If Pantera didn’t give the green light for “Walk” to be used for Rob Van Dam’s debut in All Elite Wrestling, the company had a back-up plan in mind.
Tony Khan recently appeared as a guest on the Battleground podcast and revealed that he had a “Plan B” in case he couldn’t get clearance to use RVD’s original theme song from his ECW days, Pantera’s “Walk,” for his debut in AEW to set up his in-ring return against Jack Perry for the FTW Championship on AEW Dynamite.
“We did have a backup (song for RVD’s AEW stint) but it wouldn’t have been the same and that’s why I wanted to pay the extra and go the extra mile and get ‘Walk’ by Pantera,” Khan said. “Pantera was great and worked with us and we worked out a reasonable deal. I compare music licenses in wrestling to trades in pro sports. It’s like, you can do your best but, every trade is its own transaction. It has to be between at least two willing parties. It can’t just be one willing party in a trade and I think that’s very similar with music rights in wrestling. You have to reach a deal that’s fair for everybody and sometimes the value is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes people ask for money that I don’t think is reasonable.”
Khan continued, “Other times, we’ve gotten deals that I thought were very fair. But we do use a lot of licensed music and in perpetuity. So someday when the AEW streaming library becomes available per our exclusive rights with Warner Bros. Discovery, the great company we’re very fortunate to team with, I am optimistic someday all of this will live on Max hopefully and every great moment where we’ve licensed music, we still have that music. I paid for the rights in perpetuity. So whether it was something incredibly moving and memorable like when we used Tom Waits’ Ol’ ’55 for the tribute video to the late, great Mr. Brodie Lee or like you said, something fun with the great entrance, RVD-Pantera. Other great moments like Bryan Danielson and The Final Countdown at Forbidden Door and so many other of the great things we’ve done over the years.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to POSTWrestling.com for transcribing the above quotes.
