Dead in Hollywood

Album: Beyond the Valley of the Murderdolls (2002)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is based on a song called "Hooray for Horrorwood," which Murderdolls frontman Wednesday 13 recorded with his band Frankenstein Drag Queens from the Planet 13 and released in 2000. When he formed Murderdolls with Joey Jordison of Slipknot, Jordison came up with a new guitar riff to apply to the song. This caused a bit of confusion for Wednesday when he performed the song. He told us: "It's kind of weird, when I first heard it, because I was so used to playing it the original way, and it was very confusing in a live setting, because when I was doing these shows for the first time and playing in front of these giant audiences, it rained sometimes and I was all over the place. When I would get to the chorus I would sometimes think about the original song and mess the words up and sing something that didn't even make sense to the newer fans. But in my head, I thought I was singing it right. So I just had to sort of re-learn songs and change words around. It was kind of difficult at first before I knew how to do what I was doing."
  • Like many songs written by Wednesday 13, this one is about his love of horror movies. He's explaining that his favorite Hollywood characters are dead, namechecking Frankenstein, Dracula, Norman Bates, and Leatherface along the way. He even gets in a mention of Ed Wood, the eccentric director behind deliciously awful films like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

    This song makes more sense after Wednesday told us this anecdote from his childhood: "You could still go to the toy store and buy G.I. Joes, or right beside them they had the Remco Frankenstein, Creature of the Black Lagoon. I would buy them all - get them together - and I'd make G.I. Joe fight Dracula."

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