Interview with Horror Punk Legend WEDNESDAY 13 at the World Famous Whisky-a-Go-Go!

If you had told high school-me that I would have the pleasure of interviewing horror punk legend Wednesday 13, I never would have believed you.

For those of you not yet familiar, Wednesday 13 is the frontman for some of the best horror-themed bands throughout the past 20 years, including Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, Murderdolls, Bourbon Crow, Gunfire 76, and now his solo project with an incredible band under the name Wednesday 13.

The music is hard, heavy, spooky, campy, and a must-see for horror and hard rock fans alike, with crazy theatrical shows performing songs with play-on-words titles, such as “Happily Ever Cadaver” and “Ghoul of My Dreams.”

Wednesday is currently on tour promoting his new album Condolences, just released earlier this month on their label Nuclear Blast, which presents a more serious side in the evolution of his music, moving a bit away from the usual horror film-centric dark humor seen in his work. I was allowed about 20 minutes in his dressing room at the world famous Whisky-a-Go-Go in West Hollywood, and I was not disappointed.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RpiIZfmBb4[/embedyt]

Wednesday: For a week I was so winded and it was so fucking hot, so it caught up with me a couple days ago and I woke up going “hhhhe, hhhhhe” (wheezing), I sounded like Mickey Mouse. It’s back a little bit, I’m not 100%, but I can get through the show. My talking voice is actually worse than my singing voice.

HB:I don’t know man, you sound pretty good. I just listened to Condolences, and I was pretty stoked that the first song on the album is the first song you’re playing tonight.

W: Yeah, we’re playing What The Night Brings. I have to look at our set but we’re playing 5 or 6 songs off the new album. We love our new album, so we want to play all the new shit. We have a couple of old things but it’s mostly gonna be new heavy stuff and crazy theatrical shit.

I was going to bring up your new album, do you have a story behind the name?

W: Yeah, the title just came from the observation that in the past couple years everybody is passing away, like musicians and actors, and 2016 was the year that all my heroes passed.

HB: David Bowie.

W: David Bowie, and Gene Wilder, and all these people I grew up with that seemed like they could never die. Now we’re watching it, and I kept seeing people writing a line “condolences, sorry for your loss, condolences, sorry for your loss” and it just sounded super powerful. You hear it and you know what this means. So I just thought it was a cool title and most of my titles have been play-on-words, or something funny and campy. This wasn’t funny and I didn’t want to make it funny. I wouldn’t call it “serious” but it’s about as serious as I’ve ever been.

HB: I was going to ask about that—before this you’ve been in a lot of other bands like Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13 which, by the way, I started listening to in middle school, my friend showed me Kill Miss America.

W: That’s the first song we ever wrote!

HB: She was all, you like drag queens, you’ll like this song. I thought, this is DOPE.

W: The meanest drag queens there ever were. They started a reputation of “they dress like chicks, but they’ll kick your fucking ass!”

HB: I just made a movie about drag queens, they’re pretty vicious.

W: Oh yeah?

(At this point he briefly got distracted by the 80’s cop movie playing on the TV in the dressing room.)

W: Oh by the way, that’s the guy from Breaking Bad, that’s Mike. He’s always the bad guy in all these movies. He’s the good guy in this one though.

W: Also there’s a part here coming up—when Mike gets shot, and there’s this standoff, and he starts going “don’t do it Chuck! Don’t do it!” I used to do this all the time on the bus and he didn’t know what I was talking about. Now you do. Read the subtitles. Anyway, sorry.

HB: You’re fine, the last thing I want this to be is a strict Q&A. Do you think there’s been a sort of evolution, not just in the series of albums that Wednesday 13 has done, but from your very beginning to what you’re doing now?

W: Yeah, I was thinking that where we are now is just a natural progression, this album is almost like a rebirth. We just worked really hard on it, the band has been together for a while now, so we’re a tight unit, like a machine now. You compare this record to the very first one and it’s like, holy shit, you can see how far it’s come. We’re really adamant on being a good band and writing good songs, and I’m really glad that every record we put out it’s always really good music that we strive for. Some people don’t do that anymore, they overplay but they don’t write new songs anymore. I’m a fan of songs!

Absolutely. And I think it’s really cool that every album you do is fresh.

W: Thank you.

I’ve noticed that there’s an evolution not just with Wednesday 13 but with all your stuff.

W: It’s just different, I don’t like to do the same record over and over. But there are some bands I listen to where I would get mad at if they changed the way we do. ACDC started using double bass and I’m like “fuck!” But for us, I like when people change. My favorite is Alice Cooper and he’s never stayed the same. Every record there’s something different and you wonder “what’s he doing now?” But that’s why we like those guys so much and who we rip off the most. And they know it too, but it’s alright, I don’t mind that. Without them I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.

HB: My old band and I ripped off Dead Kennedys all the time.

W: That’s basically what my look is on stage, my circle is Bowie and my eyes are Alice Cooper, putting them together is like a tribute.

This is for all of you guys if you want to get in on this, how did this current lineup meet, where are you guys from?

Roman: Well, we were at this honky tonk joint one time, a bar fight broke out, I was strangling this guy to death and he says “hey, let’s start a band.”

HB: Nice.

W: Actually it wasn’t that. Roman used to work as my guitar tech before he was in the band, and I don’t even think he really did anything, he just made me laugh, and fight with our other techs. And then we did a tour with this band called Bullets and Octane, Jack was in that band, and we shared a bus, and I was like “Hey, you’re cooler than the rest of the guys in my band” so we fired that guy and got Jack, and all three of us were in the second version of Murderdolls. So when Murderdolls stopped, we needed a bass player, so we got T-Roy from the great country of Texas. Then two years ago our drummer quit, and then Kyle joined the band. And here we are. And that’s how babies are made.

HB: How long have you been on the Condolences tour?

W: That’s a good question, I was trying to add that up today. What number show is this?

Jack: Like three weeks in?

W: Noooo. 2 weeks.

Kyle: Well including Europe.

W: So that’s 6 shows in Europe and how many have we done here? 7?

R: 70 shows. 7-0.

W: No way.

J: No, it’s our 16th show.

W: 16? Man, I have been DRUNK. Fuck. 16 shows plus 6. So you’re right, three weeks, Jack. You win the feud, it’s time to play fast money.

J: Oooo, thank you.

HB: So this is another question that goes out to all of you. Do you have any good stories so far from this tour?

W: Everyday is a story.

HB: And they can be as weird as you want by the way, because some of the shit that HorrorBuzz has made me watch…

W: Well yesterday we saw a lady on bath salts, taking off all of her clothes and trying to climb on our bus.

HB: Where? Here?

W: In Fresno.

R: Right in front of the venue, she was like a cat.

W: Yeah, she ran into the bushes and disappeared for a while, then came back out started hissing.

HB: Jesus Christ.

W: Yeah, we see stuff like that all the time. One time our bus driver that we hated stepped in a pile of human shit.

ALL: *laugh*

J: I couldn’t stop laughing.

W: I was like, fuuuuck you. So that was a good story too. I threatened to kill a sound man one time.

HB: We’ve all been there.

W: I could keep going, but—

R: I drank a tampon in Gatorade.

W: Yeah, he drank a used tampon in a bottle of Gatorade.

HB: Wait, so you swallowed the tampon or the tampon Gatorade?

W: Basically someone was trying to have sex with a girl and she was on her period, they took the tampon out and put it in a bottle of Gatorade. And the tour went on for a couple of weeks, and at the end of the tour we’re packing the bus up, and this bottle rolls out from underneath, I’m like “what the fuck is in that?” And there’s all this cotton broken apart, and the water’s all pink. So he opens it up and he drank it in front of everybody. So congratulations to the grossest man on earth.

R: I was in the hospital for 4 years. Just kidding, only two years.

W: That’s why his hair won’t grow right. He got struck by lightening in his sleep.

R: Slept right through it.

HB: I honestly can’t tell how much of this interview has been made up or not.

W: No, this is all true.

R: 86% exactly.

W: Nothing is made up. We just can’t count.

HB: So what’s next for you guys and where are you headed?

W: Lots of touring, and trying to get people who don’t know who the fuck we are to know who we are. Just trying to build it. Our show is the best we’ve ever put on and it’s awesome, so I can’t wait for our fans to see it and to make new fans. That’s one of our goals on Nuclear Blast is to get us in front of more people cause we’ve been doing this for years, and I’m tired of playing chicken-wing checks.

HB: Speaking of your fans, myself included, I think you’ve helped a lot of people embrace their spookiness.

W: I hear that a lot.

HB: I mean, I grew up as ME.

W: That’s what it was. When I was young, there were no bands like us, except for maybe Alice Cooper, but he didn’t do that all the time. He was horror here and there, but then he had love songs and things like that, and my whole deal was to have a band that had a horror vibe 24/7. That’s where Drag Queens came from, and Wednesday 13 is the same way. So I’ve just always done that, and it’s cool that we provide people with that, cause there aren’t a lot of people who do that. There’s me, there’s Rob Zombie, who else?

HB: Kind of Misfits?

W: Yeah, but they don’t really do anything anymore.

HB: Yeah, they’re not like you guys at all.

W: There’s only like four shock rockers out there: Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and me. I’m the last in line, but I’m in line!

HB: I’ll be honest, I saw Misfits at House of Blues a few years ago and it was one of the most boring shows I’ve ever been to. I got punched in the face twice.

W: Oh, I’m sorry.

HB: Anything else you want to add?

W: Yes. 2 plus 2… is 4. I always love ending interviews with that.

He may have lost his speaking voice a bit that day, but it was unable to tell by the time he got on stage, putting on an impressive theatrical performance. I got to shoot the show (doing the best I possibly could considering the amount of fog and strobe lights in the room) which included mostly songs from the new album amidst a large crowd of avid fans, who at one point held their middle fingers high and proud during a Frankenstein Drag Queens cover of “I Love to Say Fuck.”

Wednesday 13 at Whisky-a-Go-Go, June 25th 2017. Taken by Remy Cashman

If you’d like to see a show as badass as this one, you’re in luck–the Condolences tour is continuing worldwide. You can find tour dates and locations, as well as meet-and-greet packages, here.