“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

Leslie West from Mountain on the DVD…
“There’s a lot of backstage stuff, how I met my fiancé, how Corky and me came up with “Mississippi Queen,” and there’s some stuff from Woodstock. We found it with seven cameras. You can watch it with four ankles or on a big screen.”

Zakk Wylde on Roy Thomas Baker and No Rest For The Wicked…
“Well, Roy had nothing to do with the record. I’ve got no fucking sympathy for him. He treated me like a fucking cocktail space sucker, and I was trying to do the best job I could.”

Devin Townsend on progressive rock…
“My definition of progressing, I would imagine, is more apt for the term as opposed to doing something that’s been done. I mean, I really like Trilogy by Angie Malmsteen, but I’ve heard it copied so many times.”

Joe Lynn Turner on “Death Alley Driver”…
“On Highway 9, what happens is, that’s the main thoroughfare and it’s mainly for woolly college recruiters; it’s traveled very heavily by the big rakes.”