interviewer wasn't listening so it get's asked again anyway...
I've been told by many people that they've enjoyed the interviews and I'm really glad they did. After a while of just straight interviews week in and week out I started to get burnt out and wanted to change the format. I started bringing on "co-hosts" for roundtable discussions...Neil Taylor, Izzy Rotten, etc... these shows were really fun for me personally and a small circle of people who knew what/who we were talking about, but didn't have mass appeal. Because of this and work scheduling issues (plus issues at home) Cheap Heat Radio kinda faded away. Also at this time Brian Tramel and Brian Thompson were doing their "Shooting the Shiznit" shows on the same channel so it kinda lightened the load on feeling pressured to put out as many CHR shows per month.
There were a couple of attempts to bring back CHR but they failed because as BlogTalkRadio got more popular and got more users the service got a lot more congested and undependable. In the meantime of all this I was writing sporadic 'cheap heat' columns, working on a book about Eddie Gilbert, and eventually going through a divorce (which being married had more to do with CHR leaving than anything but that's a long story). After getting divorced my life changed drastically for the better....I met the awesome, wonderful woman who is now my wife and she is very supportive of my wrestling addiction and even participates in many ways. We started going to wrestling shows and I started back writing 'Cheap Heat' columns about the shows we would attend and I've started back getting in the ring myself and wrestling from time to time. Due to having a supportive wife and work schedules that allow for it I decided back in February to bring back Cheap Heat Radio full time. I went and signed up for the new BlogTalkRadio pay service and have VERY little if any issues.
During all this BT found a new passion in his life and has decided to pursue it and I applaude him for it. This however didn't leave time for him to properly run the RRO site so he decided to shut it down. Realizing what a void this would leave for wrestling in the Mid South, I decided to expand my newly accquired .com site and add a newsboard with exclusive columnists, a message board, and various other goodies that will continue to pop up in the coming months to hopefully give everyone a place to promote themselves and their wrestling shows here in the south....and hopefully inform some people and have fun along the way as well. The great thing is this is a project that Rosey and I are working on together and we've got an awesome group of people helping we aren't going ANYWHERE!! CheapHeatRadio.com is here to stay! I plan to rotate the format mixing in interviews, roundtables, and other things to keep it fresh and fun for not only the listeners but myself as well.
If you have news, an upcoming show, results, videos, or what not that you'd like to see included here on the site, please email them to me at genejackson95@gmail.com. Just please tell folks about the website....post the link wherever you can it's much appreciated....this site is here for the good of everybody so PLEASE help us get it out there.
THANKS!!
GENE
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