Murderdolls, Mick Mars and Fresca:

An interview with Wednesday 13

August 20, 2010

Eight years after the Murderdolls’ debut album, Beyond the Valley of the Murderdolls, Wednesday 13 and Joey Jordison, better known as the drummer for Slipknot and now Rob Zombie, are back with their sophomore effort, Women and Children Last. The songs this time come not from horror movies, but a darker, scarier, more personal place, and Roadrunner Records is so excited that it sent Wednesday out on the Rockstar Mayhem Festival to do nothing but meet fans and talk to press. Proper touring will start soon, with European dates with Guns N’ Roses and Ozzfest, and the opening slot on the Halloween Hootenanny Tour featuring Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper. At the Mayhem Festival’s stop in Bristow, Va., Greg Maki and Jeff Maki of Live-Metal.net met up with Wednesday to talk about the new album and more.

Wednesday 13: Tell everybody that this is a beer we opened up. [pops open a can of Fresca] [laughter] Not a Fresca. That’s not rock ‘n’ roll. [laughter] Even though it does have sparkling flavors inside of it.

Greg Maki: That’s pretty metal.

Mmhmm. Alright, let’s get this started.

Greg: You’ve been in this music game for a while and have done a lot of tours. So what is it like being out this summer on this tour and just meeting people and talking about yourself and not playing?

It’s been fun, it’s been really long and we’re on that last week stretch til we’re done. Because for me, I’m not playing every day, so it really sucks. But the good thing is, I met so many cool people on this tour and actually saw a lot of bands I never even gave a chance before and they’re really cool. So it’s just been kind of like rock ‘n’ roll band camp and people that I know, that I worked with before or worked for me on past tours. You can’t turn a corner without “Oh, hey, hey.” So it’s been fun, but I’m counting down the days. We have three weeks til we start touring, and I cannot fucking wait.

Greg: For the past several years, you were kind of on your own, no label or anything. Now you’ve got Roadrunner behind you. You wouldn’t have been able to do this before. So what has it been like having that label support again?

It’s great. This time, it’s even cooler. The first Murderdolls record—There’s different areas of Roadrunner and stuff like that. We did better in the U.K., we did better in Japan and Australia. The label didn’t really push it in America . They know that. They didn’t want it to happen. They didn’t want any side project of Slipknot to happen ‘cause it took away from Slipknot. So they put it as much as they wanted to into it, and then when it was done, it was done. I did my first record with them, and everything was cool. It was kind of the same thing as Murderdolls. They did just a little bit, and it did OK. After that, I did my own thing and now I’m back doing a new record. The crazy thing is they’re doing everything. Every idea we come up with, they won’t say no. We come up with some ideas, like, “Really? You’re gonna let us get away with this? We want two warning labels on the record.” “Alright.”

Greg: And the special, deluxe edition, that’s pretty ridiculous. What all’s in that?

It comes in like a first aid kit. It’s called the “Last Aid Kit.” It’s got the CD with the DVD, deluxe edition, the bonus tracks. It’s got a CD, it’s got a patch, a sticker, a pill bottle and a pamphlet on how to survive in Murderworld. It’s really cool. They’re just letting us do everything we want. We have these trailers that are coming out every week leading up to the record. We put out one this week for the song called “Drug Me to Hell.” Basically, we hired this dude and he’s making movie trailers set up to our songs. It has nothing to do with us. I just kind of tell him what the songs are about, a general idea, and I was like, “Just go crazy with it.” The footage I’ve seen, I just saw the latest trailer the other day and it’s the most vile, disgusting—It’s bad. And that’s coming from me, so I can’t wait for people to see it. I saw a girl get fed her guts, so it’s pretty great.

Greg: The touring starts over in Europe. You’re doing Ozzfest over there.

Actually, it starts before that. We’re doing five or six shows with Guns N’ Roses and that leads up to Ozzfest. And in between that, we’re doing off dates in Germany or somewhere—I don’t know where the tour is. Then after that, we come back and we do the Zombie/Cooper tour. That goes all the way through Halloween, and then after that—I don’t know—another tour, another tour. It looks like in the first six months we’re just doing the support slots, and then hopefully after that, we’ll come back and start doing our headlining stuff in time for the festivals next summer. So it’s a long trip. Just thinking about it, I’m getting tired. This tour has made me tired. All I do is hang out and talk all day and drink.

Greg: Fresca, right?

[laughter] Yeah, yeah. I’m rehydrating right now.

Jeff Maki: With the Zombie/Cooper tour coming up, obviously 99 percent of the people there are there to see Zombie and Alice. You know that, we all know that. So what, as a band, do you hope to accomplish?

With this new Murderdolls record, I don’t know what it’s gonna be like. I don’t know if the old fans are there or if it’s a whole new fan thing or whatever. But with the Zombie/Cooper thing, being a fan of Alice and him being the reason I do what I do, I’ve played with Alice many, many times and I know how his crowd is. And I watch the Zombie crowd every night. I don’t know what they’re like together, but I just know their production for both shows are huge, and we’re just coming out being the punk rock, snot-nosed kids on that tour. We’re coming out swinging, and I’m excited about it. I think it’s cool. We’re going in bare bones, and I think people will get it because it’s almost a natural progression. Zombie’s younger than Alice , I’m younger than Zombie. I think we’re gonna get a lot of fans off that.

Greg: It’s kind of cool with Joey playing in Zombie’s band, and I know (Zombie bassist) Piggy (D.) used to play in your band.

Right. Joey’s doing double duty for this tour. So he’s playing drums for Zombie and playing guitar with us. But yeah, it’s cool. That’s another cool thing, having Piggy here. I hang out with him every day, as well. That’s gonna be such a cool tour. I know everyone backstage and it’s just like a family tour on that. So that’ll be great. And then, getting to see Cooper and Zombie every night, that’s awesome.

Greg: Over the years, every interview you did, people always asked you about the Murderdolls getting back together, and you had always kind of stayed in contact with Joey over the years. But it seemed like when the news came out that everything started to happen really quick. Is that how it happened?

Yeah, it pretty much happened just like that. We talked about doing it for years. I was like, “Alright, maybe we’ll have time this summer or this fall, maybe start recording.” Joey’s like, “What’s your schedule?” “Well, I’m going out in November.” He’s like, “I’m going out in September.” I’m like, “Well, fuck.” We had no time to do it. That’s kind of how it was every year. Then out of the blue, he calls me up and he’s like, “I’m done with everything. What have you got going on?” I’m like, “I’ll make everything done. If you want to do this, let’s fuckin’ do it.” And it was really quick. I don’t think anyone even believed us, even our manager. We already had the studio booked, we’re flying in, I don’t think anyone knew what we were gonna do. I think they thought we were gonna go in, do Beyond the Valley Part 2 and just be a bunch of drunken idiots, come out with a bunch of goofy songs. We went in and made a really good record that the label fuckin’ loves. And the press, we’re getting great reactions off of it. Everybody went, “Oh my god, this is good!” So that’s when you started hearing all the news, everything’s happening, this, this, this and this. That’s just the reaction from the label actually wanting to promote the record. So that doesn’t suck. They paid for me to be out here to do this. That’s six weeks worth of promo, and I just did Europe . I did three weeks worth of promo in Europe before that.

Greg: You’ve been talking about yourself for two months straight.

Oh my god, dude. I’m over it. I hate myself. [laughter] Love our record.

Jeff: With the new album, it seems like it’s a much heavier record, more pissed off, maybe more serious in its approach. Was that a conscious effort going in?

Absolutely. I needed to do it for myself just because for years I’ve just been doing the same shit. I’ve wrote every horror movie song you could possibly do, and it just got to the point where, alright, you’ve gotta stop at some point. So with some of these songs, they’re not based on any movies, they’re just stories. And then there’s also a lot of personal stuff, like “My Dark Place Alone,” “Nowhere.” There’s a bunch of songs that are personal. I get to exorcise my demons with this record, and I never did that before. So now when I’m onstage, when I’m singing “My Dark Place Alone,” I’m thinking about that shit. So if I look like I’m losing my mind, I am. That’s a cool feeling. Before, it’s kind of hard to be up there singing “I Walked with a Zombie” going, “I relate to that,” other than the fact it’s a cool song. So yeah, that’s the difference. It is more pissed off. It’s heavier. I keep telling people, me and Joey are more pissed off now than we were as teenagers. So we’ll see what happens.

Greg: I think that probably what a lot of people still don’t realize about that first album is that those were basically all your songs, right?

It was a combination of my old band and it was combination of Joey’s old band, and we smashed lyrics together and songs, and took choruses out of this song and smashed them together. That’s how that record was done. It was done real fast and thrown together. This is the first time we actually had to sit down and go, “Alright, this song’s not done.” And we had to write and sit as close as you and I are, with guitars and drums, and create the song. That’s another reason why this record, I think, sounds different and has a different approach because it’s real songs this time as opposed to Frankensteining everything together.

Greg: I’m sure you’ve gotten tons of questions about Mick Mars.

Yes. My favorite question. [laughter]

Greg: You don’t need to go through how it happened or anything, but what was he like to work with? I think he’s really one of the underrated guitarists.

Yeah, that was the whole point of having him on it. It was a complete accident, too. Our tour manager heard us talking about a song, just heard me say, “This has got a really Mick Mars kind of vibe.” We hadn’t even done the solo yet. And he was like, “Why don’t you get him to play on it? He lives down the street.” And he knew him, so he called him up and he came in. It was great, man. It wasn’t about money; it wasn’t about anything like that. He came in and just really wanted to make sure that he put his stamp on the record. It wasn’t just like plug in and “get me the fuck out of here.” He hung out, and we probably bullshitted half the time. But it was great, man. Like you said, we consider him one of the villains of rock. He’s a underdog. He was always the scariest guy in that band to me—because he was the quiet guy. He was the reason I dyed my hair black. He was the Cousin It of that band. For us, it was kind of like no one gave that guy his credit. I feel like with us doing that, hats off to him. He was such a cool guy to work with.

He must have had all kinds of stories.

Oh my god. It was great. Yeah. We sat for hours and told terrible jokes and told stories. Any story we had, he would tell one and it was like, “Oh, well my story sucked. I never lost my vision and went and saw gray for three days.” [laughter] Mick’s great, though.

Greg: Shout at the Devil was one of the first records you ever owned, right?

It was one of the first records that I heard. My brother played it for me, and it scared the shit out of me because I was a Bible Belt, North Carolina little kid playing with G.I. Joes. I walk into my brother’s room, he’s got candles lit, “In the Beginning’s” playing on vinyl, and you’re like, “Whoa, what is this?” That was kind of my first introduction to it. Then I would sneak and make copies of his vinyl on cassette and hide it. My mom thought I was listening to fuckin’ Walt Disney and I was listening to Motley Crue in my headphones. I had to sneak it.

Greg: So I guess Murderdolls obviously is the priority and that moves all of your other stuff to the back now, Bourbon Crow, Gunfire 76 and all that. Do you think you’ll go back to them at some point?

I have no idea what the future’s gonna hold with what Murderdolls are gonna do. It’s not a thing where we’re gonna take a eight-year break this time. I’m sure once we’re done with the touring cycle, Joey will want to go do something, whatever he has planned to do, and I’ll want just to get away from it for a bit. Or it may just be right into writing the new record. I have no idea. I never intended to be a solo artist in the first place. The whole reason that happened was because we were told Murderdolls would go on hiatus for six months, then we’d be recording and touring. Then it was like, Slipknot’s going on tour for two years. So just for fun, I went to England —I’m gonna play all my shit, I’m gonna call it Wednesday 13, and people loved it. So I just kept doing it, then got a record deal with it. So that’s what happened with it. So if it goes back to it, I may want to do something completely different. I won’t start a rap group. [laughs]

Jeff: There’s no way Murderdolls could be Murderdolls without the two of you?

No and that was something we made sure we didn’t do. That’s an agreement Joey and I made in the very beginning, was we would never do the band without each other. We are the band.

Greg: Do you see Murderdolls ever playing any of the songs you did on your own?

I don’t know. Joey’s been a fan of me. That’s why I know him. He heard my old band and was like, “Your band rules!” So he’s always been a fan of stuff, and he likes all my records. But I think for me and myself, I would rather just play the Murderdolls stuff. There are some cool songs I’ve done over the years, but I think for us being out this long, we owe it to the fans to go out and play those songs.

Greg: Anything you want to add?

No. [laughter] No, I’m done.