Seeking Game Changers: A Wednesday 13 Interview

WEDNESDAY 13: Seeking Game Changers

An interview by Sarah Kidd.

He is the man that is the personification of devilish ghoul rock; a stalwart of the horror punk scene since he first emerged from the shadows as the lead vocalist of Maniac Spider Trash in 92’. Since then he has fronted some of the most iconic bands of the last two decades, including Frankenstein Drag Queens from the Planet 13, Murderdolls and Bourbon Crow whose collective songs about Rambo, Serial Killers, and a healthy dose of necrophilia have never failed to bring debaucherously delicious spine-tingling delight to his legions of fans.

Finally after fifteen long years, Wednesday 13 will once again tread on New Zealand soil, bringing with him not only a back catalogue of tracks that is guaranteed to make even the most putrefied zombie salivate; but material from his latest exhilarating release entitled Condolences.

Speaking with Wednesday 13 last year about Condolences, it was clear that he is still very much inspired to make music, with his live shows being a part of his life that he thoroughly enjoys, putting much thought and design into both the stage show and his own personal appearance.

My thoughts of what fantastical costume Wednesday 13 would grace the stage of Valhalla with was interrupted as his deep voice greeted me with his typically tongue-in-cheek humour:

“Hello, it’s Wednesday 13 here, on a Tuesday I believe, although it won’t be a Tuesday over there for you.”

[laughs] No, it’s definitely a Wednesday over here in New Zealand!

“Well it’s good that you can hear me, I’m on my landline. I’m here at my home in Los Angeles, it’s kinda during the day so you may hear police sirens, and helicopters and people screaming outside… but don’t worry its normal…”

[laughs] I’m in good ole suburbia in Auckland, so it’s pretty quiet… maybe a few bird calls…

“Yeah, it’s not anything bad it’s just you know it happens from time to time, I was talking to some guy and he asked me a question and I heard like a helicopter fly over my house and I’m like ‘Could you please repeat the question?’, so if I have to do that, you’ve been pre-warned.”

[laughs] Okeydokey…

“But I’m completely safe… I’m completely safe in my underground bunker…”

Excellent, I’m glad to hear that! Now I would like to start this interview off by saying thank you, when I spoke to you late last year you stated that you would definitely try and bring the tour down to New Zealand and you have done that so thank you very much!

“Oh awesome! I stuck to my word!”

[laughs] Yes, fans are very excited to hear that you are coming back this way because it has been many, many years since you last played here which as we talked about last time was the Big Day Out in 2003 with Murderdolls…

“Yeah New Zealand, that was my first time and my only time visiting there! We played I believe in January or February… something like that. Yeah it was a really short time there; some of the guys in our band and crew got held up in customs for drug paraphernalia with that artist Xzibit. We became good friends with him the whole tour, every time he’d see us he’d be like [puts on an Xzibit accent] ‘MURDERDOLLS!’

So that was my experience of New Zealand, was getting caught up in customs for like six hours, almost missed our first show because of it!”

So let’s talk about the upcoming tour, you’re coming here with Davey Suicide in support, now how did that come about?

“I’ve known those guys for a couple of years we did some shows here in the States with them. They’re a band from here in Los Angeles, I know several of the members in the band and yeah when it came time to tour we were tossing band names around and they were definitely one of the names that came up and we and the promoter decided that they would be a good addition to this tour.

So yeah we’re excited to bring those guys down, cause it’s their first time coming down to Australasia, so I’m sure they’re going to be having their minds blown when they see how crazy the fan base is, it’s going to be exciting.

It’s just cool to be bringing bands that are kinda on the same page as you. For us you know I think fans like to come to a show where they feel like it’s all an equal sort of thing. You don’t want to have your country & western act first and then you got your ska band and then your rap and then you got us… so we try to keep it all in the same vein, where it’s just a freak show from doors til we’re done.”

Well we appreciate it as not only do we get Wednesday 13; we get an international double header that includes Davey Suicide on their inaugural visit to our shores!

“Yeah, it’s gonna be a good time, we’re super excited. It will be our first tour, as we have only done one show this year so far so that one’s just kinda got us tempered and we’re ready to go, we’re like tigers pacing in a cage…”

Now we spoke last year about your latest album Condolences, since its release have you noted any particular tracks that you’ve played live that the fans have really eaten up?

“Yeah man, you know you get that gut feeling whenever you write a record, like for me every time we did a record, there’s always been the songs that I go, ‘Oh man I know that live that’s gonna be the song, that’s the one that’s gonna connect, that’s the one that’s gonna work!’ and it’s really cool to see if my predictions [chortles] come true when we play them live. And with this tour we play four or five songs off the new album – or six depending on what we do – but we play a good majority off of the record and it was branded to a lot of people, but on this last tour last year it was like people were singing along to the new songs just as much as the old ones!

So they definitely loved the record, they loved the sound, so it’s just been a great, great reaction. It’s a different record than any other record that we’ve done; I think every record we’ve done has been different from each other and that’s kinda been something I always try to do I don’t try to repeat myself I always try to do something a little different but at the same time always paying respect to the past and making sure it’s still Wednesday 13.

But it’s ok to play around with some extra toys and add some new tricks and bells and whistles here and there, so yeah just reaction wise these songs have been great! We try to bring the atmosphere and bring these songs to life, so I was really happy with how the tour and the show went last year and right now I’m preparing what we’re gonna do for Australia, maybe a little bit of what we did last year and some new stuff… who knows!”

Do you find with your older work – and you have one hell of a body of work – that there’s one iconic song that fans are always demanding to hear? What would you say your one was?

“Oh man, there’s a few that if we don’t play them the audience just gets pissed; which is an absolute great problem to have! I mean to have people want songs and get mad if they don’t hear them?

Our staple song which is probably the oldest song of the catalogue that we play is the song ‘I Love To Say Fuck’ – which is originally from my band Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13, which we performed with Murderdolls and now just continue to perform it with Wednesday 13 – that’s the staple song, that’s literally like as simple as the Happy Birthday song or the ABC’s or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star! ‘I Love To Say Fuck’ it’s that simple and I think that’s what makes it fun, so we usually end the show with it or it’s in the encore part. ‘Bad Things’ is another one if we don’t play it people get upset… ”

Yes! ‘Bad Things’, that’s my favourite too!

“‘…I Walked With A Zombie’ we sometimes either way with not playing that, but I do bring that back out and then another old classic favourite that I claim to be my dumbest … well in the top two dumbest greatest songs I’ve written, is the song ‘Rambo’. When we play that one, that’s one’s just another… just a no-brainer and I love it.

So yeah those are the ones that if we don’t play them the fans get upset. But I always try to put myself in the audience. Every time I make a set list I’m not just thinking for myself and what I wanna do; like I take in the perspective of the fans and what they wanna see and if I was out there and I had been following Wednesday 13 as a fan what I would wanna see. So I try to make our show via a combination of everything you know, putting all the years into one show and believe me that is not an easy thing to do! Because the music goes back to 1996 til now so it’s like I have to cram in 22 years of songs that people love into a 90 minute set! So it’s pretty tough but I think we pull it off… we try…”

You’re never going to please everybody, but going off previous set lists you certainly do squeeze a lot of awesome tracks in there!

“Yes it’s tough, luckily our songs are short [laughs] I remember going to see Type O Negative, one of my favourite bands of all time, I went to see them play and I looked at their set list and their songs are like fifteen minutes long so they had like five songs…”

[laughs]

“…it’s like what?! I’m gonna have to watch you guys play for like three days to hear anything I wanna hear!”

[laughs] Whereas you go to a good punk band show like The Restarts [UK] and they can fit in about 38 songs because everything is like a minute and a half long!

“Yeah! That’s how it used to be; over the years my songs have gotten a little bit longer but like since I would say 96’ til about 2002-3 all of our songs were under three minutes and we could play a 25 set show in under and hour and a half; now it’s a little harder with the new songs. On the last record Condolences there’s a song that’s over seven minutes, it’s a like an Iron Maiden song for us!”

With the Condolences album having been out for a while now; have your thoughts turned towards new material? Or are you an artist that reserves writing for when you are off the road?

“Well when we finished writing Condolences, I’ll be honest I was… we spent so much. We spent three months writing and recording that record and I never spend that long and that like focused on something. Normally we can work on something and take a little bit of time off to write. Condolences, it was literally like three months, like cramming for a test or something you know? So when we got done with that record I was like ‘Alright, I’m not picking my guitar up for a few months, I don’t wanna write anything, I don’t wanna… let’s just let this record go’.

Now just in the past few months I’ve been writing because I just had to get that out for a bit. I don’t like to keep writing because I used to basically what I would call ‘shoot myself in the foot’; I would write a record and it wasn’t even out yet and I would already have half of the other one already written. I’m like [puts on a drawling voice] ‘Well I like this one better’ so I was kinda rushing to get that one out to get to the next one. It’s just better that I pace myself and just sorta put the guns down after the recording and get them back out when the time’s due. But I’m always writing ideas down and things like that, but like full on sitting down ‘Oh I’m gonna write a song today’ or anything I haven’t been doing that… but I have started working on songs over the past month so the writing process has started for the follow-up to this.”

Looking at music and artists, we’ve spoken before about your love for bands such as The Misfits, obviously Type O Negative, Alice Cooper and W.A.S.P etc. Are there any more recent bands that have caught your eye for example the very tasty Swedish band called Then Comes Silence?

“Like newer bands that I listen to? There’s definitely a lot of cool bands coming out of Scandinavia, stuff like Backyard Babies [Sweden], of course they’re not new but I guess to people that have never heard of them they are. You know I was into them, Hardcore Superstar [Sweden], Sister [USA] a bunch of bands like that. There’s also Danko Jones from Canada who wave the flag of Rock n Roll in my eyes pretty high, one to be reckoned with for sure.

As far as anything brand new that’s come out, I really haven’t seen anything. And I’m not saying that there’s not anything out there or that I’m being stubborn or anything, I’ve just been so busy with my own stuff I don’t get to investigate newer bands as much. But that band Code Orange [USA] is a newer band that I saw and heard a lot about and I think those guys are doing something unique and different.

That’s what I kinda look for from bands, I look for stuff I like and also I look for what I like to call ‘The Game Changers’; the bands that come out of nowhere and just change the game, like when Alice in Chains came out and everybody was like ‘What the fuck is this?’. When Korn came out they changed the game. System of a Down, Slipknot all these bands… Fear Factory these bands did different sounds… the game changers!

So when I listen to music now I listen for you know stuff that I like but I’m also listening for the game changers and I think the last game changer I heard was Gojira [France] and that’s a band that I hear every metal band trying to incorporate what it is that they do; that’s just… that band, their musical ability is just unbelievable to me, it’s like a machine!”

They actually just played here in a double header with Mastodon! Stunning show!

“Oh! I love it! Oh! And Mastodon?! What a great double bill!! Another great band that just keeps getting better and better and is just making better music and that’s the kind of bands that I like. Of course I still like my old glam bands; I listened to Wasp just two hours ago…”

You can’t beat W.A.S.P!

“Yeah! I’m still listening to the old stuff but you know again when something new comes out and it’s good, it catches my ear and I’m into it. But that’s the sad thing, there isn’t really a lot of new stuff coming out, looks like a lot of people are just sort of copying each other.

But that’s the way that everything kinda goes, right before something big or something new happens everybody is just sorta treading on the same ground you know? So it’s time for something new, somebody new is gonna come out… a Lady Gaga of Metal is gonna come out somewhere any moment now…”

I agree, but as you said nothing wrong with the classics. On a personal note I have to say that The Crimson Idol [W.A.S.P] is still one of my all-time favourites.

“Great! Chainsaw Charlie (Murders in the New Morgue)…”

Before we go… any message for your fans in New Zealand?

“Just that we’re so excited to be coming back. Sorry, it’s been forever, you’ve probably never seen us and we’re gonna make up for that! We’re gonna give you guys the biggest and best show that we possibly can!”

Wednesday 13 performs with Davey Suicide TONIGHT (Sunday 29th April 2018) at Valhalla in Wellington. Tickets are still available from Under The Radar, but get in quick as this is sure to sell out!