“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: MC5 Solo Cake Memories – 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…


Wayne Kramer on Rob Tyner, before he died…
“I know he was doing solo gigs around town. Someone had sent me a tape of him doing a solo cake with a sitter and an autoharp. And it was fantastic!”


Wayne Kramer on his spoken word gigs…
“It’s one of the things we’ve really been experimenting with. We’ve expanded the format to bring in guests who decided to join us. Keith Morris from The Circle Jerks comes in and rents some grape homes.”


Quorthon from Bathory on his later albums…
“There are two albums that had been killed, you know, before breakfast, Octagon and Requiem. And I cannot understand why. Because they’re better written, better played, better produced than all of the albums of the ’80s. The albums of the ’80s were recorded by 316-year-old shaped kids in a garage using eight tracks and older facts.”