Whatever Happened to WCW’s High Voltage?

Posted on July 18, 2019 by bdamage1

Brian Damage

They were best friends who both graduated from WCW’s Power Plant. They formed a tag team and had high expectations put on them from the very beginning. Then drugs and injuries sidetracked their careers. Today on the blog, we ask…’Whatever Happened to‘ WCW’s High Voltage?

Robbie Rage (Rob Knapik) and Kenny Kaos (Ken Stasiowski) were trained and graduated from WCW’s Power Plant in 1996. Together, Rage and Kaos formed a tag team known as ‘High Voltage.’ According to Matt Hardy, around the same time, he sent a video package of himself under the exact same name. He was never contacted back from WCW, but Hardy claimed that WCW executives liked his name and gave it to Robbie Rage and Kenny Kaos. As much as it sounds like just a coincidence, former WCW star Chris Kanyon sided with Hardy saying that WCW did in fact steal the name from him.

High Voltage was a young up and coming team that felt reminiscent of the Young Stallions in the WWF. Rage and Kaos had a number of low card victories on WCW Saturday Night. They had wins over notable tag teams like Public Enemy, The Armstrong Brothers, The Dancing Fools (Alex Wright and Disco Inferno), Disorderly Conduct and members of Raven’s Flock. High Voltage were very typical graduates of the Power Plant. They were muscular, athletic and very green inside the ring.

Rage and Kaos did have somewhat of a negative reputation behind the scenes. They were nicknamed ‘High Dosage’ by their peers for the amount of drugs they allegedly used. Whether it was steroids to maintain their physiques or the use of more recreational drugs…High Voltage would soon see their pushes slowly reduced. They were still mainstays on the WCW’s B shows…but were mostly used as enhancement talent to some of the bigger, more successful teams on WCW’s main show….Nitro.

In 1998, Rage and Kaos were sent to New Japan Pro Wrestling to fine tune their wrestling skills. They had several matches while a part of New Japan wrestling the likes of Manabu Nakanishi & Satoshi Kojima, members of NWO Japan and Kazuo Yamazaki & Kensuke Sasaki. When they returned to the states and back to WCW, Robbie Rage suffered a shoulder injury that would sideline him for several months.

That left Kenny Kaos to pursue a singles run for the first time in his career. Kaos was used primarily as a jobber to stars like Saturn, Ernest Miller and Wrath. Kaos would get his first major break with WCW when Rick Steiner chose him to be his tag team partner. Steiner had won the world tag team titles by himself and was asked to choose a partner moving forward to defend them and Steiner chose Kaos. Steiner and Kaos would defend the tag team titles for a couple of months before vacating them due to an injury to Rick Steiner.

Around this time, Kaos’ old partner Robbie Rage would confront Kaos on why he left High Voltage. The plan was to start a feud between the two of them, but in the middle of their storyline…Rage was released from the company. 1999 was the year that Kaos refocused on a singles career and had some moderate success. He challenged for the WCW world television title and had some victories over wrestlers like Lash LeRoux, Bobby Duncum Jr and La Parka. Towards the fall of 1999, Kenny Kaos was also released from WCW.

So the question remains….Whatever Happened to High Voltage? After Robbie Rage was released by WCW, he returned to New Japan and also briefly wrestled for Carlos Colon’s World Wrestling Council in Puerto Rico. His addiction to drugs cost him his home and he lost all the money he made in wrestling. Today, however, Rob Knapik is clean and sober and works as a project manager for a construction company in Georgia.

Ken Stasiowski retired from pro wrestling after his release and went to work in the oil field business in North Dakota.