“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: King on the Throne – Column

“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


deadmex-kingdiamond

King Diamond
“‘Into The Coven’ was another song that had a different title. We wrote new songs and all this stuff and diarrhea rode some of the lyrics to fit me better.”


Jens Johansson on the changed Yngwie…
“I think he’s a lot calmer than he used to be. He doesn’t drink the way he used to drink. I mean, we were all horrible, but he was the worst one. But the other Swedish guys in the band weren’t saints either. I think he got blamed for a lot of the stuff that we did, actually. People would say, ‘Yeah, it was Angry and his fucking band!'”


Martin Popoff to Gary Moore…
“What were your favorite albums from the heavy metal solo era, Victims Of The Future? Camcorders Of Power?”


Roger Earl from Foghat on Ted Nugent…
“I remember one show we did last summer out in Montana, a big festival. Ted was headlining and we were second on the bill. After we got off, Ted comes into the dressing room, he sat down and had a class of one with us and he was just telling stories.”