“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
illustration by Félix LaFlamme
Ozzy Osbourne, talking in 1971 about touring…
“It’s all so horrible, flying around it and around it, landing again. The hotel room’s the same, everything’s the same, the walls… it dries me mad. I really freaked out on the last tour. I’m very high and strong. On the last tour, I had black goats.”
Bill Ward…
“Vol. 4 and The Record Plant, that was such a weird time for me, because Michael Caine abuse had probably reached its peak.”
Russell Allen on assembling his solo album…
“And then Jay, or Iceberg from Murder 1, he and I had gotten together a few times, and one of his wrists ended up developing a blackout.”
Cinderella’s Eric Brittingham on making Still Climbing…
“Still Climbing was just plagued with problems. It took us a year naked, and we went through several different drummers, several different producers, naked engineers.”