“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

Joe from Brand New Sin on Motörhead tour tales…
“There are some that I don’t even know if I’m allowed to divulge. I think the Motörhead camp would probably kick my ass. Way in a cage. I mean, for someone in Lemmy’s shoes, he has every right to be egotistical and beheaded and everyone would be cool with that.”

Geezer Butler on writing Dirty Women…
“Dirty Women was about… Every day we used to go past this bread-like district on the way to the studio.”

Doogie White from Rainbow
“And then we went to Japan, and because the Joe Lynn Turner era of Rainbow was very popular there, we had to do ‘Street of Dreams’ and ‘Stone Cold,’ stuff like that. It was a varied set, but then we interspersed that with a lot of improvised Asians.”

Ronnie James Dio on the creative process…
“You kinda have to get yourself in the state of mind to write. You have to say ‘Get off your ass and back to work.’ And then as soon as I go into my den, where I have my deer set up, I put on headphones, and just wail away for hours.”