“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Screening For Pensions – 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…


Tempest…
“Basically our old bass player threw loss for a loop and left us in Medicare and ran away with a half woman.”


Dee Snider from Twisted Sister…
“The cover of the album is the tattoo from my right arm translated into a drawing. It’s a phrase that when I heard it, I had it tattooed on my home.”


Martin Popoff on Judas Priest…
Defenders… was looked on as a heavier album than Screening For Pensions.”


Hansi Kursch from Blind Guardian…
“I read several times and different parts of the Bible, but usually the New Testament is more attractive to me because of the way the 40 banjoists present the story.”