They said secret messages in the song encouraged them to take their lives. And the only way to hear these messages was to play the record backwards. Bryan: The ability to capture and preserve sound also gave people the ability to manipulate it. Bryan wrote about the history of backmasking for Atlas Obscura. Bryan: When people talk about backmasking in the audio world it's generally considered a deliberate recording process where a sound, whether it's an instrument or a voice is recorded and played backward and then placed somewhere into the forward mix of a song.
Bryan: Sometimes that can be obvious [SFX: music being played in reverse] , you're hearing a song and then you hear some sort of weird garbled reverse version. You can kind of make it out. Sometimes it's more hidden in a track, but that's the basic idea of backmasking. But their most famous recording has no backmasking in it. Bryan: It's… about a boy who's taking out a girl on a date in his car. Bryan: During the song, there's two instances of what sound like really garbled yelling, the first instance is the girlfriend's father….
Bryan: Supposedly the message is, "Now look it here cats, stop running these records backwards. They have to walk home, show up late, and dad yells again. Bryan: The song A few years after Car Trouble, it was the Beatles who really brought backmasking to the forefront of music culture.
Bryan: The Beatles were recording 's Revolver. Bryan: If you listen to it all the way through there's sort of this ending coda. Bryan: And it's just basically a reverse of the first line of the song. Bryan: Bands were actually, legitimately doing this. They were inserting messages, often they were just reversed lyrics in their own songs but in general fans of rock and roll music were aware of this, at least the sort of geeky audiophile ones.
So far this all sounds pretty tame, but it was this next song that was spark that ignited the initial flames of panic. Bryan: In there was a radio DJ named Russ Gibb and he gets a phone call from a student at Eastern Michigan University and the student claims that…there's this rumor about Paul McCartney, he's been dead actually and replaced by some strange doppelganger Paul McCartney who looks and sounds just like him but is not the real Paul McCartney. Gibb hears the phrase, "Turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man…".
Bryan: So Gibb freaks out and begins telling all of his listeners about what he calls sort of this great Beatles coverup and more and more people start listening for clues and low and behold they found them. Including there was another alleged backmasked message, "Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him.
Keep in mind, this was at a time when people were already worried about subliminal messages. Bryan: There was this renewed interest in subliminal manipulation and this is largely the result of books. They claimed basically that the general public was being manipulated by ad agencies.
The idea was that hidden messages could get into your subconscious. Once planted there, they could influence the way you think. Bryan: Supposedly certain images would be inserted on the front box of cigarettes or you could make out naked women in the bubbles in the gin ad in a magazine. These subliminal manipulations were not limited to visuals. Many believed these backwards messages in songs could also control the way people think and act.
To be more blunt, many people believed that backmasking could make you worship the devil. Bryan: There had always been this idea that rock and roll was the devil's music [SFX: Fade in devil voice under Bryan] and once certain conservative pastors What these pastors found shocked them. Satanic messages were supposedly hidden all over rock albums. Christ you're infernal. It is said we're dead men.
He organized his own religion. Apparently, there are examples of this all over seventies and eighties rock music. Bryan: There was a famous pastor, Gary Greenwald, who actually started a sort of backmasking tour where he would travel around the United States and even went up to Canada and would hold basically what are record listening parties where he would play these things for the audience pointing out every time what the backmasked message supposedly was and people would freak out.
Often they would be followed by album burning parties or whatever He also had a television show briefly where he would do these sorts of things as well. Gary Greenwald: Is it possible that this could be preparing us subconsciously through backward masking to accept a child that is coming that is none other than the son of Satan? Let me play that for you backwards and you tell me who the child is. By this point, many had gone into full blown Satanic Panic.
So, obviously, the next step was for the government to put a stop to it. Bryan: Starting in the early 80s, you saw an uptick in actual legislation aimed at combating backmasking. Bryan: He gathered all these witnesses, he gathered a person who purportedly was a neuroscientist who explained how these backward messages were influencing or could influence kids who didn't necessarily play the albums backward and then it kind of just snowballed.
The call for local legislation turned into a cry for national laws. Now, it was time for the US Congress to get involved. Bryan: People were actively introducing legislation and trying to pass bills that if not outlawed the practice, mandated warning signs on all the albums that supposedly had these nefarious messages on them.
Rock bands and producers claimed the backwards messages were completely and totally unintentional. Bryan: Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots.
Bryan: Led Zeppelin's record label issued one statement based on the backmasking controversy which was, "Our turntables only rotate in one direction. So when tragedy struck in Reno Nevada in , the music industry was already under a microscope for backmasking. And even though none of these laws actually passed, the Judas Priest trial in had everyone in the music industry watching.
If the band lost, it would set a precedent that anyone can be sued for backwards combinations of sounds creating an unintentional message. Plus, the brain science behind backmasking In the late 80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing. So we just kept doing more silent movie scores and branching out to other cities. Eventually it eclipsed our rock shows and we decided to make silent film accompaniment our main focus.
A lot of the early traditional folk, bluegrass and gospel songs were really songs of struggle. Coal miner tunes, protest songs, music from the Great Depression etc. The greats have always been fearless in that way. People admire that kind of artistry. Country has always been more than cute lyrics and rhinestone suits. Rock like M. Words: Chris Krovatin. Svalbard in The K! Previous Entry Next Entry. Follow Us. Just remember, you may never want to dress like a Deadhead, but pass the bottle around with a few of them, and you might discover that you and they share a mutual pal.
Quite the opposite: the track is all about being a cartoonish thrasher living their best life. In the time-honoured tradition of bluesman and rumoured satanic disciple Robert Johnson, Eagles Of Death Metal crafted a syrupy, good-timey tale of allegiance to the dark one that just makes you want to clink glasses in a humid dive bar.
The true beauty of Kiss The Devil is that rather than be overly complicated or ignorant about Satan, the band just went super countrified and old-school, professing their love for the Devil in a chain gang chant. Remember, Hell is hot, but all your favourite musicians are there. Who else could but Rob Zombie could write what can only be described as a satanic jock jam? Lucifer Rising is as bombastic as any goal song played in a sports arena, with lyrics that glorify Satan the way one would a megachurch pastor.
But though fast, intense, and hard-hitting, the songs is also a buttload of fun, the kind of track you blast when you see the lights of Vegas in the distance and stomp on the gas of your car. This is the theme song to anyone who wants to live life in a leather vest with no shirt on underneath.
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