By Ron Evans
MATURE CONTENT AHEAD. YE BE WARNED.
I was that kid. The one with the super religious mom that smashed his KISS records because everyone knew it stood for Knights In Satan’s Service. Honestly, when I was 8 I didn’t know whether that was true or not. I just knew I liked “God Of Thunder” and “Shout It Out Loud.” I suppose I was drawn to the dark and bloody imagery of the band in the same way I read Tales From the Crypt comics and watched horror films, but I instinctively knew these dudes weren’t worshipping (or even mentioning) Satan. It was a shtick. Ditto for Alice Cooper. Who still beheads himself on stage even though he’s a self-proclaimed born-again Christian these days.
A similar story occurred with the band W.A.S.P. When some TV preacher announced that the name was an acronym for We Are Satan’s Preachers, smashy smashy went my W.A.S.P records. At least this one was a little more buyable because W.A.S.P. did sometimes sing about the devil, like in their rather pretty metal ballad “Sleeping In The Fire.” Lead singer Blackie Lawless also now identifies as a born-again Christian. You hear that ma?
I can’t really blame my mom here though. And maybe there’s no one entity to blame for the hilariously misguided efforts against these kinds of bands during the 70’s and 80’s. My mom was simply listening to what the pastors told her. She didn’t want her boy to roast like a weeny over an eternal campfire. But it all just caused so many unnecessary fights in our household and likely the households of millions when we all could have just agreed to disagree on what tunes we wanted to listen to and call it a day. But no. Churches needed to be filled. Books needed to be sold. Votes needed to be won. Examples had to be made.
Enter the famous 1990 backmasking trial of Judas Priest. Long the target of many puritanicals with too much time on their hands, Priest was accused of putting the hidden messages “try suicide” and “do it” on their “Stained Class” album. Two young men, Raymond Belknap, 18, and James Vance, 20 were stoned and drunk and had been listening to the album for six straight hours when they agreed to shoot themselves with a fucking shotgun. Belknap died but Vance survived and later claimed the record had hidden messages telling them to… “do it.” Something that you’d assume would be thrown out of court before it even went to trial, but nay. Frontman Rob Halford’s lawyer actually told him he should brace for the possibility of prison time on the other side of the trial. For real. Fortunately the judge dismissed the charges and that didn’t happen, but good lord.
One of the more surreal moments of the Judas Priest trial. Frontman Rob Halford singing his lyrics under oath.
Adding fuel to the hell fire, in the early 80’s televangelist Paul Crouch claimed Led Zeppelin put satanic messages in their ubiquitous staple “Stairway To Heaven.” Allegedly working in “Here’s to my Sweet Satan” among other spicy tributes.. The band essentially called Crouch a dipshit with too much time on his hands.
Speaking of too much time on your hands, Styx was also accused of a purposeful backwards salute to Great Red One in their song Snowblind. “Satan moves through our voices” in this case.
Now, when you have the text of these alleged evil messages interpreted right in front of you as you listen...yeah maybe you can kinda hear it. But that’s a big key in the whole backwards messaging phenomenon. Suggestion and inference.
Pseudoscientist David John Oates made a name for himself on the Art Bell show in the late 90’s with his Reverse Speech studies. Oates claimed that humans send out subconscious energy in the form of backwards messages while we talk, regardless of what our forward words are saying. Yeah, it’s a doozy of a theory but I’ll be honest - 22 year old me was pretty intrigued listening in to the clips he’d play. Bill Clinton saying something like “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and backwards you’d get “she was a fun one.” That’s a paraphrase but Oates had tons of Clinton “reversals” and they made for great late night listening. But again, inference was key here. Oates would always tell you what the reverse message was before he’d play it. Occasionally Art would have Oates play one without the prompt and see if he could guess what the message was. Every time, without fail...he couldn’t. And neither could I.
Here’s a “best-of” Donald Trump reversals to get a sense of what Oates is jazzed about.
Again, entertaining stuff - especially that Hillary email one. But, ultimately Oates and his research haven’t been taken seriously by the scientific community at large. Most detractors call it a mixture of pareidolia - the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist, as in considering the moon to have human features - and hundreds of obsessive hours of sifting through backwards dialog to cherry pick the occasional “captures.” It’s worth noting that the CIA did find the idea of Reverse Speech (which is trademarked) interesting enough to look into it. But those papers have all been since declassified so it seems they won’t be using the technique for reverse espionage anytime soon.
I recall reading that power metal group Dio’s logo spelled Devil upside down, and honestly...it kinda does. But as you can see in the photos here, other Old English style typefaces have a similar effect.
Iron Maiden cover artist Derek Riggs was encouraged by the band to put secret gags (mostly Monty Python type inside jokes) all through their album designs just to be silly but were accused of brainwashing the youth with subliminal messages. So, a lot of this was just made up from fear, misunderstandings, assumptions and yes...boredom.
Satan must be a nerd. Play ‘spot the jokes’ and sci-fi references with the cover of Maiden’s Somewhere in Time LP.
Of course, then you have the bands that actually claim to be Satanic. Many of the Norweigan Black Metal bands for examp. But...that’s sort of a different topic than the pop-metal that got the bulk of the Satanic Panic shitstorm. Ozzy Osbourne never bit the head off a live bat as a sacrifice to Satan. He did bite the head off a live dove at a record label party while high as the fucking moon. As a gag. A sick gag, sure. But again, a slight retelling of the story and you go from “high as shit” to “Satanic as shit.”
I always heard the story of Alice Cooper offering up animal sacrifices in the name of Satan at his shows. Now, there was a rather unfortunate incident involving poultry once. Some maniac decided to bring a live chicken to the concert and threw it up on stage. Alice was puzzled by the display but grabbed the confused bird and tossed it back out into the audience assuming chickens could fly. They cannot. The bird was ripped apart by frenzied show attendees and its innards were tossed around on stage. There is even footage of Alice throwing gizzards back at the audience. The whole thing happened quickly and seemingly accidentally. But again, high concert goers out of their mind and shock-musicians that are confused by how birds work do not equate to Satanism. But you gotta admit, it fit an agenda.
Eventually this madness started to go away for several reasons. One, I think the powers that be decided to focus more of their efforts on the fledgeling gangsta rap scene than on the Halloween pageantry of classic heavy-metal. Two, and I hope this is the biggest factor, we stopped being so silly. Not that these stories don’t still prevail. They do. But just like the PMRC labels on explicit rap albums sold a ton of rap records, nothing sold more heavy metal albums than angry parents, easily frightened politicians and pastors on a mission from God. I believe that much like my mom, a lot of these people had good intentions. But...isn't that what the road to Hell is paved with?