“There are actual segments of this show where you cannot feel any oxygen because it is all in people’s lungs.  There are periods when we are on stage where if feels like a hairdryer, people are screaming and giving you the energy back so much.  There are times in this show where I look around and there is hardly anybody in a seat, they are on the floor laughing.” – Jim Rose, on the audience’s reaction so far to the When Legends Collide Tour.

The legendary Jim Rose has done it once again, this time taking his freak show to the stage and incorporating the legendary and understated, yet controversial Jake “The Snake” Roberts into his theater.  Traveling across the globe with high profile wrestlers, attractive females, and an unusually talented ensemble, Jim Rose continues to make audiences cringe with his latest, When Legends Collide Tour.  According to Jim, this is the best tour yet.  “We’ve got pretty girls, wrestling, amazing circus stunts, and a fistfight.  I mean, who can ask for more? If that isn’t testosterone fueled, I don’t know what is.”

ChinaShop caught up with Jim Rose on a much-needed day off in between shows, as he filled us in on what people can expect from his latest project.  In addition, Jim was accommodating enough to wake Jake “The Snake” Roberts abruptly from his sleep to break us off a little piece of his troubled past and to explain why he really considers this tour to be the launch of his mighty comeback in the eyes of the media.

Tell me a little bit about The Jim Rose Circus.  What can we expect from the live show, especially the When Legends Collide Tour?

Jim Rose: We’re gonna do the fan favorite stunts at a warped speed for first 20 minutes of the show, then segue into kind of a theater and a wrestling show with Jake “The Snake” Roberts.

What was your inspiration behind including Jake in this tour?

Jim Rose: His phone started ringing off the hook after that movie The Wrestler came out.  I’ve known him since Moby Dick was a minnow and we’ve got a mutual best friend named Sinn Bohdi, formally Kizarney of the WWE.  After Jake’s phone started ringing, Sinn called and said, “We’re not dealing with a lot of Hollywood circles here in our wrestling community, so maybe you can help us with that.”  So we started hanging out a little bit and had so much fun and we ended up figuring out a show.   Sinn Bohdi gets a lot of the credit for this.

How exactly are you incorporating wrestling into the circus?

Jim Rose: The premise is that Jake is looking for a less violent environment and looking for a family that he can perform with…And he can do some amazing mentalist stuff by the way.   We take him into the circus family but you know what, it’s just like in that old John Wayne movie; he tried to put his guns down but the young bucks just keep showing up and they want a piece of the icon.  He tries his hardest, but you know when people start messing with your family, even the most passive among us can get a little upset.  And that’s when the barbed wire and the chairs and a lot of things come out.  When you do rile a man that is really protective of his family, it can get really brutal.

How did you get into the whole sideshow world?
Jim Rose: I started off at the Arizona state fair grounds and I was vending soft drinks and then I started to work for this guy called the Lobster Boy, but my interest was motorcycle daredevil.  One year I attempted to jump 27 cows and I must have hit some spit cud and went wobbly.  And that’s why when I speak to you today; I have the posture of a jumbo shrimp.  I wanted to do something that required less mobility.  So I was redrawn to some of the sideshow stuff and learned a lot of those stunts.  Then I went into spoken word and comedy and sort of put all of that together.  I was doing a show in Washington DC and I ran into this little French girl named Bebe, who is also in the show, she’s my wife.  She comes from a circus family in France.  I went on with their family circus, learned a lot of traditional circus stuff, moved back to the US, and started doing stuff here.  I remembered a lot from my freak show years and incorporated a lot of that into my circus stuff and that’s how it all started.

How did you discover that you had talent for doing things like hammering a screwdriver into your nose?
Jim Rose: My only talent is recognizing talent.

You have a lot of regular performers like the Amazing Mr. Lifto and Torture King.  Are they all on this tour with you too?
Jim Rose: Well I’ve had several people under those names.  In different cities it’s different people.  I mean nowadays there are 20 or 30 kids that follow us all over the country wanting to do this stuff and there are probably 70 wrestlers bringing tables, chairs, etc… saying “Please have Jake the Snake throw me into a table.”  So we’re out there fulfilling people’s dreams, doing God’s work.

I read somewhere that during one of your past tours involving women sumos and Mexican transvestite wrestlers that you guys ended up in a Texas jail and got banned in New Zealand?
Jim Rose: Yeah, we were banned in New Zealand and we’re allowed back now.  And as far as getting arrested in Texas, the officer, the best compliment I could give him was “Nice tooth.”  He thought our women sumo wrestlers were showing too much buttocks.

Tell me about Maurice le Grand the snake…. $63,000?  That’s an expensive snake!
Jim Rose: I’m really lucky to have him because it wouldn’t be a show with Jake “The Snake” Roberts if he didn’t have a big snake.  The snake is out of Belgium and is the world’s largest touring Burmese python.   Sinn Bohdi calls it “son of a bitch” because he gets bit all the time by this thing.  It is the wildest snake that Jake the Snake who has worked with hundreds of snakes has ever had.  Let’s just say he’s got a nasty disposition.  This snake is more picky than Mariah Carey.

How involved do you get with the crowd in the show?
Jim Rose: We don’t do things to the crowd in any way.  I have in the past.  We’re not gonna go into the crowd and terrorize like we used to do when we used to play chainsaw football…Giving a whole new meaning to ‘halfback’.

Do you and your performers have to take days off to let your bodies heal in between?
Jim Rose: If you take a few days off, it hurts more.  It’s better just to keep rollin.’

Jake, How long have you been on the tour?
Jake: Just a week.

Is it going well?
Jake: Oh yeah.  It’s a barrel of laughs for me.  I get a chance to tell some stories and invite different things to happen.  It’s just different for me not having a wrestling ring around.  And I like to play mind games and use a little psychology on people and it gives me a chance to raise the bar a little bit you know instead of just being out in front of a ring with another guy and doing just one thing.  Now I can do anything basically that I want to.

So this kind of all started for you after the movie The Wrestler?  I heard your phone was ringing off the hook after that?
Jake: Yeah.  I mean everybody knows who the movie is about anyway.  It’s about me and my daughter’s relationship.  When the phone started ringing I said: “I need to do something and it’s gotta be crazy.”  And sometimes people get motivated to do the wrong thing and I’ve tried to keep that part out of my life and try to do the right thing.  And this has been good.  I’m having a blast.

Going back in time a little bit, how did you originally get into wrestling?
Jake: Out of hate.  Basically I had a father that wasn’t around much and didn’t give us much nurturing at all.  I came out of high school I was going to become an architect.  I went to visit my father and said, “I finished high school with honors and am going to college” and the only thing he said to me was “I hope you don’t want any money because I’m not giving you anything.”  And I said, “You haven’t given me anything my whole life, why would you start now?”  And unfortunately as children, we all want our father’s and mothers to be proud of us, and that’s all I wanted him to say was “I’m proud of you” but he didn’t have that in him.  So I went to a wrestling show a few nights later that he was appearing in, and as I sat there watching wrestling, youth, ignorance, and alcohol took over and my brain told me if you want your father to be proud of you, you have to go out there and do something in this wrestling ring.  Basically I was real stupid and a little inebriated and I went down and challenged a wrestler.  I got in the ring and got the living shit beat out of me and the guy took his time doing it.  After the match, I crawled back to the locker room and there’s my father looking down at me and he says: “I’m ashamed of you, you’re gutless, and you’ll never amount to anything.”  At that point, my life changed because the anger and humiliation and the starved kid that wanted that affection that didn’t get it, and then to have his father say something like that…I threw everything else out the window, said, “Screw college, I want to go into wrestling and by God I’ll be better than you ever were.”  It’s been one hell of a ride. With wrestling, I’ve seen the world two or three times and have had the chance to take other people on that ride.   That’s the thrill of it…is to entertain people and to take them on an emotional rollercoaster.   I mean up, and down, and sideways.  For lack of a better term, I called it masturbating people’s emotions.

That sounds like quite the ride.
Jake: In the wresting ring, to be able to make people love you or hate you…I’ve had people offer me their children to kiss them or whatever to here take my girlfriend to taking a gun and shooting at me.  I’ve had it all.   I had a grandmother cut me with a knife.  It was exciting.  I was quite impressed.  It was a damn sharp knife that she used.

Where did that happen at?
Jake: That happened to me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  As I went down the aisle, she stuck her arm out and had a box cutter in it and zipped me right across the back of the arm.   She was like 70 years old.  When they took her in the back and they were arresting her, I went and talked to her and said, “Why did you do this?  Who the hell are you.  Are you family? (laughs) Do I owe you money or something?”  Her story was that she had been at home with her grandkids and they were watching wrestling and having fun and she said “You were so violent, so mean…and I made a statement telling my grandkids that somebody needs to stop him and by God if I ever got close enough I’d stop that no good son-of-a-bitch.”  And she said that they laughed at her.  And when they laughed at her she felt that she needed to do something to show that she was still the matriarch of the family.  And I understand that type of motivation.  And she’s a sweetheart.  When she told me about that, I reached over and gave her a big hug and a kiss and said, “Hell, you made my night.” Because if I can make people do things like that, if I can get in their head like that and motivate them to do things they normally wouldn’t do, then I’ve done my job.

So this sounds like a great outlet for you to come out and rebuild your reputation and do what you love, but with you having control of it.
Jake: Yes, and not being played like a pawn anymore.  You go out in this world today and you can do 33 years of the perfect career but one night can destroy it all.

How many snakes have you gone through in your career?
Jake: Probably a hundred or so.  A lot have gone to the wayside or been returned because they had become unmanageable.  The hard thing with traveling with a snake is they are very susceptible to getting pneumonia.  Once they get sick, they are very hard to cure so I would simply just trade out.  The last thing I’d want to do is abuse any animal.

Jim just said this new snake you guys just got is a real handful?
Jake: Well he likes to express himself by biting.  He hasn’t hit me yet but he’s gotten Sinn a couple of times, which I just love.  I mean why should I get bit?  There’s a lot of people in this world that deserve to get bit and I’ve had my share of them.  You know I’ve probably been bit 60 times or more.  And that’s just by snakes, not talking about humans, which I prefer anyway.  Love stinks doesn’t it (laughs)?

Well I appreciate you taking time out of one of your few days off to chat with us.  It sounds like you guys were desperately in need of a day to relax.
Jake: My body hurts anyway.  I mean I’ve got two discs removed out of my neck, compound fracture, a wrist reconstruction, hip replacement, part of my left foot’s been removed, a couple of knee surgeries, broken sternums, broken ribs, I swallowed an ovary in ‘84, but that wasn’t mine.  The other injuries have mounted up, 15 – 16 root canals, but those injuries don’t go away.  The toll keeps rising.  With that, you don’t ever feel really good.  The fingers don’t straighten out anymore and some things don’t straighten out at all.  You’re out there just continuing to go and it seems to be OK.  But it’s when you try to get well and its like “Oh my God“ and then you realize how bad you are really hurting and that’s not good.  I just assume keep rolling because you live off the adrenaline anyway; that’s the reason you do it.  And if you can put some smiles on some faces here and there along the way, that’s great.

Words by Nicole Jones

Post note: The Jim Rose Circus Tour has been postponed, doctor’s orders! Jim has injured his neck due to a particularly savage blow from a metal chair delivered to him by Sinn, which occurred at the galaxy theatre in Orange County during a show. Jim is doing OK, but he’s prety beat up both physcially and mentally from the whole thing. They hope to reschedule the remaining shows sometime later this year.