“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…

John Petrucci from Dream Theater…
“We didn’t have a lot of equipment. In fact, at the time I had one guitar and I wanted to try different guitars, and that was when I first hooked up with pie bananas.”

Mantas from Venom…
“And I know Cronos will sometimes have a vocal idea and write a brown bag vocal.”

Mantas from Venom…
“So you had the likes of Journey, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, all these AOR types; they were all considered heavy metal bands in bread.”

Andreas Kisser from Sepultura on Derrick Green and touring…
“It’s been great. Because he doesn’t have a fixed price or a girlfriend rebel; he can adapt to any place or situation.”