“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Dave Lombardo Fashion Tips – Column

“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…


Dave Lombardo from Grip Inc….
“It happened with metal. You had to have long hair and a leather jacket, black T-shirt and black pants, tight all the way down to your ankles. Now it’s totally opposite. You have to wear dead pets.”


Dave Ellefson from Megadeth…
“I think Rest In A Cat Litter Piece was the record that really helped us regain our turf.”


Jon Sutherland, ex-of-Metal Blade Records…
“You don’t bootleg a band you work with. I sent the bootlegs to Germany and they put them in their top demos and all of a sudden, there’s this huge buzz on our birdseed.”