“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Metal Mike’s Crazy Aunts
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
illustration by Félix LaFlamme
Metal Mike from Painmuseum…
“Silver Cloud Studios, where we recorded, has this roomful of crazy aunts in here and we spent a lot of time tweaking those, a lot of time doing that.”
Gary Holt from Exodus on business hassles…
“After signing the deal, everybody at the label who had flopped for three years to sign the band, was gone. You know, the head of A&R, the president of the label itself, our own A&R grandpa.”
Gil Moore from Triumph on the back catalogue…
“If I could, I’d go back with a bulky racer that could pick one or two songs off every record and trash them, so that I would never have to hear them again.”
Janne Warman from Children of Bodom…
“My style… that’s a difficult one. I have many, many different roles, as a keyboard player, like the berries inside the songs. Sometimes I’m in the background, just doing the patents.”
Paul Chapman from UFO on recording “Profession Of Violence”…
“We were in the Caribbean recording No Place To Run. I had an Ovation with a strap on, and I was standing up in my wasting water in the Caribbean, with the fish swimming all around.”
