It’s always interesting to think of what could have been. From Dave Navarro turning down the Guns N’ Roses gig to Sharon Osbourne cutting Alex Skolnick’s Ozzy Osbourne career short after just one gig, the guitar world has plenty of tales of player what-ifs.
Now, Wednesday 13 – AKA Joseph Poole – has added another story to the pile: Children of Bodom shred master Alexi Laiho nearly joined Murderdolls.
Speaking the Guitar World in a soon-to-be-published interview, Poole says the late Finnish electric guitar great was once positioned to be part of a three-pronged lineup that would pit him alongside both Poole himself and Slipknot's Joey Jordison.
Poole, who formed the supergroup with the late Slipknot powerhouse, says Laiho, who passed in 2020, was in line to join for Muderdolls’ second album. His talents would have brought an extra level of shred to the band, but it sadly never came to pass.
“Here's something people don't know,” Poole tells GW. “At the beginning stages of the second album [2010’s Women and Children Last], Alexi Laiho from Children Of Bodom was going to be the new guitarist in the band.
“It would have been Joey, me, and Alexi... and damn, that guy could shred. That was almost a thing. Can you imagine what that would have sounded like?”
Laiho made his name with melodic death metal superstars Children of Bodom, producing a raft of shred-laden studio albums that, along the way, saw him unite with ESP for a V-style signature guitar. He was also a part of the Dimmu Borgir/Bodom/In Flames supergroup, Sinergy, and has guested on songs from Marty Friedman and, fittingly here, Wednesday 13.
Poole adds that neither he nor Jordison were shredders, but that “we both wanted to shred”.
“Joey wanted to be as crazy on guitar as he was on drums,” he says, and the Bodom man would have solved that issue for the guitarists.
During Bodom’s heyday in the early-mid-’00s, Laiho was considered one of modern metal’s foremost players, his love for Eddie Van Halen, black metal, and classic music a potent tripartite. In 2004 he was ranked in Guitar World's Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time list, which rated him as one of the fastest shredders on the planet.
“I was 10 years old and watching MTV when the video for Steve Vai’s For the Love of God came on. That was the moment I knew I had to start playing,” Laiho once told Guitar World of his guitar journey. “Not only did it blow me away, it also opened up a whole new world for me.” Across a scintillating legacy, he would go on to conquer that world.
Jordison, meanwhile, passed in 2021. Poole also reveals talks about a third Murderdolls record had taken place beforehand.
“He messaged me a month before he passed,” Poole recalls. “It was a funny text about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's a line in the film where someone says, 'I have this knife,' and he suggested writing a song about that. That was the last time we spoke. I'm convinced if he was still here, it would have come out.”
For other ‘what could have been stories’, there’s a raft to choose from. Gus G turned down approaches from Megadeth and Machine Head while he was in Ozzy’s band, and Kiki Loureiro suggested Megadeth should have brought back Marty Friedman when he stepped down from the band.
Yngwie Malmsteen says he nearly joined Kiss and UFO, and Ritchie Kotzen nearly joined Nine Inch Nails, but one specific reason changed Trent Reznor's mind.
Guitar World’s full interview with Wednesday 13 will be published online very soon.
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