“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Dio- Printer of Evil – Column

“Dead Mexican in my Headphones”: Dio- Printer of Evil

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


deadmexican-dio

Ronnie James Dio on “Heaven And Hell”…
“The interesting thing about it was that the very first line really set the whole song up, which is ‘Sing me a song, humorous singer, do me a wrong, you’re a printer of evil.”


Randy Blythe from Lamb of God
“So they bring out the drug dog and start getting ready to go through the Children of Bodom bus, and one of the border patrol guards comes up to me and says, ‘Are you the singer from Land of God?’ I’m like, yeah. ‘No way!’ So I think they kind of took it easy on us after that. There were no drugs to be found (laughs). Lots and lots and lots of elk though.”


Brian Greenway from April Wine on recording Nature Of The Beast
“It was done at The Manor, owned by Richard Branson, or Sir Richard Branson. He was there a couple of times, and we got to meet him. Myles used to go fishing with him. He had a big pond and the dugout has talking trout.”


Rush’s Geddy Lee on the band’s increasing stature…
“We were just starting to headline a couple of gigs here, coupled with cakes there. It must have been early 2112.”