“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Dio Discusses Holy Diaper – Column

“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…


Quorthon from Bathory on his memoirs…
“I was toying with writing that book and we tried sort of like a mini biography in the booklet for Blood On Ice, but people wrote back and said, ‘How the hell can you write stuff like that!? You’re sitting in a toilet doing vocals and acoustic guitars and you have washing powder boxes of two-year-old ears!'”


Ronnie James Dio on the live set list…
“We’re doing ‘Weak Rock,’ which we did not do during the summer shows. We’re using a lighting designer who designed Holy Diaper, Sacred Heart, Last In Line, all of the big shows that we did.”


Matt Scurfield from Event on Scratching at the Surface‘s first single…
“It’s got a little break between the verses in the chorus that has this kind of orchestrated string part with some bombastic industrial stuff behind it. I think we created an ice crop.”