“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”

by Martin Popoff
illustrations by Jonathan Ian Mathers

Phil Lewis from L.A. Guns…
“I like a dead Mexican in my headphones and I’m ready to go.”

I interview rock guys two, three times a week. I use voice recognition software to transcribe these interviews. Works like this: I tape the phone conversation, then take the tape and speak my questions and their answers into a headset and voila, it’s a transcribed text file. It doesn’t always come out as planned though. Fun game: Repeat the wrongness out loud and you might be able to figure out what the guy actually said. Here are some of the more memorable miscues. More than a few of these gems ring truer than the actual words spoken…

Björn Gelotte from In Flames…
“I talked to Slipknot a little bit about this Tattooed The Cat Litter that they are doing. To bed we never got.”

C.C. Deville from Poison…
“I’m not a music critic. I enjoy the bands who are out with us. Send a Relic, we actually toured with back in 1986, and both of us opened for Loudness.”

Adrian Smith from Iron Maiden…
“So I went down to the studio, and apparently, he had been up drinking with Robert Palmer all night, because he lived next door to the studio. So proper polymer is sitting there and he’s dressing down, and they were both drinking tequila and they wanted me to work.”

Mark Reale from Riot…
“Rock City was quite live. We just went in there and played dead, with babble overdubs.”