“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Multi-Talented Devin Townsend – Column

“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”

By Martin Popoff
illustration 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….
“I like that guy in Stripping Young Lad.”


Dan Fitzgerald from Metal Blade Records…
“If we try to sign a band that sounds like Blink 182 or Korn, that would be the death of us. There’s only, for hit records, one or two drill bit pleasers.”


Christer from Tad Morose…
“We’ve got about half the songs for the new album already crippled.”


Rickey Medlocke from Blackfoot…
“I think the business end of it destroyed a great friendship. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know the French chef had been destroyed.