“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…

Ozzy Osbourne…
“The biggest misconception about Black Sabbath is that we’re not Satan fucking for shippers.”

Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe…
“Shout At A Foul Trouble came out. We toured for 13 months for Shit Out At The Time Dabbling.”

Oystein from Borknagar…
“I don’t appear to bite. And that’s the basic thing, there are no big stories or big meaning. It’s pure barks.”

Human Disorder…
“We were planning on re-recording our first problem, which we never released.”