“Alexi (Laiho) is totally cool,” says Wednesday 13, nestled comfortably amongst the finest sour mash Tennessee has to offer; of which there is no shortage upon his tour bus, parked outside The Rockpile in Toronto.
 
The reason we’re discussing the Children Of Bodom frontman is because he invited W13 to sing guest vocals on one of the bonus tracks contained on the newly released I Worship Chaos digipak, specifically a cover of The Plasmatics’ “Mistress Of Taboo”. “Honestly, at the time I didn’t really know Alexi,” admits Wednesday. “I know him pretty well now. Before this (Blood, Guts & Gore) tour started, we hung out at a horror convention where we both judged this horror beauty contest. But before that, I’d met Alexi through Joey (Jordison) on the last Murderdolls album. Just out of the blue I got an email saying, ‘do you want to sing on this Plasmatics cover?’ Hell yeah! It’s so cool because we sound like we’re from the same little bastard womb. I was really glad I got to be a part of that. Children Of Bodom is a super band and Alexi’s an awesome, phenomenal guitar player; just ridiculous.”
 
W13 is an equally big fan of The Plasmatics. “Oh, absolutely. After I saw Alice Cooper, the only thing that ever shocked me was when I found out about The Plasmatics – who blows up cars on stage? Who gives fellatio to a sledgehammer? And she (vocalist Wendy O. Williams) was easy on the eyes. I really love the music too – Beyond The Valley Of 1984, and New Hope For The Wretched – they’re awesome.”
 

 
Speaking of awesome, Wednesday 13 and Rayen Belchere – collectively known as Bourbon Crow – have given birth to their third little whiskey-drenched bundle of outlaw country tunes, aptly named Off The Wagon, On The Rocks. For this endeavour, the pair utilized a highly successful Kickstarter Campaign. The initial goal was $6,000. Within 48 hours, $10,000 had been raised; when all was said and done, the grand total surpassed $21,000. “We were shocked, and I have to attribute a lot of that to Rayen. He really, really worked his ass off and did the whole online thing with social media, which proves you can do it that way. I was involved in it too, but he really worked the fans. This was really crowd-funded. We asked the fans what songs they wanted to hear, and we wrote based upon that. It’s really a fan-record, and they’re going to get a really cool surprise with this release; they don’t even know. We put every bit of that money back into the band as far as merchandise. We’re actually getting Bourbon Crow wrestling belts – heavyweight partying champions. We’ll have those at whatever select shows we do here and there, cause we won’t actually be touring. It’ll be part of our meet and greet things for a photo-op. That’s what Bourbon Crow is, basically a drinking club that’s obsessed with Ric Flair.”
 
Commenting further on Bourbon Crow’s fundraising efforts, W13 reveals, “We had one fan, this kid Niklas, he bought the ultimate package. He flew us over to Sweden and we played a private party for his friends; there was maybe 30 people there. It was awesome! And we flew home the next day; we were there for 24 hours. It’s cool to have the freedom to go do that, and have fans that appreciate it. When we first did Bourbon Crow (their debut album, Highway To Hangovers, was released in 2006), I wanted to be silent. I didn’t want people to know it was me. Not that I was embarrassed by it, but then I was like, I don’t care if people know it’s me. It’s cool how the fans adapted to it. There was a few, when they heard country that were like, ‘what the fuck?’ But our fans are die-hard, and the Wednesday fans are the same. It’s a real cult following… I can’t explain… it’s my people.”
 
Bourbon Crow’s sophomore album, Long Way To The Bottom, saw the light of day in 2009. So why now, six years later, is the timing right for a return to acoustic alcoholic sing-alongs? “One of the main reasons is Rayen moved down the street from me. He literally lives a few blocks away; we can walk to each other’s apartments. It’s funny cause when we grew up, he lived in South Carolina and I lived in North Carolina; we were about 45 minutes apart. We’ve hung out more in the last six months than we had our whole lives. We just started talking about it again. He came over to my place and we played the old songs, started writing new stuff. Me and Rayen are such hometown dudes… we speak the same language. Our parents are so similar; he’s like a brother to me. It was like no time apart at all. We’re old friends; we picked up right where we left off.”
 
And the new stuff falls under a brilliant album title: Off The Wagon, On The Rocks. “Yes. I’ve had that title for a long time. I got drunk and forgot it, then I got drunk again and I remembered it. I knew it was good, so I wrote it down.” W13 delves further into the new music. “We have an official Ric Flair song (‘Nature Boy’). We have a song about the restaurant, Chick Fil A; it’s our favourite fast food place in America, but it’s closed on Sundays. It’s a Christian thing. One day we were talking about how we always want Chick Fil A on Sundays, why is that? So we did one of those Periscope videos, just hanging out and free-styling a song right there. All the fans thought that was awesome, so we ended up writing that song and putting it out. That is a fan-requested, made up on Periscope song. It just shows how you can be interactive with your fans and do something cool that we both enjoy. There’s one called ‘Wish Upon A Bar’. This is a cool record; it’s a good mix of both albums (that came before it).” Once again, Wednesday and Rayen split lead vocals pretty much 50/50. “Yeah, there’s 11 tracks on it. He sings five, I sing five, and we try to harmonize on one together in a drunken holler at the end; we’re not so successful but it gets the point across.”
 

 
This past summer, Bourbon Crow put out a digital-only release, Demos That Didn’t Quite Make It. Is that going to be available on CD? “I don’t know? Maybe, eventually, we still have a ton of other demos we haven’t even touched yet. A lot of the songs on the new album are songs that were suggested for Long Way To The Bottom. There was a couple we didn’t use for that, so we went back and revisited them, and wondered why the hell we didn’t record them? That shows the test of time. You listen to a demo, and that song’s still good after so long, it’s worthwhile doing. That’s how the last Murderdolls record was.”
 
As the evening’s W13 show in Toronto draws ever closer, we’re all anxious to Come Out And Plague. But before we do, Wednesday shares a secret. “I think we’re going to record tonight and tomorrow night here, and we may put that out as a live album by the end of the year. The sound guy here is so fucking awesome! He knows our sound. We do sound check and he plays our music back to us after; it sounds great. So we’re talking about doing Live From The Rockpile In Canada, and making that our live album before Christmas.” Toronto is the only city in North America that Wednesday plays two consecutive concerts in. “Well, Steve (Hoeg) is such an awesome promoter. He gets people in here both nights, and he’s such a fan too. I love it here, and they treat us like gold. If we could be treated like this every day, none of us would ever complain at all – about anything. It sounds great, the people are great. It’s so cool to come just a few hours out of The States and it’s literally another fucking world of fans; they’re so rabid here! These shows are usually the best shows of the tour.”
 
Before we disembark the Astro Psycho Space Vehicle, W13 teases and tantalizes with one simple sentence. “I’m already working on the next Wednesday album, and I’ve got such an awesome idea – but I’ll tell you off the record.”
 

 

(Top photo by: Aaron Small)