“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”

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…

by Martin Popoff
illustrations by Félix LaFlamme

Martin Popoff to Zakk Wylde…
“Do you know what back-up act you’re going to beat with Ozzy overseeing?”

Rick Wartell from Trouble on the tour for the first album…
“They sent us out with Slayer to play four or five shows on our way back to Chicago, and that was pretty much it. But playing with the Slayer crowd, they were little basement gigs, really at that point. They weren’t trying that many people and we weren’t drying anyone either.”

Warren Haynes on recording The Deep End Volume1 and Volume 2…
“On ‘Time To Confess,’ I saw that one night really late in the studio thinking that I was going to go back later and lease it. But when we listened to it we thought, well, it’s kind of got a cool vibe because my boy sounds real tired.”

David Sylvian on Camphor…
“Well, you know, it’s a compilation so it covers a lot of ground in that sense. I mean, the compilation itself is far more dynamic than I originally intended to be. I thought it would be in mourning recipes.”