By Aaron Small

Much like a chameleon changes its colours, WEDNESDAY 13 is capable of switching musical styles. From the horror punk of FRANKENSTEIN DRAG QUEENS and his solo material, to outlaw country with BOURBON CROW and now classic glam with GUNFIRE 76, Wednesday certainly blazes his own sonic trail.

Gunfire 76 initially transpired while Wednesday 13 was touring The UK with THE CHELSEA SMILES. He befriended guitarist Todd Youth and the two quickly realized they shared a love of KISS, THE NEW YORK DOLLS and THE STOOGES. Shortly thereafter, the pair began writing together. “The UK part of that tour was the last two and a half weeks of a non-stop two and a half month tour, including the US and Japan,” recalls W13. “By that time, I was so burnt out and sick of myself. I was still grateful to be on tour, but I was sick of hearing those songs. During that time, I was saying, once I get off this tour, I’m going to put something new and fresh together for me, for my own sanity."

To maintain mental stability, W13 "started taking with Todd Youth about stuff. We’d known of each other over the years, but never really got to sit down, talk and hang out. I told him I was doing something new and he was interested in working with me on it. That’s basically where it started. We came home after the tour and for two months, we sent each other songs back and forth on the Internet. We collaborated on some music for the record” – Casualties & Tragedies, due in stores October 6th. “Unfortunately when it all came down to piecing it together as a band that I could actually go out and tour with, Todd’s scheduling didn’t allow him to be part of it. He did help write on the record, but that’s as far as it went, which was great ‘cause it got me out of my writer’s habit. He definitely brought some fresh stuff to it. I usually write by myself, so to have one other person come in and write was like, wow!”

The aforementioned road trek begins November 11th in Austin, Texas. “Being that this record is only 11 songs and I’m going to be touring on this for a while, I can’t just play 11 songs; there’ll definitely be stuff from the past. I’m not really going to do the horror rock songs. Over the years there have been other songs I’ve done like ‘Bad Things’ and ‘I Love To Say Fuck’ that have nothing to do with horror movies but still have that rock style. So I’ll be pulling out some of those as far as the live show goes. It’s a new band but you’ll still hear some classic stuff from the past. This Gunfire thing is something I’m going to be doing as my priority for probably the next year and a half or two years. I won’t be doing any Wednesday solo stuff.”

As for the moniker Gunfire 76… “We just came back from Japan. We had three days off in The UK before that last Wednesday tour started. I was in my hotel room in London, sitting at this little desk, just scribbling down names and different things. I don’t know where the Gunfire thing came from? I might have written down fire and gun and somehow it just came together. But the 76 thing is, I was born in 1976 and one of my fan-favourite songs is one I recorded with Frankenstein Drag Queens and Murderdolls, ‘197666’. The Gunfire thing, I was pissed off. I wanted to do something new and it lit a fire under my ass. Gunfire 76 just fit. When I wrote it down and looked at it, it looks cool and sounds cool.”

Recording Casualties & Tragedies was a studio session unlike any other Wednesday has experienced. “The recording was a lot different. The main thing was, I played guitar on this record just a little. Normally, I play almost everything. The last two records, I didn’t play bass on. I’ve been letting my studio guy, Jamie Hoover play on the records. He’s one of the most phenomenal musicians I’ve ever seen, he can play everything! When I would play bass on my older recordings, I’d do it like a guitar player would do it. A couple little cool things here and there, but nothing great. He took it to a whole new level. He really brought out a lot of these songs."

Then another cohort was added. "I brought my friend Roman in who played guitar with me in Bourbon Crow. He did all the guitar stuff, cause it’s definitely got more technical parts that I’m not capable of doing. Basically I just instructed these guys. It was like, play this. I didn’t want anything to sound even remotely metal. If somebody wouldn’t have done it in the ‘70s, we didn’t try it. We didn’t use any fancy guitar pedals. We used a wah pedal and miced an amp up. We kept it bare bones. We didn’t use any samples or anything like that.”

A little over a week and the album was done. “I think it was eight days total. We did the drums in not even a day and a half, ‘cause my drummer was only in town for a couple of days. From that point, I took it song by song. A lot of people record all their drum parts first, then all the guitar, then bass. We went song by song and I think this turned out to be one of the best sounding things I’ve ever put out. It was simple.”

Delving into the lyrics, ‘What Did You Expect’ appears to be about a broken-hearted groupie, with the line, “You weren’t the first and you won’t be the last, you were just something that was easy and fast.” “Touring has been my life since 2001/2002. You travel around and meet so many people. Out of all the great and wonderful people you meet all over the world, I make so many friends. But there’s always one or two people here and there, it’s just like, where did you come from? I remember some girl somewhere on some tour – it had nothing to do with me. It might not have even been my band; I just heard it on the side. Somebody said, ‘this chic’s crazy! She won’t leave me alone. She wants me to be her husband.’ My guitar tech Chris said, ‘well what did she expect'?"

Never one to let a good line pass him by, Wednesday, "wrote that down and I was listening to KISS – ‘Love ‘Em And Leave ‘Em’ when I came up with that song. In the ‘70s, you couldn’t say fuck on a record really, but KISS is basically saying fuck ‘em and leave ‘em. I’d never written a song about anything like that. I thought it would be kind of cool and the song definitely had a KISS vibe to it. So yeah, it’s kind of about the whole groupie thing, but also people that you meet and you’re nice to them, but then they expect that every single time you tour, you guys are best buddies. That’s an ode to the crazies. At the same time, there’s a lyric in the second verse that says, ‘A perfect place to go insane, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ Even though I’m tagging on it a little bit, I wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

Whether feeling homesick or dealing with a difficult promoter, W13 always finds something to ‘Get Me Through The Night’. “With that song in particular, there have been some nights that I just thought I was going to die. When you go on tour, especially the way I do it, I believe in the whole spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. Way before I started doing this, I grew up reading all the magazines: Hit Parader, Rip, Metal Edge. The more debauchery the bands caused, that was the kind of band I wanted to be in. With MÖTLEY CRÜE, I remember reading The Dirt and saying, wow, there’s no way this stuff could happen. Then I started touring and oh my god, this stuff really does happen!"

Fact can be stranger than fiction and "the ‘Get Me Through The Night’ song, that was a real thing that actually happened on that last tour. We were in Japan. It was a super long tour. We did the States and the travel over was rough. We finally get to Japan and everything was cool. We went non-stop. After the show we’d party ‘til the sun came up, wake up and travel to the next show. We went out with all the HANOI ROCKS guys to some bar and got really drunk. The very next day, we all showed up at sound check with sunglasses on saying, oh god, just get me through this fucking show. I remember being on stage that night. The intro started, we came out and in the middle of the first song my heart started beating really fast. I think I was having a panic attack. I started getting light headed. I thought I was going to pass out in front of 2,000 people in Osaka. I made it through the show and went back to my hotel, still saying, just get through this night, I won’t ever do it again. That song’s about being on tour and getting beat to death every night. Everybody thinks it’s easy and it is. But after a while, anything gets tiring and starts to wear on you. The travel alone – and we’re not shoe gazers. When we go out, we go out for blood.”

Writing about personal experiences as opposed to fictional horror icons such as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers proved cathartic for Wednesday. “That’s something I’ve tried to explain to people. I am 100% happy and proud of everything I’ve ever put out. I’ve been really fortunate to have so many releases. Stuff I released when I was a teenager that I thought no one would ever hear luckily got the light of day again with the Frankenstein Drag Queens. Everyone knows pretty much my whole musical history. That first album came out when I was 19. I was just out of school, still living with my parents, so I didn’t want to write about working a regular day job. I wrote about fun stuff on TV. Over the past six or seven years, I got to live and get out of that."

Diehards have no reason to worry as W13 "is still a huge fan of all that kind of stuff, but it gets to a point where, you put out 14 records about graveyards and zombies, you’ve got to pinch it off a little bit. I didn’t want to put another Wednesday 13 record out and not do what people expect. If I put a Wednesday 13 record out that didn’t have any type of horror element to it, it would be like, what the fuck? So I put another band together and I’ll ride this out for however long I want to. Then when I come back to doing the Wednesday stuff, I’ll do it full-throttle and probably more over the top than I ever have. It gives that a break and puts more life into it. For once I can go out and sing about stuff that I’ve lived and experienced, and that’s what this whole record is about.”