Art Barr

Real Name: Art Barr

Stage Name: Love Machine Art Barr

Date of Birth: 1964 Home Town: Portland, Oregon

Height: Weight:

Arthur Barr was born in 1964 in Portland, Oregon.He comes from a family of wrestlers:his father,Sandy (Ferrin) Barr,and brothers Jimmy Jack Funk, Jesse Barr and Shawn Barr.
Before becoming a pro wrestler, Art Barr wrestled in the Oregon State University. His brother Jesse was also an amateur wrestler, Jesse even wrestled for the 1980 US Olympic wrestling team. Art achieved great success as he was four times district champion and two times two times state champion in Portland, but he had to quit the University when his first wife became pregnant. Art started to work in a steel mill at day, while training to became a wrestler at night.

His father taught him some secrets of the wrestling business, but he was trained by the one and only Roddy Piper. When Art was 12, Piper (who at the time was wrestling in Oregon) used to take him to the gym. Piper was more than a mentor to Barr and they were great friends. With the Hot Rod as a teacher there�s no doubt why Art was a heat machine.

He started to wrestle for his father�s promotion as Arthur Barr and also wrestled as The Intruder, but one day Piper had a idea for him. While Arthur was in the ring in a televised show, Piper and other three wrestlers entered the ring. They covered him with a sheet, striped him naked throwing his clothes to the crowd and put them a new suit. Piper sprayed something in Art�s hair. Piper grabbed the mic and said: "Now I have created The Beetlejuice, the meanest little son-of-a-gun that I have ever seen". He took off the sheet and there was Arthur with his new gimmick.

His tremendous charisma helped Barr to sign with the WCW in the late 1990. At the time WCW was very distant to the WWF in popularity among the kids and they saw Barr�s potential as a draw to the children. In the WCW he kept his Beetlejuice persona, but it was renamed to The Juicer to avoid copyright problems.After some problems with the law,Barr left WCW and went to the Mexican promotion EMLL (where Konnan worked) in the early 1991. For almost to years, he wrestled there as the American Love Machine, as an American masked tecnico wrestler.

In 1992 a new promotion called AAA was formed.After moving to the AAA he had two try-outs with the WWF, but they decided not to sign him, so he returned to Mexico, where he continued his war against Blue Panther. Barr challenged Panther to a hair vs. mask match in Los Angeles, California, which he lost. This match has been one of the most important matches in Barr�s career, because after that match he turned rudo and became the hottest ticket on Mexican lucha libre. He was really hated by the Mexican people. He was so popular that soon gained a pay raise to a nice 5,000 per week.

Later, he joined forces with Eddy Guerrero and formed La Pareja del Terror, and in the late 1993, Konnan joined them and they formed the legendary stable called "Los Gringos Locos". Other wrestlers joined them: Black Cat, Madonna�s Boyfriend (Louie Spicolli), Misterioso, Chicano Power and King Lion, forming an unlikely combination of different wrestlers with different styles.

Guerrero and Love Machine feuded with El Hijo del Santo and Octagon, feud that was culminated in a hair vs. masks match in the first ever lucha libre only PPV, November 6�s "When Worlds Collide". Of course the Gringos Locos lost their hair.

With the PPV, Arthur gained worldwide exposure, and he was destined to stardom. ECW was very interested in him and Eddy and wanted them to feud with their top tag team Public Enemy, while WWF, WCW and New Japan also showed interest in them.

But only three weeks later Barr was found dead. The 28-year-old wrestler went to his home to celebrate the Thanksgiving day. At night, he went to sleep with his 5-year-old son Dexter, and the next day Art's mother, who went to his house after nobody did answer her phone calls, found him lying in the bed without pulse and bleeding from the nose.

To our days Art�s death is still a mistery. Preliminary reports said that he died of a aneurysm, but later reports said that he died under unknown circumstances. He hadn�t had heart problems, there was no aneurysm or internal bleeding, there weren�t ring injuries and there wasn�t any illegal substance of his body.

There are two theories of his death. One of them is that he had a missing vertebrae on his neck from birth. That made that two vertebrae pressed against each other, and one of them could have pinched a nerve that caused his lungs to stop. The second theory says that there could have been some bad mixing of different substances.

The above Biography has being compliled from the following web sites:-

http://members.tripod.com/~karmasunn/abarr.html
http://members.tripod.com/~lucharan/artbarr.htm