Canadian rockers Finger Eleven first burst onto the mainstream scene with their self-titled album back in 2003. The album went gold in the US and platinum in Canada largely on the back of the single “One Thing.”
Finger Eleven was also tapped to create a theme song for WWE legend Kane. Guitarist Rick Jackett recently appeared on the “Ropes N Riffs” podcast and shared how writing “Slow Chemical” for “The Big Red Machine” came to happen.
“That song still this day is probably one of our most viral in our catalog,” Jackett said. “Every day we’re being tagged to post with someone reposting that song with Kane or his entrance, and we get a lot of love. We get a lot of people saying that it’s one of their favorite entrance songs too, which is—we all grew up in the launch of the massive WWE. So to be a part of history… it’s very, very cool.”
Finger Eleven were offered a spot on the WWE’s “Forceable Entry” CD, but weren’t too keen on writing for the wrestlers available until Creed dropped off and Kane became available to craft a song for. “The offer to be part of the Forceable Entry CD came to us, but I think that when we got asked, there wasn’t any wrestlers that we were wanting to do it for,” Jackett explained. “But then, I think Creed actually had Kane and they couldn’t do it at this point in their career. They’re too busy or something. So all of a sudden Kane became available and we were like, “we’ll do Kane! We’ll do Kane.’ When we wrote that music, there was definitely this idea of like trying to make it a big heavy riff. The one thing that they had in the agreement was it had to include the Jim Johnson thing (the guitar bending sound of Kane’s), like you have to have this in here. So pretty much that part is them, and then everything else we wrote as a Finger 11 song.”
The song almost didn’t get released, however. “The truth is though, when we gave them that song, there was a bit of a, I don’t honestly remember with who, but there was a bit of a back and forth,” Jackett said. “And they, I think it had to do with mastering and publishing rights. And there was this sort of like, we had a disagreement, let’s call it. And to the point where if you go look, it’s not on Forceable Entry because they left it off because the disagreement was still going on when the CD was being released. So there was a moment where we thought, “Okay, I guess they’re not going to use it. We’ll just take the Finger 11 part and go make it a Finger 11 song.” And it sort of got lost in limbo.”
“And then I’ll never forget one day we were at our pub that we liked to drink at back in the day and we were just playing pool and the TV had wrestling on. I heard the little organ start on the TV and we were all like, “No way they’re going to use it!”.
