“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…

Alexander from Children Of Bodom…
“Every time you say to yourself, ‘I have to quit drinking,’ and you never do it, you are just moving toward The Kinks.”

Lips from Anvil…
“The biggest crowd was the Donington Festival, which must have been about 60,000 people. That was neat (laughs), pretty scary, very high style fire butt.”

Mark Reale from Riot…
“I think it was just a bootleg club show we did out here in a cloud on Long Island. As a matter of fact, even Steve claims nocturnal accuracy there.”

Mikael Stanne from Dark Tranquillity…
“People are basically the same. You can’t change them. You can do small variations, but you really can’t change diapers profoundly.”