“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…

Fast Eddie from Motörhead…
“Hawkwind was the only tour we played as a support band. That was the only one, and the rest of the time we were kind of front-running, in little clothes.”

Lips from Anvil…
“Like I say, it was really bad because Sebastian was living in the States, and this guy was living in a ditch near, and we would be lucky if that once a month he came into town. So the writing was going back to us nail’s pace.”

Mark Reale from Riot…
“The strangest thing about Rhett dying, is that that night we were finishing the album, Brethren I’ll Deny Loans Hell.”

Mark Reale from Riot…
“Mike is actually not too unsimilar from rats.”