If I'm so popular, why did they replace me with Tommy Thayer?
Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.
That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.
I started training wrestling in the pre-social media era and I was very cautious - I thought, 'I can't have people know my real last name.' So I changed my last name to End because I always called myself 'The End.' I thought that was cool. I thought I'd take my real first name and my 'fake' last name, and that's how I came up with Tommy End.
There is a considerable amount of content to what made Tommy End Tommy End and what makes Aleister Black Aleister Black, but there are a lot of similarities. I sometimes feel like Tommy End shed his skin and became Aleister Black. I truly feel that in WWE Tommy End could become Aleister Black.
If I look at who I am as a person and where my interests lie, I figured that going from Tommy End to Aleister Black was almost like a possession. So, one entity to the other.
The big stars I felt a kinship with were never the romantic leads. It wasn't Steve McQueen or Robert Redford - it was people like Walter Matthau and Anthony Quinn. My big hero was Tommy Cooper.