“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Godsmack’s Janet Jackson – 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…


Shannon Larkin on the Godsmack tour…
“You know, I tell you, the first ten weeks, we did arenas in America. We had bigger production and a Janet Jackson…”


Joe Lynn Turner on The Voices of Classic Rock…
“I certainly didn’t suspend it, but it seems like Charlie Schmidt, he just dropped the ball. It’s almost like he got involved in this bull race down in Jacksonville, this mock cop race, and I haven’t played a gay in I don’t know how long.”


Sammy Duet from Goatwhore on the new album…
“These songs all have some pretty weird stuff in them. As far as a departure for us, it’s just the concentration on not trying to play fastball baton.”