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When you’ve been toiling in the underground circuit for years, desperately trying to make your rock star dreams come true, and then it finally happens for you, the last thing you want is for it all to be snatched away within a year. But that’s the situation that Wednesday 13 found himself in when touring for the Murderdolls' hugely successful breakthrough 2002 album, Beyond The Valley Of The Murderdolls, wrapped up.
“I was nervous, I was excited, I didn’t really know what to do,” Wednesday recalls. “I knew that I definitely didn’t want to go back to my day job though. I knew 100% I was going to do everything I could not to do that.”
The reason for his concern: any Murderdolls activity was, and always would be, at the mercy of his bandmate Joey Jordison’s commitments with Slipknot.
“When I first came off the road, the carrot was dangled,” smiles Wednesday. “It was, ‘You only have to wait eight months, Slipknot is only going to tour for six months, then we’ll be back’. Well it soon became apparent that wasn’t going to happen. I waited and waited.”
There was a real chance that he could have become, in his words, “just a guy that did something in one of those Slipknot side projects”. But rather than fade into obscurity, Wednesday decided to take a leap of faith and start a solo career, and over 20 years later it’s still going strong - thanks in part to a song that he wrote in his bedroom whilst he was figuring out what to do with himself: I Walked with a Zombie.
I knew that I definitely didn’t want to go back to my day job
Wednesday 13
“I just went into my basement and wrote and wrote and wrote,” he says. “I literally wrote what would become my first album in that period.”
Wednesday had songs, but he still wasn’t sure what project they would eventually be attached to. In 1996, he’d formed Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13. That band released four albums, but had fallen apart somewhat acrimoniously in 2002, around the time he headed off to Murderdolls land. Wednesday thought about forming a new band, but there was a voice in his head that was pushing him towards going solo.
“I had doubts in the beginning, for sure,” he says. “I didn’t know if I wanted to call it 'Wednesday 13'. I had a band name in my head at one point, it had the word funeral in it...that’s all I can tell you. But something in the back of my mind said, ‘Dude, if you put this band together, within a month, this guy will quit and that guy will quit, and then you’re back to square one. If you just call it Wednesday 13, you’ll never quit the band.’ Here I am, 20 years later.”
It was a concept that he was still grappling with, until, just to pass the time, he found himself grabbing an acoustic guitar and heading over to the UK to play some shows, performing songs by Murderdolls and his first band, Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, for his new fanbase.
“Every night was packed out,” he excitedly proclaims. “We completely sold out and the fans loved it. I went home and I thought, ‘You know, maybe I could just do a Wednesday 13 solo album’. I felt like it was something I should at least try and put out.”
Decision made to become a fully-fledged solo artist, there was now the issue of finding a label to release his work. Unbeknownst to himself initially, Wednesday was actually still signed to Roadrunner Records, the label that had released Beyond The Valley….
“I had been down in my basement writing songs and I found out that I was still an artist on Roadrunner,” he tells us. “So I went to my A&R guy and said, ‘Hey, would you put out a Wednesday 13 record?’ He said ‘Wednesday, I like you... but I don’t think we’re going to put your record out.”
My A&R guy said, ‘Wednesday, I like you...but I don’t think we’re going to put your record out.
Wednesday 13
But there’s nothing like the sense of FOMO to kick a record label into action, and within a week of passing on the idea of releasing the debut Wednesday 13 solo album, Roadrunner performed a huge U-turn.
“I shopped it out to other labels and one came back within a week and said they’d like to release it,” he recalls. “I went to Roadrunner to say, ‘Hey, can you guys release me please, I’m signing to someone else to put this record out. and they said, ‘Oh... really? Well...now we do want you! We’ll put your record out!’ (laughs) I got that deal, just from them being fearful of someone else taking it.”
It was a situation that Wednesday was happy with, rubber-stamping his decision to go solo in the first place.
“I wanted to be on Roadrunner, I loved my team there,” he says with a shrug. “It was an accomplishment! It gave me a life too, because it showed I wasn’t just Joey’s friend, you know what I mean?”
It was all set up, but Wednesday needed an anthem to showcase this new solo direction, a song that would prove that he could make horror-themed rock’n’roll even without the rest of Murderdolls. It came in the shape of I Walked with a Zombie, a song that mixed his love of old school horror themes with fantastically rough-sounding glammy, punk metal riffs, a sneering, sleazy vocal with plenty of hooks and, the cherry on the top of the cake, some poppy hand claps.
“Zombie… was one of the first songs that I wrote in those sessions,” Wednesday remembers. “I was literally just goofing around in my room playing that ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da’ open string and the riff just came to me. Then I just started singing ‘Zombie... Zombie!’ over the top of it. It came really easily.It wasn’t even written about the movie [1943’s I Walked With A Zombie] necessarily, a zombie voodoo priest thing. It’s a cool movie, but that’s not where it was inspired. It just flowed out of me.”
Usually, artists will say they knew they had a special song when it was played to their record label for the first time, or when they saw the reaction from an audience when playing it live. But, for Wednesday, he knew he had something with I Walked With A Zombie when it was sang back to him by someone much closer to home.
“My daughter was like, three years old at the time, and I made the demo of it, and she started singing it,” he says with a laugh. “I realised, ‘A little kid is singing this, how many people tell me that some of the first songs they ever sang was something their parents were playing!’ So, something simple like that is kind of when I knew that this was a catchy song.”
Thanks to his daughter, Wednesday had decided on his first solo single. Riding the crest of the Murderdolls wave and delivering a proper earworm, it was always destined to succeed. But the now iconic video, featuring Wednesday inserting himself into scenes from the legendary Night Of The Living Dead movie, made I Walked With A Zombie a real crossover smash.
“At the time, that sort of green screen technology wasn’t as easy. You can do that on your phone now,” Wednesday says of the making of the video. “On an iPhone you can flip something and have it in 10 minutes. But for us it was one hour per second to edit; it was the most time-consuming thing to get that little thing right. We thought we were on the brink of breaking technology, it seemed like we did something futuristic at the time. It’s funny: the cheapest part was actually getting the footage!”
Released as the first single from his debut album Transylvania 90210: Songs Of Death, Dying And The Dead, I Walked With A Zombie launched Wednesday 13 as a solo artist. The album’s subsequent success – it hit number 34 on the US Heatseekers chart – showed that he could make it all on his own. As Wednesday is quick to point out, it’s been 20 years and 47 band members since then, and he’s still going strong.
“Still all these years later, when that riff comes in you see the excitement in people’s faces,” Wednesday says of the song’s legacy. “They actually get ready to do the handclaps. It’s funny. That’s its legacy; it’s a crowd pleaser. It represents who I am and what I do.”
Mid Death Crisis is out now via Napalm. Wednesday 13 plays Bloodstock Festival in August
