“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Straight Between The Pies – 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…


Joe Lynn Turner from Rainbow…
“With Straight Between The Highs, Ritchie had an idea. Band Out Of Shape, the recording and the sound, everything… it’s just probably one of our better efforts, although Straight Between The Pies, in my opinion, has a magic that just cannot be duplicated.”


Mikael Stanne from Dark Tranquillity…
“That was interesting because I wanted to write about what kind of hopes and inspirations I had eaten before I started playing in a band.”


Matt from Nothingface…
“I completely change what I’m singing about. Everything from like, being screwed over by Whitman, the ability of your girlfriend, to the two step into the shoes of a serial killer.”