If you want beef then bring the ruckus, Jericho Appreciation Society ain’t nothin’ to…
For Chris Jericho, his group dynamics are geared towards building stars and telling great stories. Since signing with AEW, he’s been able to successfully steer in that direction.
Upon winning the AEW World Championship at All Out in 2019, Chris Jericho soon recruited Sammy Guevara, Santana, Ortiz, and Jake Hager to join him in forming the Inner Circle. The faction underwent some internal changes, but eventually, The Inner Circle evolved into a more expansive group called the Jericho Appreciation Society. As of now, JAS is comprised of eight members, including long-time allies Jake Hager and Sammy Guevara, and some newer associates, such as Daniel Garcia and Anna Jay.
In a recent appearance on the Battleground Podcast, Chris Jericho spoke about the differences between his two factions. With Jericho’s obvious ventures into music (as the leader singer of Fozzy), he correlated each wrestling faction to a different legendary musical group.
“It’s interesting because I think when The Inner Circle is first formed, it had almost like a Guns N’ Roses vibe to me, in that you had five guys that had completely different looks. Yet when you put them together, it looked cohesive and cool,” he explained. “The first group picture we took was like, ‘That looks really cool.’ There’s five different guys, but everyone fits. And it was much more of a wild pack of dogs, I think with The Inner Circle.”
“I think the Jericho Appreciation Society is much more finesse. I think the Jericho Appreciation Society is much more character. If The Inner Circle is Guns N Roses, the JAS is the Rolling Stones. We’ve got chicks in the band now and we’ve got an extra guitar player, so to speak, with the six guys. And I like the fact that it’s not the business model of just five because that was my original vision. Then Tony [Khan] wanted to add some more people, now there’s eight of us.”
In regard to the Jericho Appreciation Society, the former world champion believes their structure is similar to that of a popular hip-hop act.
“It’s almost like the Wu-Tang Clan,” Jericho said. “There could be two of us together, there could be five of us together. There could be three of us together. It kind of interchanges, and I think it’s a little bit more Vaudevillian Vegas. We can wear the matching outfits.”
“We always had matching stuff in The Inner Circle. That was based on the movie ‘The Warriors,’ in that there was all those street gangs that all kind of looked similar, but they had the same vest or whatever. [The JAS] is much more of a boy band or a Vegas revue.”
RELATED: Chris Jericho Reveals Why He Uses Pop Culture References On Commentary
