September 26, 2024 • 48 mins
A greatest hit of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s came when the metal band Judas Priest was put on trial for the suicides of two teens. While the case was preposterous – based on alleged hidden satanic messages in the music – it arose from a real tragedy.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just rocking out
worshiping Satan here and stuff you should do.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yes, and I believe there's a CoA at the top here.
Just a trigger warning. This one features you know, content
featuring drug and alcohol use and suicide, some pretty serious stuff,
so we just wanted to give listeners a heads up.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Also a heads up.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
If you want to read a really, really great long form,
in depth article about this. There's an article called The
Dreamer Deceiver from nineteen ninety from The Village Voice by
Ivan Solataroff. It's amazing, fantastic and like really gets into it.
So thanks to Dave for this and as well as Ivan.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah for sure. Yeah, And like you said, this is
kind of a heavy subject, but it's also just totally
fascinating because it comes from that really bizarre chapter of
American history from essentially the eighties the beginning to the
mid eighties, where there was a segment of the American population,
(01:22):
specifically Christian fundamentalists, who were convinced that Satan was working
as magic through rock and roll music, but specifically they
eventually came to target heavy metal bands, and I mean
that was a pretty easy target because at the time
there are plenty of bands who were using satanic imagery
or just looked weird so they must be Satan worshipers
(01:47):
or something like that. There were bands that definitely encouraged it.
As soon as they figured out that. The more the
Christian right shouted about how there were Satanists out there,
that they could sell more records, so they really kind
of into it. So that's kind of where this story begins.
And then the other thing you need to understand what
we're talking about is something called back masking, and that
(02:10):
is putting essentially hidden messages by that appear when you
play music backwards. So those two things, the Satanic Panic
of the early eighties combined with back mask and kind
of laid the groundwork for what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
That's right, And if you want to really get a
background before you listen to this, you can listen to
our I think one of our best episodes are Satanic
Panic episode that we recorded and also go to a
bookstore by our book Sure stuff you should know Colon.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I don't even know what's the name of it.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's hey, are you looking at edit? Or is that
for memory?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Right off the top of my dome? As the cool kids.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Say, nice work.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You can go out and get that book because we
have a really really fun chapter on back masking or
backward masking and.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
There and yeah, so go read that, Listen to that.
Now read this.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Welcome back, everybody, and we can talk about the Judas
Priest trial. But first, even before we get to that,
we'll talk about California Bill AB thirty seven to forty one,
the very first bill that said, hey, we should have
warning labels on records that have backward masking.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah. It was introduced by a California assemblyman named Phil Wyman,
who was an assemblymen for decades, I think two different times,
and he had been contacted by a constituent who'd seen
a show about satanic messages being subliminate, subliminally hidden in
music on the Trinity Broadcast network and she was very
(03:56):
upset about this, and Phil Wyman ended up introducing a
bill based on that phone call.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
That's right, and part of this bill said the records
of many rock groups contain anti Christian and pro satanic
messages transcribed on them by backward masking.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And I'll paraphrase the rest, because they basically.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Say, like, while you can't, you can only understand it
basically if it's played backwards. But when it's played forwards,
your brain still subconsciously picks up on this stuff, which
is ludicrous and pseudoscience. We know this for a fact now.
But they in this bill, which by the way, didn't
(04:36):
even get put to a vote, thank goodness, this bill
literally said like, hey, this stuff, your brain is picking
up on it. Even though it's playing in the wrong direction.
Your child's brain is still hearing these messages.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Right and again these are messages about Satan, anti Christian,
pro satanic messages. And the big fear was that not
only would it make kids like drop out a heighth
school and start drinking beer prematurely, but then they would
drive them to suicide. That was, you know, and to
the Christian rights credit, they were deeply concerned about teenage
(05:10):
suicide and they were seeking a way to easily explain
it because usually teenage suicide is the convergence of a
lot of different factors. A lot of times it comes
from people you would not want to identify as part
of the problem. So it makes a lot more sense.
And it's a lot easier to just point at heavy
(05:30):
metal bands and say, you guys are putting messages in
your music that's causing kids to commit suicide. Right, And
like you said, there were experts that came and testified
about this, but the experts with scare quotes, and I
think you should actually put scare quotes around the scare
quotes when you write experts when you're talking about these people.
Because one guy, in particular, William H. Yarrel the second
(05:55):
was a self taught neuroscientist. That's how he got It's
it's a I can't say, yeah, okay, this is a
family podcast.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah he's he's self described as a self taught neuroscientist.
He does not have academic credentials that are anything close
to what he has described himself as. And he has
a a again in quotes, probably scientific theory about these
messages that they are they can be decoded by the unconscious,
(06:27):
which already covered if it's hurt enough times. And here
are the two keys here as far as this is
going to play out in like a trial situation is
that he said, once you have decoded this message your
unconscious mind has, then you process it as truth and
that these truths can influence your behavior like suicide and
(06:49):
drug use and any other anti social behavior you can
think of.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Right, and so again this is total pseudoscience based on
nothing like facts, but because they're he was a man
who presented himself as an expert in this, who was
willing to go testify as an expert, and was saying
these things that backed up the Christian rights beliefs. This
is how like junk science starts to get a hold
(07:14):
in culture because in a lot of times people don't
want to be impolite and tell you how ridiculous what
you're saying is, and so it ends up like on
the record, and it just kind of grows from there.
And this is a really good example of that.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
In the Satanic Pecket Satanic Panic episode, I know, we
talked about the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource Center, that
was the group formed in eighty five, not a supergroup
of musicians, but a supergroup of DC political spouses, notably
Tipper Gore and then wife of James Baker, who was
(07:51):
Treasury secretary his wife Susan Baker, when they got together
and said, hey, we need warning labels on music. Expert
profane or sexually explicit, V for violent, DA for drugs
and alcohol, O for a cult, anti Christian or satanic music.
And this is where we got those very famous hearings
(08:12):
in nineteen eighty five with everyone from Frank Zappa a
very fired up John Denver testifying.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I watched some of John Denver's testimony today and it's great.
I mean, he is fired up in what he's saying,
but he's also mellow John Denver, Yeah, but he's He
talks about how his song Rocky Mountain High was banned
in some places or not played in some places because
it was taken as like a pro drug song, and
(08:42):
he said it was banned by people who'd obviously never
been to or seen the Rocky Mountains.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Or some good weed.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, but he he really kind of went to bat
for against censorship. He said, I'm opposed to censorship in
any form, and especially that's dictated by a self appointed
group of watchdogs who were telling everybody else what morality is.
He had some really great messages, but in the end,
(09:12):
the PMRC prevailed because the warning sticker that parenal advisory
explicit lyrics that essentially helped sell way more records than
would have sold had that label never been created.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That came out of that push by the pmr C.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, and you know what, I didn't mind it back
then so much.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I think when the pm R PMRC was doing their thing,
I was really young and I didn't understand it. Later,
when the parental Advisory label came out, I was kind
of like, well, who cares. It's fine, Like it's just
a rating and parents need ratings as guidelines. But I
don't know now that I see how it all went down,
(09:58):
It's really I don't know how you draw those guidelines
and what is right and what is wrong? Is is
really kind of the big question for me.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, you know, sure, I mean, as you're essentially providing
a service for parents who don't want to go to
the trouble of finding out what lives are doing, you know,
at the expense of free speech. Although to me I
kind of agree with past you where it's like this
is this barely qualifies as censorship. No one's saying you
(10:27):
can't say it. Yeah, there's just a warning on there
that some things might be offensive to some people. I
don't know how I feel about it, but it's not.
I'm not as virulently against it as I once was too.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But point being, during those hearings, you had you know,
Frank Zapp and the gang out there, but you also
had a group of again you know, quote expert unquote
people testifying that like, hey, this music will I mean,
there was one guy, Joe Stucy, that said there are
scientifics studies that prove that rock music warps young people's
(11:04):
minds and that these subaudible messages can you know, infiltrate
the unconscious and lead to suicide. They'd talked about all
these and these are you know, to be sure, sad,
sad cases of teenage suicide, but you know, trotting these
cases out there saying and you know what they were
listening to Twisted Sister before it all happened and that
(11:24):
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah. Yeah. So And also if you say that there
are scientific studies and no one asks you to explain
what scientific studies you're talking about, that's again how junk
science gets a foothold in the world.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So I say we take a break and come back
and talk about how this kind of went from Congress
into the courtroom. Once this this idea took hold, that
that musicians were putting dangerous, harmful, hidden messages in their music.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
That's a real pro transition.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
All right, So we're back. We promised to get into
the courtroom, and we are not going to start.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
With the.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, I guess they were both pretty popular trials in
the media, or at least captured everyone's attention, but one
trial went decidedly longer than the first. In nineteen eighty five,
Ozzy Osbourne was sued along with CBS Records when their
son John McCollum these are parents in California, took his
life after listening to Suicide Solution, the Ozzy Osbourne song.
(12:52):
It was dismissed very key ruling here on First Amendment
grounds that basically said, hey, music lyrics are free speech
and it doesn't matter what they say. You can't sue
someone for writing a song and singing it. Very quickly
after this, there were two more pending suicide cases that
were scrapped.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
But then a couple of years, well, I guess wouldn't
a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
It was just a few months later, in December of
nineteen eighty five, a very tragic thing happened in Reno, Nevada,
just outside of Sparks, Nevada.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So yeah, this is a very sad story. This is
where it gets tragic because there were two boys who
were best friends. They didn't really like most other people.
They were just as tight as two people could be
with one another, though, and they loved Judas Priest. Their
(13:44):
names were Raymond Bellknapp, who was eighteen, and James Vance,
who was twenty, and everybody called them Ray and Jay
because they were essentially inseparable. And I think I said
it before, but it bears repeating. They loved Judas Priest.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They did. It was their favorite band.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
These are guys that, you know, if you sort of
think about the typical metal heads of the nineteen eighties,
maybe some anti social behaviors. Like you said, they just
hung around with each other, hung out in a room,
drinking and smoking grass and listening to heavy metal over
and over and over and reading lyrics and looking at
(14:22):
the posters and you know, number one fans basically. But
these were deeply troubled kids who were very unhappy. Raymond
had had one attempted suicide before and that night they
made a suicide pack that they were going to in
their lives. They got a shotgun as sawed off shotgun,
(14:44):
went to a playground after drinking and smoking pot all
day and went to a playground behind a Lutheran church,
and Raymond shot and killed himself with a shotgun under
the chin.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, it's even worse than that though, because, like you said,
it was a suicide packed. So after he witnessed ray
shoot himself with a shotgun point blank range, jay was like, well,
I guess it's my turn. So he picked up the
shotgun that was covered in blood and gore and ejected
the shell, put in another shell, and then put it
(15:21):
to his own chin. And in that article from the
Village Voice that you cited, the author calculated based on
the nine to one one call and when the ambulance
got there, that he probably sat there for a full
five minutes contemplating whether to do this or not. And
(15:41):
he said later, because he actually survived this, that it
was the sound of sirens that essentially hurried him up.
And I guess the gun slipped or he didn't quite
line it up the way that he had intended to
or there was just some little part of his head
that was like I don't want to die. But he
did pull the trigger, but he shot himself under the chin,
(16:04):
out at an outward angle, away from himself. So he survived.
But he also took off like a significant portion of
his lower face.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, his his chin and mouth and nose. You know,
he was he was reconstructed as best possible. If you again,
big trigger warnings here, but if you if you want
to go look up you know, parts of this trial
or interviews with this with this kid, you can do that,
just you know, do so at your own risk.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So yeah, so Jay survived, Ray died. And it was
in a letter to Ray's mom that Jay wrote that
he first said he he he identified the Judas Priest
record they were listening to over and over all day
while they were getting trashed as something that prompted them
to to take their lives. And he said, quote, I
(17:00):
believe that alcohol and heavy metal music such as Judas
Priest led us or even mesmerized us into believing that
the answer to life was death. He also was He
also spoke to a guidance counselor afterward and told her
that he had heard do It do It in the
song in the end that they were listening to. And
(17:23):
the song in particular is better by You Better than Me,
which is off of the Judas Priest Stained Class album
from nineteen seventy eight. And there's a lot to talk
about with that.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Song, yeah, there is. It was their fourth record. The
song is actually a cover song. Maybe ironically it's a
cover song, and that these weren't even Judas Priest, you know,
words that they had written. And you know, we'll get
to the duet part, but well, I guess we should
just go ahead and say that supposedly at the end
(17:55):
of like three different lines in the chorus right afterward
you hear do it. And the boys heard this and
thought that meant to take their lives. There were also
four other parts that they thought were backmasked. One that
said try suicide backwards, not try suicide backwards, Try suicide.
(18:15):
Suicide is in sing my evil spirit and curse words here,
but I'm going to clean up for the crowd here
f the Lord f all of you.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Some more about that song, Chuck. The other thing about it,
it's on a Judas Priest album. It's associated with these boys,
suicide and suicide attempt So of course you'd think, like,
this is some dark material that you're talking about, And
like you said, it's a cover. It was originally written
by Gary Wright, who was a member at the time
(18:47):
of Spooky Tooth, who recorded it in nineteen sixty nine.
That same Gary Wright went on to have quite a
successful solo career with his number two hit dream Weaver
in nineteen seventy six. That Gary Wright. But it was
a song. I don't know if it was an anti
war song. At the very least, it was a look
inside the psyche of a boy at war, a sensibly
(19:10):
in Vietnam, who was having such a rough time that
he couldn't he couldn't express himself to his girlfriend back home.
So he was actually talking to his best friend saying,
like you talked to her, You tell her how I'm
doing because I can't express myself. It's better by you,
better than me. That's what the song's about. There's no
(19:31):
nothing about suicide in there. There's nothing about taking your
life or killing other people. It's just kind of like
a soul bearing song about somebody who's going through the
horrors of war. It's a good song it is a
good song, and I really like Judas Priest's version of
it too. It's like, I like Judas Priest, but I'm
(19:52):
also like, after a while, everything sounds like Motorhead in
a certain way. This does not. This sounds like Priest.
You know, it's really yead.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So it doesn't even it doesn't even sound that metal.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Actually no, it's it's almost like do wop?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, did you say do wop?
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Or do it?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I said wow, See I said do wop? Everybody. I
definitely did not say do it.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Do it? Then.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I hope there are no bloodsucking attorneys listening, because that's
just what happened. This is where the story to me
gets a little gross because in nineteen eighty six, three
attorneys headed by a man named Ken McKenna, who was
quoted at one point of saying, I was born.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
To sue people. I guess is the dot dot dot.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
It sounds like a vanity plate.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It really born number two sue. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
So they mount a case, file a case rather a
lawsuit against Judas Priest and CBS Records, which and this
is just sort of a nitpicky thing, but it is
specifically was a product liability lawsuit, meaning the same kind
of lawsuit you would bring if any other product had
(21:10):
something that made you sick to your stomach.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Or something exactly. And in this case, the plaintiffs were
bringing this as if CBS Records and Judas Priests had
put out a product that had a harmful flaw to it,
which was these subliminal messages that had brought harm to
Ray and Jay, which had caused them to kill himself
and then attempt to kill himself. So that was essentially
(21:34):
what they were coming at it with, and they drew
a judge in Washoe County, where Reno is I think
the courthouse is in Reno. Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead heard
this case and in pre trial hearings he heard a
lot of expert testimony. He heard testimony from a lot
of junk science, scare quote experts, and he agreed to
(21:57):
hear the case. There was no jury, it was just him,
but he allowed the case to come to trial, and
just that was a landmark decision because what he's saying is,
I think there's enough possibility that what the plainis are
saying is right that these guys incerted subliminal messages that
got these kids to take their lives or attempt to
(22:18):
take their life, that I'm willing to hear lawyer's debate
whether it's correct or not.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
That's enormous right.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
And that it didn't get bumped because of the ASSI
free speech ruling because they were specifically because they were
subliminal messages, which to him, setting this president doesn't count
as free speech because there's no dialogue that can happen
where you can determine if something is correct or true.
(22:48):
And on top of that, even subliminal messages were invasion
of a right to privacy because the listener didn't know
this going into it and had no way of avoiding this.
So mark rulings. Another thing, two things I want to
point out here was part of this. Part of this
was because these attorneys stepped forward, of course, and they
(23:09):
thought they could make a lot of money. Part of
it was because these parents hated this music. These weren't
like rock and roll parents who were like, oh man,
I was kind of into that too, but it turned
my son wrong. These are people like when you see interviews.
I watched that documentary on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
It's not very good.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
It was sort of from the time though that but
it showed a lot of the trial and interviews the
mom I believe it was James's mom.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
They asked her like what kind of music she was into,
and she liked music that her parents were into, so
people from like the nineteen forties and fifties, she was like,
you know, like Ry Rogers and the singing nun So
the idea of Judas Priest being in their household, they
hated this, so they're angry about that to begin with.
(23:57):
And then the other thing that people I don't think
thought about my which at the time was is that
Judas Priests like they were devastated by this. These were
big fans of theirs and Rob Halford and interviews was even like, well,
first of all, we're not inserting backward messages anyway, but
if we were, like, why it's ludicrous. Why would we
(24:17):
have our biggest fans and tell them to kill themselves?
And he's like, if anything, we would say buy more
shirts and buy more records. Yeah, and it like it
devastated them emotionally that these these kids took their lives
and that they loved Judas Priest and they were being
blamed for it.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, yeah, that really struck me too in reading quotes
from Rob Halfer is just the amount of empathy that
he had and that he was able to kind of
like cut through all the other stuff and be like,
you guys, don't lose sight of what this is all about.
These two kids, yeah like died, Yeah, and yeah, but
also at the same time defending their music and defending
(24:52):
their other fans too, saying like, don't pick on these
kids just because they listened to Judas Priests, Like, there's
nothing wrong with listening to Juwus Priest. It was a
really strange, awful position that the band was forced into by,
like you said, those ambulance chasing lawyers who created this
lawsuit out of whole cloth.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
The other thing too, from watching the documentary was just
the complete lack of and I'm not saying like parents
are responsible if a child takes their life, because there's,
like you said, there's so many things at work here,
but the complete and utter lack of these parents' ability
to look at the environment they were raised in was
(25:35):
just startling.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
The stepfather of James was an alcoholic and had a
gambling addiction, and when they asked her about it, in
court and cross examination, she couldn't even say the word alcoholic.
The wife she was just like, well, he had a
drinking problem, but James the quote was James would make
extremes out of situations. And then it cut to an
interview with her on the couch with her husband that said,
(25:59):
big deal, you had drinking problem, and like a lot
of people have drinking problems and their kids don't kill themselves.
And she said, everyone tries to blame everything on me,
and none of this is my fault.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
And you know, I'm having empathy for her.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Because she lost her child, but also just like the
utter lack of like it's all this rock band's fault
and nothing had to do with this. And the kids said,
like being raised in that home was awful, Like he
said that, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah, and not just him. I think his siblings also
were basically in the same boat. Yeah, and for sure
I read I read an article in Skeptical Inquirer by
one of the psychologists for the defense for Judas Priest
who was saying, like, this is not blaming the victims.
We're not blaming the victims here, but you can't not
(26:49):
take into account all of the other factors in these boys'
lives that made them extremely high risk for suicide. Yeah,
and to instead just ignore all that stuff like an
inability to stay employed, engaging in tons of crime, fighting,
trouble at school, fighting, being beaten at home, all of
(27:12):
these things put together. You can't just throw those out.
And it doesn't mean it's these kids' fault. And you know,
in a lot of ways it doesn't necessarily make it
the parents fault either, but it's certainly not the band's fault.
Like you're really failing to take any sort of tountability
if you're like you said, you're placing all the blame
on Judas Priest.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, absolutely so, totally all right. So they go to court.
The thing that they had to do to persuade Judge Whitehead,
they really had a four prong approach that they had
to prove in order to prove that Judas Priest and
CBS Records had at pay money. One is that there
was definitely a physically present message on that song that
(27:54):
you could identify. They brought in this guy, William nick
Loff Junior, who this is For some reason this struck
me as funny. He had a business that specialized in
detecting subliminal messages, but it went out business.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
He also made money selling subliminal message tapes himself, those
self help tapes that supposedly help people that quit smoking
and lose weight. Right, He also made money doing.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
That, right, So he supposed he was an expert at
that kind of thing. He you know, isolated and slowed
down and amplified the parts of the song that supposedly
said do it. We'll get to you know, the outcome
of that later. And then he also played some of
the backward masking stuff in court.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, so that's really important too, Like there were two
components to this. If you listened to it regularly, you
heard do it. If you listened to it backwards, you
heard all of those other satanic messages right, right. That
wasn't clear to me at first. It took a little
while to kind of sink in. So they were trying
to get them both ways, forward and backward.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Yeah, But the one thing that I don't get is
in try well, they were talking about just lyrics in general,
and that's the stuff that should have been protected by
free speech. Because the judge even said at the beginning,
like nothing that the only thing that matters here is
the subliminal messages. That's the only thing this case hinges on.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, but I think back masking would fall into subliminal
messages too. Well.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
No, no, I'm saying they were just talking about regular lyrics
on the album.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Oh gotcha, probably just prove the case or established the
case that Judas Priest was evil.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
You know. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So one of the things that really helped the plaintiffs
that came from Rob Halford is on the stand. He
was asked like, have you ever included any back mask
lyrics and he said, yeah, we actually have before. And
it was not too hide any kind of secret message
or anything like that. But it was a cool effect
(29:50):
playing something backwards when you listen to it forward. That
was the point of it. But the plaintiff lawyers were like,
case closed basically, and of course the case wasn't closed,
but it was not. It was not. It didn't help
the defense at all.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
No, for sure. And that was the second prong. First one,
like I said, was there was an identifiable message. The
second one was that they deliberately put it there. Yeah,
if they're going to be held liable, so yeah, just
the fact that they did that at all, does it
mean anything, because a lot of bands were doing that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, just read our chapter on backmasking, go do it.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
But they couldn't. But they rob however, couldn't say no,
we've never done this, right, which would have been really
helpful if you've done it once, who knows if you've
done it before, right, So there was another one. The
next part that they had to prove was that these
messages were in fact subliminal, because the point of them
being subliminal is that you couldn't resist the messages you
(30:51):
were getting because you couldn't identify them, and you couldn't
be like, this is not this is not right. And
so the idea that there was such a thing as
subliminal messaging. Apparently there was a guy named Wilson Key
And I don't know, did you say that he didn't
actually testify at the trial, but he was an advisor
to say like William nick Lough.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I mean he basically he literally wrote the book
on subliminal advertising. Yeah, and they interviewed him a lot,
like he never took the stand, I think, but they
used a lot of his like quoted testimony to back
up their case.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, And he was a hammer, and subliminal advertising is
the nail. Like he saw it everywhere. He saw the
word sex and the ridges of a Ritz Cracker on
the box, that old chestnut. That like there was a
naked woman hidden in the ice cubes of a Johnny
Walker ad that came from him. He said, it was
in the Sears catalog, as in the assistin chapel. It
(31:45):
was everywhere. That just subliminal messaging was everywhere in the
media and it worked. That was the point then that
really helped bolster that plaintiff's case that the messages were
and then they also needed to show that subliminal messages
could create the impulse to die by suicide.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
By the way, I got a quote, a real quote
from Wilson Okay, Wilson Key on science. He said, science
is pretty much what you can get away with at
any point in time.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
At least he didn't say that he's a self taught neuroscientist,
but it's definitely in the same ballpark.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
That's a good point, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
So you said they had to prove that they contributed
to that impulse, those messages contributed to the impulse to
take someone's life. They brought in the plane was brought
in a guy named Howard Chevron. This guy was an
actual legitimate clinical psychologist, very respected guy. Yeah, and he
is the guy that basically in court showed experiments that
(32:55):
showed how the unconscious mind and the conscious mind operate
and how they're separate, but how they do interact with
one another, and that subliminal messages are potentially very very
powerful because your brain is confusing it.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
And here's it as a truth.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, and this guy, like you said, he was legit.
He back in the sixties, he in a colleague essentially
proved that Freud's theories on the unconscious mind were right,
that we do have an unconscious mind. They detected it
by showing subliminal messaging to people or images and then
you know, analyzing their brain waves and they were like, yep,
this is actually a thing. He went too far, though,
(33:36):
and he attributed way too much potency to subliminal messages
on the unconscious mind. And he essentially said that when
the unconscious mind gets its hands on a subliminal messager,
is presented with a subliminal message, it doesn't understand that
it's just been it's just taken. It externally and so
(33:56):
the mind confuses it as an internally generated thought and
it gets all it's accorded, all of the importance that
your own thoughts and beliefs are given even though somebody
else told you to do it. You just don't understand
it like that. So yeah, ergo, if you suddenly have
this idea like, oh, I should kill myself, even if
(34:16):
it's subliminal, you might act on it.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Right, Yeah, too far.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I believe he was a guy in court too that
said that was talking about just their lyrics and their
anti religious connotations, which I didn't you know, it just
cut right there. So I don't see if the judge
was like irrelevant or whatever, because again that's the part
that was supposedly not on trial.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, let's take our break.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
All right, let's take our final break here, and we'll
talk about the defense case and the ruling right after this.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Okay, So we went over the plaintiff's case and judas
priests had defense pretty well established. One. Essentially, they had
to show number one that the words do it were
not actually the words do it, that they were random
sounds that to the ear, especially once somebody pointed it
out to you that it sounded like do it. You
(35:31):
would hear is do it? And so I couldn't find
it anyway.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
I couldn't either.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, I listened over and over to that section, and
I just don't hear it at all.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
But apparently if somebody is pointing it out, especially if
they're slowing it down and isolating it and all that, yeah,
you supposedly hear do it. It was played over and
over again in the court, So there is something there
enough that no one said objection, this doesn't sound anything
like it. And it became like just one of the
central components of this, like do it is? Do it there?
(36:05):
Is it purposely there? And then conversely, on the defensive side,
does do it even exist? Like are these actual words?
And so a lot of weird stuff happened. Rob Halford
sang better better buy you better than Me in the
witness Box, and he was basically showing how he likes
to say ea at the end of like every line.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, it was a very interesting part because they were like,
you know, and why do you do that? Like it
was an implication. He was like, he's like just the
emotion of the song, and you know, like basically, I'm
just a singer man.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, Satan told me to.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah, well he shouldn't have said that, but he let
it slip.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
So, just like how the Plainliffs brought in nick Lough,
William Nicklough as sound engineer, the defense brought in their
own sound engineer, and they managed to slow it down
and essentially prove that do it was just a random
combination of sounds, not even speech.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
Yeah, but it was a.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Combination of a guitar sound and Rob Halford the lead singer,
exhaling on the line, and that you put those together
if you listen to a certain way, especially if somebody
said sounds like do it, doesn't it? You could hear
do it?
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yeah, there were like three more things though. It was
in that big, big article from the Village Voice. I
just can't remember. I know, the high hat that had
something to do with it, and like some sort of
an echo. But yeah, the point is they were like,
do it's not even in here? So why are we
even in here? Is what they were thinking.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, again, still having empathy this whole time. One of
the most troubling parts of this trial for the defense,
of course, is having to you know, cross examine these
families and talk about the history of depression and these
anti social behaviors that these boys had. Like one of
these guys, and this is seven years before Columbine, one
(37:57):
of them. I don't think it was Jay, I think
it was Raymond. It was Raymond talked about getting automatic
weapons and like shooting up large gatherings. And you know,
the defense attorney's asking this this mom, like, like, can
you agree that to hear something like this, you know,
something is wrong with your son. And she's like, well,
I don't understand what your question is, Like, what do
(38:19):
you mean something's wrong with them? And she was just
you know, it was a tough tough thing to bring
the sister out and say, like, you had two previous
suicide attempts and you never listened to this music, right.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
She's like, no, I just listened to Roy Rogers.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
It was all very hard to watch because they had
to paint a picture of their unhappy home life and
their unhappy childhood.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, but it was I mean, there was just no
way of mounting a defense without of course doing that,
you know. But yeah, from what I could tell in
that Dream Deceiver long form article, the all members of
Judas Priest found it very distasteful.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
But yeah, they all.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Seemed to understand they had to do this, but none
of them were happy about doing it. Yeah, and they
were all I mean, it wasn't just Rob Halford, like
all of them were deeply affected by this and having
to hear the story of what happened to these kids,
and like it haunted them. For sure.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
They were mad in there.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
They were mad that they had been dragged into court
across the pond over this ridiculous stuff. But at the
same time, they were definitely affected by what had created
this whole kerfuffle.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yeah, I saw too. Halford was really just upset that
it was America. He was like, this is a country
that was always so good to us, and we loved
America so much, and you know, to be taken to
court in America was just really hard for us. And
you know, they sat there every day in the trial.
And I wasn't the biggest Judas Priest guy because I
just didn't listen to a lot of that kind of.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Music, But like they were good dudes.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Yeah, you know, yeah, I've always respected Rob Halford for
coming out in the metal community. You know, like he
was as far as I know, the first and maybe
even still the last so far.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I mean, can you imagine if they knew he was
gay at the time, what they were done in that trial.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
No, because this was a really bizarre time in American history,
and there was just so much boldness to take somebody
to court over things like free speech, over things like obscenity,
just over moral policing. There was no qualms about taking
somebody to court over morality. So, yeah, you're right, who
knows that they would have done? Yeah, for sure. So
(40:30):
there was also the point of essentially debunking all the
pseudoscience that the plaintiff's witnesses had spouted from the witness stand,
And luckily they were basically able to do that. They
were All they had to do was say, there's zero
body of literature in the scientific corpus that suggests that
(40:53):
this is even remotely possible that at best, studies that
have shown an effect from subliminal messages could maybe disturb you,
could maybe trigger anxiety in you that certainly couldn't actually
create behavior, and certainly not behavior as monumental as suicide.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah for sure. And they use like the opposite just
help prove their point. They were like, when people like
want to lose weight and quit smoking more than anything else,
and they buy these books and tapes with subliminal messages
supposedly to help them do it. They're trying to do
this and using it as an aid, and it's still
not helping them achieve that goal. It doesn't work. It's
(41:35):
not working.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, that definitely helped their case too. So the defense
put up a pretty good well defense and just kind
of picked apart a lot of the plaintiff's case. But
ultimately it was up to Judge Whitehead, who, from what
I read in that article was just his face was
totally impassive. He didn't let on anything that he'd taken
in on any given day, and so I don't know
(41:59):
that they had any clue how it was going to go.
And so he ruled in favor of judas priests. He
ruled against the plaintiffs, and like you said, the plaintiffs
that brought this is essentially a product liability case, but
Whitehead viewed it instead as an invasion of privacy case.
And the big difference between those two is intent. And
(42:19):
I think Attorney McKenna put it like, if you're in
a Ford. Pinnow that blows up. It doesn't matter whether
Ford didn't mean for that to happen, it still happened.
The harm was done. But if it's invasion of privacy,
there has to be intent. And so Judge Whitehead essentially said,
I believe that subliminal messages are real. I believe that
they can impact behavior, but I don't think judas priests
(42:42):
intentionally put these in there. And I'm ruling in favor
of judas priests.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah, I mean, looking back, it was a totally sensible
decision on a case that never should have been brought.
But it still feels like a bit of a brave
decision for a a loone judge to make without the
assistance of a jury, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, for sure. I mean he added to the free
speech body of law. That's enormous. That's an enormous ruling
just from that, just by ruling that subliminal messages are
not protected speech. And then yeah, in his ruling, he
didn't do anything to debunk the idea that there were
subliminal messages and that they could affect us, and that
(43:26):
metal bands are putting them in their records. So the
fact that he didn't say that that wasn't correct. Actually
bolstered people's viewpoints of that later on in other criminal cases.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yeah, in the end, Judas Priest spent about a quarter
of a million bucks in their defense.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Did not do the conversion on that for some weird reason.
But i'd sufvise just to say it's a lot more
now I feel hollow.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
CBS was ordered to pay forty thousand dollars to those
plaintive attorneys as cost reimbursement for not complying with discovery reorders.
It all came down to their providing the master tapes
for the song. They went back and forth saying that
they didn't have them, and then finally I think after
a long time, they did provide them, but there was
(44:15):
chunks missing that, you know, the conspiracy minded plane of
attorney said was them sort of whitewashing it.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
And they said when they did receive the.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Master tapes they were sort of like flaking apart, and
that they didn't want to even they didn't even play
them because they didn't want to assume any responsibility for them.
So it was just sort of a mess in that
discovery period. So they ended up having to pay them
forty grand.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
But yeah, yeah, so the Christian Wright kept going after
metal bands for a while after this, and you might say, like, well,
how did this ever stop, Like how did it end?
It didn't, and they just changed targets and once rap
music became a thing in the late eighties, yeah, they started.
There was a new moral panic, and in fact, that
(45:00):
same year, in nineteen ninety, two Live Crew was arrested
for obscenity in Florida and went on trial and ended
up prevailing. As well.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
I had a great idea the other day that I
can't remember now that had to do a two Live Crew.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Probably their free speech Crusade.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Wasn't a podcast episode, it was something else. It was like,
I don't know, it was a good title for something
that had to do.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
With Two Life Crew. Okay, hey we want some podcasts?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Was that it miso podcast?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Well?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Sadly we should mention that. As for Jay, he only
lived a few years after that.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
He went to.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
A mental health facility for depression, and it's very hard
to find out exactly what happened because they, I know,
he suffered from an overdose, went to a coma for
a few days, showed no brain activity and died, but
there is dispute between the parties over whether or not
that was a suicide or whether it was an accidental
(46:03):
overdose of methadone, whether or not the plug was pulled.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Like I couldn't get any straight answers.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, it seems that for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, because they wanted that lawsuit to continue, they appealed,
of course, and I imagine a suicide probably would not
have helped their case any So maybe that had something
to do with that.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
I don't know. And despite feeling betrayed by America, Judas
Priestill tours here and if you want to see them,
they will be at the Alliant Energy Powerhouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
September twenty first.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
I've never seen them. I'd love to.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
I bet I would love too.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
Well, you got anything else, nothing else.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Nothing else here either, which means, of course, everybody, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Appropriately you're going to talk about streaming music. Hey, guys,
went to your New York show the highlight of my year.
I've worked in the music industry for nearly a decade
and must give you guys kudos for summing up the
streaming debacle so well well I have a few additions
that may add color to the situation, namely that it
was a crisis for the industry and Spotify is credited
with saving the fan consumption model for music. Still, Spotify
(47:12):
is in a power struggle with the labels, and because
they pay out seventy percent of the total revenue to labels,
they lobby for lower payout rates for musicians and songwriters
to achieve profitability to a loophole involving audio books and bundles.
As of May twenty twenty four, Spotify will be paying
songwriters approximately one hundred and fifty million dollars less per year.
(47:33):
Spotify is kind of in a three way standoff with labels.
Without label owned content like Drake and Taylor Swift, no
one would use Spotify, but labels need stores like Spotify
and Apple for fan consumption. It's a convoluted power dynamic
that has trickled down effects on music that most fans
don't even recognize.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Keep finding the good fight, guys. That's from Nate in
New York, New York.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Thanks a lot, Nate, thanks for that email. Thanks for
coming to see us too. That was a fun show.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
A town hall totally.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
If you want to be like Nate. You can come
see us too wherever we perform live in the meantime,
You can also send us an email send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just rocking out
worshiping Satan here and stuff you should do.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yes, and I believe there's a CoA at the top here.
Just a trigger warning. This one features you know, content
featuring drug and alcohol use and suicide, some pretty serious stuff,
so we just wanted to give listeners a heads up.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Also a heads up.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
If you want to read a really, really great long form,
in depth article about this. There's an article called The
Dreamer Deceiver from nineteen ninety from The Village Voice by
Ivan Solataroff. It's amazing, fantastic and like really gets into it.
So thanks to Dave for this and as well as Ivan.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah for sure. Yeah, And like you said, this is
kind of a heavy subject, but it's also just totally
fascinating because it comes from that really bizarre chapter of
American history from essentially the eighties the beginning to the
mid eighties, where there was a segment of the American population,
(01:22):
specifically Christian fundamentalists, who were convinced that Satan was working
as magic through rock and roll music, but specifically they
eventually came to target heavy metal bands, and I mean
that was a pretty easy target because at the time
there are plenty of bands who were using satanic imagery
or just looked weird so they must be Satan worshipers
(01:47):
or something like that. There were bands that definitely encouraged it.
As soon as they figured out that. The more the
Christian right shouted about how there were Satanists out there,
that they could sell more records, so they really kind
of into it. So that's kind of where this story begins.
And then the other thing you need to understand what
we're talking about is something called back masking, and that
(02:10):
is putting essentially hidden messages by that appear when you
play music backwards. So those two things, the Satanic Panic
of the early eighties combined with back mask and kind
of laid the groundwork for what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
That's right, And if you want to really get a
background before you listen to this, you can listen to
our I think one of our best episodes are Satanic
Panic episode that we recorded and also go to a
bookstore by our book Sure stuff you should know Colon.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I don't even know what's the name of it.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's hey, are you looking at edit? Or is that
for memory?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Right off the top of my dome? As the cool kids.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Say, nice work.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
You can go out and get that book because we
have a really really fun chapter on back masking or
backward masking and.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
There and yeah, so go read that, Listen to that.
Now read this.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Welcome back, everybody, and we can talk about the Judas
Priest trial. But first, even before we get to that,
we'll talk about California Bill AB thirty seven to forty one,
the very first bill that said, hey, we should have
warning labels on records that have backward masking.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah. It was introduced by a California assemblyman named Phil Wyman,
who was an assemblymen for decades, I think two different times,
and he had been contacted by a constituent who'd seen
a show about satanic messages being subliminate, subliminally hidden in
music on the Trinity Broadcast network and she was very
(03:56):
upset about this, and Phil Wyman ended up introducing a
bill based on that phone call.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
That's right, and part of this bill said the records
of many rock groups contain anti Christian and pro satanic
messages transcribed on them by backward masking.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
And I'll paraphrase the rest, because they basically.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Say, like, while you can't, you can only understand it
basically if it's played backwards. But when it's played forwards,
your brain still subconsciously picks up on this stuff, which
is ludicrous and pseudoscience. We know this for a fact now.
But they in this bill, which by the way, didn't
(04:36):
even get put to a vote, thank goodness, this bill
literally said like, hey, this stuff, your brain is picking
up on it. Even though it's playing in the wrong direction.
Your child's brain is still hearing these messages.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Right and again these are messages about Satan, anti Christian,
pro satanic messages. And the big fear was that not
only would it make kids like drop out a heighth
school and start drinking beer prematurely, but then they would
drive them to suicide. That was, you know, and to
the Christian rights credit, they were deeply concerned about teenage
(05:10):
suicide and they were seeking a way to easily explain
it because usually teenage suicide is the convergence of a
lot of different factors. A lot of times it comes
from people you would not want to identify as part
of the problem. So it makes a lot more sense.
And it's a lot easier to just point at heavy
(05:30):
metal bands and say, you guys are putting messages in
your music that's causing kids to commit suicide. Right, And
like you said, there were experts that came and testified
about this, but the experts with scare quotes, and I
think you should actually put scare quotes around the scare
quotes when you write experts when you're talking about these people.
Because one guy, in particular, William H. Yarrel the second
(05:55):
was a self taught neuroscientist. That's how he got It's
it's a I can't say, yeah, okay, this is a
family podcast.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah he's he's self described as a self taught neuroscientist.
He does not have academic credentials that are anything close
to what he has described himself as. And he has
a a again in quotes, probably scientific theory about these
messages that they are they can be decoded by the unconscious,
(06:27):
which already covered if it's hurt enough times. And here
are the two keys here as far as this is
going to play out in like a trial situation is
that he said, once you have decoded this message your
unconscious mind has, then you process it as truth and
that these truths can influence your behavior like suicide and
(06:49):
drug use and any other anti social behavior you can
think of.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Right, and so again this is total pseudoscience based on
nothing like facts, but because they're he was a man
who presented himself as an expert in this, who was
willing to go testify as an expert, and was saying
these things that backed up the Christian rights beliefs. This
is how like junk science starts to get a hold
(07:14):
in culture because in a lot of times people don't
want to be impolite and tell you how ridiculous what
you're saying is, and so it ends up like on
the record, and it just kind of grows from there.
And this is a really good example of that.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
In the Satanic Pecket Satanic Panic episode, I know, we
talked about the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource Center, that
was the group formed in eighty five, not a supergroup
of musicians, but a supergroup of DC political spouses, notably
Tipper Gore and then wife of James Baker, who was
(07:51):
Treasury secretary his wife Susan Baker, when they got together
and said, hey, we need warning labels on music. Expert
profane or sexually explicit, V for violent, DA for drugs
and alcohol, O for a cult, anti Christian or satanic music.
And this is where we got those very famous hearings
(08:12):
in nineteen eighty five with everyone from Frank Zappa a
very fired up John Denver testifying.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I watched some of John Denver's testimony today and it's great.
I mean, he is fired up in what he's saying,
but he's also mellow John Denver, Yeah, but he's He
talks about how his song Rocky Mountain High was banned
in some places or not played in some places because
it was taken as like a pro drug song, and
(08:42):
he said it was banned by people who'd obviously never
been to or seen the Rocky Mountains.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Or some good weed.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, but he he really kind of went to bat
for against censorship. He said, I'm opposed to censorship in
any form, and especially that's dictated by a self appointed
group of watchdogs who were telling everybody else what morality is.
He had some really great messages, but in the end,
(09:12):
the PMRC prevailed because the warning sticker that parenal advisory
explicit lyrics that essentially helped sell way more records than
would have sold had that label never been created.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That came out of that push by the pmr C.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, and you know what, I didn't mind it back
then so much.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
I think when the pm R PMRC was doing their thing,
I was really young and I didn't understand it. Later,
when the parental Advisory label came out, I was kind
of like, well, who cares. It's fine, Like it's just
a rating and parents need ratings as guidelines. But I
don't know now that I see how it all went down,
(09:58):
It's really I don't know how you draw those guidelines
and what is right and what is wrong? Is is
really kind of the big question for me.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, you know, sure, I mean, as you're essentially providing
a service for parents who don't want to go to
the trouble of finding out what lives are doing, you know,
at the expense of free speech. Although to me I
kind of agree with past you where it's like this
is this barely qualifies as censorship. No one's saying you
(10:27):
can't say it. Yeah, there's just a warning on there
that some things might be offensive to some people. I
don't know how I feel about it, but it's not.
I'm not as virulently against it as I once was too.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But point being, during those hearings, you had you know,
Frank Zapp and the gang out there, but you also
had a group of again you know, quote expert unquote
people testifying that like, hey, this music will I mean,
there was one guy, Joe Stucy, that said there are
scientifics studies that prove that rock music warps young people's
(11:04):
minds and that these subaudible messages can you know, infiltrate
the unconscious and lead to suicide. They'd talked about all
these and these are you know, to be sure, sad,
sad cases of teenage suicide, but you know, trotting these
cases out there saying and you know what they were
listening to Twisted Sister before it all happened and that
(11:24):
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah. Yeah. So And also if you say that there
are scientific studies and no one asks you to explain
what scientific studies you're talking about, that's again how junk
science gets a foothold in the world.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So I say we take a break and come back
and talk about how this kind of went from Congress
into the courtroom. Once this this idea took hold, that
that musicians were putting dangerous, harmful, hidden messages in their music.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
That's a real pro transition.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
All right, So we're back. We promised to get into
the courtroom, and we are not going to start.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
With the.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, I guess they were both pretty popular trials in
the media, or at least captured everyone's attention, but one
trial went decidedly longer than the first. In nineteen eighty five,
Ozzy Osbourne was sued along with CBS Records when their
son John McCollum these are parents in California, took his
life after listening to Suicide Solution, the Ozzy Osbourne song.
(12:52):
It was dismissed very key ruling here on First Amendment
grounds that basically said, hey, music lyrics are free speech
and it doesn't matter what they say. You can't sue
someone for writing a song and singing it. Very quickly
after this, there were two more pending suicide cases that
were scrapped.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
But then a couple of years, well, I guess wouldn't
a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
It was just a few months later, in December of
nineteen eighty five, a very tragic thing happened in Reno, Nevada,
just outside of Sparks, Nevada.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So yeah, this is a very sad story. This is
where it gets tragic because there were two boys who
were best friends. They didn't really like most other people.
They were just as tight as two people could be
with one another, though, and they loved Judas Priest. Their
(13:44):
names were Raymond Bellknapp, who was eighteen, and James Vance,
who was twenty, and everybody called them Ray and Jay
because they were essentially inseparable. And I think I said
it before, but it bears repeating. They loved Judas Priest.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
They did. It was their favorite band.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
These are guys that, you know, if you sort of
think about the typical metal heads of the nineteen eighties,
maybe some anti social behaviors. Like you said, they just
hung around with each other, hung out in a room,
drinking and smoking grass and listening to heavy metal over
and over and over and reading lyrics and looking at
(14:22):
the posters and you know, number one fans basically. But
these were deeply troubled kids who were very unhappy. Raymond
had had one attempted suicide before and that night they
made a suicide pack that they were going to in
their lives. They got a shotgun as sawed off shotgun,
(14:44):
went to a playground after drinking and smoking pot all
day and went to a playground behind a Lutheran church,
and Raymond shot and killed himself with a shotgun under
the chin.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, it's even worse than that though, because, like you said,
it was a suicide packed. So after he witnessed ray
shoot himself with a shotgun point blank range, jay was like, well,
I guess it's my turn. So he picked up the
shotgun that was covered in blood and gore and ejected
the shell, put in another shell, and then put it
(15:21):
to his own chin. And in that article from the
Village Voice that you cited, the author calculated based on
the nine to one one call and when the ambulance
got there, that he probably sat there for a full
five minutes contemplating whether to do this or not. And
(15:41):
he said later, because he actually survived this, that it
was the sound of sirens that essentially hurried him up.
And I guess the gun slipped or he didn't quite
line it up the way that he had intended to
or there was just some little part of his head
that was like I don't want to die. But he
did pull the trigger, but he shot himself under the chin,
(16:04):
out at an outward angle, away from himself. So he survived.
But he also took off like a significant portion of
his lower face.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, his his chin and mouth and nose. You know,
he was he was reconstructed as best possible. If you again,
big trigger warnings here, but if you if you want
to go look up you know, parts of this trial
or interviews with this with this kid, you can do that,
just you know, do so at your own risk.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So yeah, so Jay survived, Ray died. And it was
in a letter to Ray's mom that Jay wrote that
he first said he he he identified the Judas Priest
record they were listening to over and over all day
while they were getting trashed as something that prompted them
to to take their lives. And he said, quote, I
(17:00):
believe that alcohol and heavy metal music such as Judas
Priest led us or even mesmerized us into believing that
the answer to life was death. He also was He
also spoke to a guidance counselor afterward and told her
that he had heard do It do It in the
song in the end that they were listening to. And
(17:23):
the song in particular is better by You Better than Me,
which is off of the Judas Priest Stained Class album
from nineteen seventy eight. And there's a lot to talk
about with that.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Song, yeah, there is. It was their fourth record. The
song is actually a cover song. Maybe ironically it's a
cover song, and that these weren't even Judas Priest, you know,
words that they had written. And you know, we'll get
to the duet part, but well, I guess we should
just go ahead and say that supposedly at the end
(17:55):
of like three different lines in the chorus right afterward
you hear do it. And the boys heard this and
thought that meant to take their lives. There were also
four other parts that they thought were backmasked. One that
said try suicide backwards, not try suicide backwards, Try suicide.
(18:15):
Suicide is in sing my evil spirit and curse words here,
but I'm going to clean up for the crowd here
f the Lord f all of you.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Some more about that song, Chuck. The other thing about it,
it's on a Judas Priest album. It's associated with these boys,
suicide and suicide attempt So of course you'd think, like,
this is some dark material that you're talking about, And
like you said, it's a cover. It was originally written
by Gary Wright, who was a member at the time
(18:47):
of Spooky Tooth, who recorded it in nineteen sixty nine.
That same Gary Wright went on to have quite a
successful solo career with his number two hit dream Weaver
in nineteen seventy six. That Gary Wright. But it was
a song. I don't know if it was an anti
war song. At the very least, it was a look
inside the psyche of a boy at war, a sensibly
(19:10):
in Vietnam, who was having such a rough time that
he couldn't he couldn't express himself to his girlfriend back home.
So he was actually talking to his best friend saying,
like you talked to her, You tell her how I'm
doing because I can't express myself. It's better by you,
better than me. That's what the song's about. There's no
(19:31):
nothing about suicide in there. There's nothing about taking your
life or killing other people. It's just kind of like
a soul bearing song about somebody who's going through the
horrors of war. It's a good song it is a
good song, and I really like Judas Priest's version of
it too. It's like, I like Judas Priest, but I'm
(19:52):
also like, after a while, everything sounds like Motorhead in
a certain way. This does not. This sounds like Priest.
You know, it's really yead.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So it doesn't even it doesn't even sound that metal.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Actually no, it's it's almost like do wop?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, did you say do wop?
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Or do it?
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I said wow, See I said do wop? Everybody. I
definitely did not say do it.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Do it? Then.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I hope there are no bloodsucking attorneys listening, because that's
just what happened. This is where the story to me
gets a little gross because in nineteen eighty six, three
attorneys headed by a man named Ken McKenna, who was
quoted at one point of saying, I was born.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
To sue people. I guess is the dot dot dot.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
It sounds like a vanity plate.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It really born number two sue. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
So they mount a case, file a case rather a
lawsuit against Judas Priest and CBS Records, which and this
is just sort of a nitpicky thing, but it is
specifically was a product liability lawsuit, meaning the same kind
of lawsuit you would bring if any other product had
(21:10):
something that made you sick to your stomach.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Or something exactly. And in this case, the plaintiffs were
bringing this as if CBS Records and Judas Priests had
put out a product that had a harmful flaw to it,
which was these subliminal messages that had brought harm to
Ray and Jay, which had caused them to kill himself
and then attempt to kill himself. So that was essentially
(21:34):
what they were coming at it with, and they drew
a judge in Washoe County, where Reno is I think
the courthouse is in Reno. Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead heard
this case and in pre trial hearings he heard a
lot of expert testimony. He heard testimony from a lot
of junk science, scare quote experts, and he agreed to
(21:57):
hear the case. There was no jury, it was just him,
but he allowed the case to come to trial, and
just that was a landmark decision because what he's saying is,
I think there's enough possibility that what the plainis are
saying is right that these guys incerted subliminal messages that
got these kids to take their lives or attempt to
(22:18):
take their life, that I'm willing to hear lawyer's debate
whether it's correct or not.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
That's enormous right.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
And that it didn't get bumped because of the ASSI
free speech ruling because they were specifically because they were
subliminal messages, which to him, setting this president doesn't count
as free speech because there's no dialogue that can happen
where you can determine if something is correct or true.
(22:48):
And on top of that, even subliminal messages were invasion
of a right to privacy because the listener didn't know
this going into it and had no way of avoiding this.
So mark rulings. Another thing, two things I want to
point out here was part of this. Part of this
was because these attorneys stepped forward, of course, and they
(23:09):
thought they could make a lot of money. Part of
it was because these parents hated this music. These weren't
like rock and roll parents who were like, oh man,
I was kind of into that too, but it turned
my son wrong. These are people like when you see interviews.
I watched that documentary on YouTube.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
It's not very good.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
It was sort of from the time though that but
it showed a lot of the trial and interviews the
mom I believe it was James's mom.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
They asked her like what kind of music she was into,
and she liked music that her parents were into, so
people from like the nineteen forties and fifties, she was like,
you know, like Ry Rogers and the singing nun So
the idea of Judas Priest being in their household, they
hated this, so they're angry about that to begin with.
(23:57):
And then the other thing that people I don't think
thought about my which at the time was is that
Judas Priests like they were devastated by this. These were
big fans of theirs and Rob Halford and interviews was even like, well,
first of all, we're not inserting backward messages anyway, but
if we were, like, why it's ludicrous. Why would we
(24:17):
have our biggest fans and tell them to kill themselves?
And he's like, if anything, we would say buy more
shirts and buy more records. Yeah, and it like it
devastated them emotionally that these these kids took their lives
and that they loved Judas Priest and they were being
blamed for it.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, yeah, that really struck me too in reading quotes
from Rob Halfer is just the amount of empathy that
he had and that he was able to kind of
like cut through all the other stuff and be like,
you guys, don't lose sight of what this is all about.
These two kids, yeah like died, Yeah, and yeah, but
also at the same time defending their music and defending
(24:52):
their other fans too, saying like, don't pick on these
kids just because they listened to Judas Priests, Like, there's
nothing wrong with listening to Juwus Priest. It was a
really strange, awful position that the band was forced into by,
like you said, those ambulance chasing lawyers who created this
lawsuit out of whole cloth.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
The other thing too, from watching the documentary was just
the complete lack of and I'm not saying like parents
are responsible if a child takes their life, because there's,
like you said, there's so many things at work here,
but the complete and utter lack of these parents' ability
to look at the environment they were raised in was
(25:35):
just startling.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
The stepfather of James was an alcoholic and had a
gambling addiction, and when they asked her about it, in
court and cross examination, she couldn't even say the word alcoholic.
The wife she was just like, well, he had a
drinking problem, but James the quote was James would make
extremes out of situations. And then it cut to an
interview with her on the couch with her husband that said,
(25:59):
big deal, you had drinking problem, and like a lot
of people have drinking problems and their kids don't kill themselves.
And she said, everyone tries to blame everything on me,
and none of this is my fault.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
And you know, I'm having empathy for her.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Because she lost her child, but also just like the
utter lack of like it's all this rock band's fault
and nothing had to do with this. And the kids said,
like being raised in that home was awful, Like he
said that, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah, and not just him. I think his siblings also
were basically in the same boat. Yeah, and for sure
I read I read an article in Skeptical Inquirer by
one of the psychologists for the defense for Judas Priest
who was saying, like, this is not blaming the victims.
We're not blaming the victims here, but you can't not
(26:49):
take into account all of the other factors in these boys'
lives that made them extremely high risk for suicide. Yeah,
and to instead just ignore all that stuff like an
inability to stay employed, engaging in tons of crime, fighting,
trouble at school, fighting, being beaten at home, all of
(27:12):
these things put together. You can't just throw those out.
And it doesn't mean it's these kids' fault. And you know,
in a lot of ways it doesn't necessarily make it
the parents fault either, but it's certainly not the band's fault.
Like you're really failing to take any sort of tountability
if you're like you said, you're placing all the blame
on Judas Priest.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Yeah, absolutely so, totally all right. So they go to court.
The thing that they had to do to persuade Judge Whitehead,
they really had a four prong approach that they had
to prove in order to prove that Judas Priest and
CBS Records had at pay money. One is that there
was definitely a physically present message on that song that
(27:54):
you could identify. They brought in this guy, William nick
Loff Junior, who this is For some reason this struck
me as funny. He had a business that specialized in
detecting subliminal messages, but it went out business.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
He also made money selling subliminal message tapes himself, those
self help tapes that supposedly help people that quit smoking
and lose weight. Right, He also made money doing.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
That, right, So he supposed he was an expert at
that kind of thing. He you know, isolated and slowed
down and amplified the parts of the song that supposedly
said do it. We'll get to you know, the outcome
of that later. And then he also played some of
the backward masking stuff in court.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, so that's really important too, Like there were two
components to this. If you listened to it regularly, you
heard do it. If you listened to it backwards, you
heard all of those other satanic messages right, right. That
wasn't clear to me at first. It took a little
while to kind of sink in. So they were trying
to get them both ways, forward and backward.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Yeah, But the one thing that I don't get is
in try well, they were talking about just lyrics in general,
and that's the stuff that should have been protected by
free speech. Because the judge even said at the beginning,
like nothing that the only thing that matters here is
the subliminal messages. That's the only thing this case hinges on.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, but I think back masking would fall into subliminal
messages too. Well.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
No, no, I'm saying they were just talking about regular lyrics
on the album.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Oh gotcha, probably just prove the case or established the
case that Judas Priest was evil.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
You know. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So one of the things that really helped the plaintiffs
that came from Rob Halford is on the stand. He
was asked like, have you ever included any back mask
lyrics and he said, yeah, we actually have before. And
it was not too hide any kind of secret message
or anything like that. But it was a cool effect
(29:50):
playing something backwards when you listen to it forward. That
was the point of it. But the plaintiff lawyers were like,
case closed basically, and of course the case wasn't closed,
but it was not. It was not. It didn't help
the defense at all.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
No, for sure. And that was the second prong. First one,
like I said, was there was an identifiable message. The
second one was that they deliberately put it there. Yeah,
if they're going to be held liable, so yeah, just
the fact that they did that at all, does it
mean anything, because a lot of bands were doing that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, just read our chapter on backmasking, go do it.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
But they couldn't. But they rob however, couldn't say no,
we've never done this, right, which would have been really
helpful if you've done it once, who knows if you've
done it before, right, So there was another one. The
next part that they had to prove was that these
messages were in fact subliminal, because the point of them
being subliminal is that you couldn't resist the messages you
(30:51):
were getting because you couldn't identify them, and you couldn't
be like, this is not this is not right. And
so the idea that there was such a thing as
subliminal messaging. Apparently there was a guy named Wilson Key
And I don't know, did you say that he didn't
actually testify at the trial, but he was an advisor
to say like William nick Lough.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I mean he basically he literally wrote the book
on subliminal advertising. Yeah, and they interviewed him a lot,
like he never took the stand, I think, but they
used a lot of his like quoted testimony to back
up their case.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yeah, And he was a hammer, and subliminal advertising is
the nail. Like he saw it everywhere. He saw the
word sex and the ridges of a Ritz Cracker on
the box, that old chestnut. That like there was a
naked woman hidden in the ice cubes of a Johnny
Walker ad that came from him. He said, it was
in the Sears catalog, as in the assistin chapel. It
(31:45):
was everywhere. That just subliminal messaging was everywhere in the
media and it worked. That was the point then that
really helped bolster that plaintiff's case that the messages were
and then they also needed to show that subliminal messages
could create the impulse to die by suicide.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
By the way, I got a quote, a real quote
from Wilson Okay, Wilson Key on science. He said, science
is pretty much what you can get away with at
any point in time.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
At least he didn't say that he's a self taught neuroscientist,
but it's definitely in the same ballpark.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
That's a good point, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
So you said they had to prove that they contributed
to that impulse, those messages contributed to the impulse to
take someone's life. They brought in the plane was brought
in a guy named Howard Chevron. This guy was an
actual legitimate clinical psychologist, very respected guy. Yeah, and he
is the guy that basically in court showed experiments that
(32:55):
showed how the unconscious mind and the conscious mind operate
and how they're separate, but how they do interact with
one another, and that subliminal messages are potentially very very
powerful because your brain is confusing it.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
And here's it as a truth.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, and this guy, like you said, he was legit.
He back in the sixties, he in a colleague essentially
proved that Freud's theories on the unconscious mind were right,
that we do have an unconscious mind. They detected it
by showing subliminal messaging to people or images and then
you know, analyzing their brain waves and they were like, yep,
this is actually a thing. He went too far, though,
(33:36):
and he attributed way too much potency to subliminal messages
on the unconscious mind. And he essentially said that when
the unconscious mind gets its hands on a subliminal messager,
is presented with a subliminal message, it doesn't understand that
it's just been it's just taken. It externally and so
(33:56):
the mind confuses it as an internally generated thought and
it gets all it's accorded, all of the importance that
your own thoughts and beliefs are given even though somebody
else told you to do it. You just don't understand
it like that. So yeah, ergo, if you suddenly have
this idea like, oh, I should kill myself, even if
(34:16):
it's subliminal, you might act on it.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Right, Yeah, too far.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I believe he was a guy in court too that
said that was talking about just their lyrics and their
anti religious connotations, which I didn't you know, it just
cut right there. So I don't see if the judge
was like irrelevant or whatever, because again that's the part
that was supposedly not on trial.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, let's take our break.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
All right, let's take our final break here, and we'll
talk about the defense case and the ruling right after this.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Okay, So we went over the plaintiff's case and judas
priests had defense pretty well established. One. Essentially, they had
to show number one that the words do it were
not actually the words do it, that they were random
sounds that to the ear, especially once somebody pointed it
out to you that it sounded like do it. You
(35:31):
would hear is do it? And so I couldn't find
it anyway.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
I couldn't either.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, I listened over and over to that section, and
I just don't hear it at all.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
But apparently if somebody is pointing it out, especially if
they're slowing it down and isolating it and all that, yeah,
you supposedly hear do it. It was played over and
over again in the court, So there is something there
enough that no one said objection, this doesn't sound anything
like it. And it became like just one of the
central components of this, like do it is? Do it there?
(36:05):
Is it purposely there? And then conversely, on the defensive side,
does do it even exist? Like are these actual words?
And so a lot of weird stuff happened. Rob Halford
sang better better buy you better than Me in the
witness Box, and he was basically showing how he likes
to say ea at the end of like every line.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, it was a very interesting part because they were like,
you know, and why do you do that? Like it
was an implication. He was like, he's like just the
emotion of the song, and you know, like basically, I'm
just a singer man.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, Satan told me to.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah, well he shouldn't have said that, but he let
it slip.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
So, just like how the Plainliffs brought in nick Lough,
William Nicklough as sound engineer, the defense brought in their
own sound engineer, and they managed to slow it down
and essentially prove that do it was just a random
combination of sounds, not even speech.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
Yeah, but it was a.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Combination of a guitar sound and Rob Halford the lead singer,
exhaling on the line, and that you put those together
if you listen to a certain way, especially if somebody
said sounds like do it, doesn't it? You could hear
do it?
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yeah, there were like three more things though. It was
in that big, big article from the Village Voice. I
just can't remember. I know, the high hat that had
something to do with it, and like some sort of
an echo. But yeah, the point is they were like,
do it's not even in here? So why are we
even in here? Is what they were thinking.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, again, still having empathy this whole time. One of
the most troubling parts of this trial for the defense,
of course, is having to you know, cross examine these
families and talk about the history of depression and these
anti social behaviors that these boys had. Like one of
these guys, and this is seven years before Columbine, one
(37:57):
of them. I don't think it was Jay, I think
it was Raymond. It was Raymond talked about getting automatic
weapons and like shooting up large gatherings. And you know,
the defense attorney's asking this this mom, like, like, can
you agree that to hear something like this, you know,
something is wrong with your son. And she's like, well,
I don't understand what your question is, Like, what do
(38:19):
you mean something's wrong with them? And she was just
you know, it was a tough tough thing to bring
the sister out and say, like, you had two previous
suicide attempts and you never listened to this music, right.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
She's like, no, I just listened to Roy Rogers.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
It was all very hard to watch because they had
to paint a picture of their unhappy home life and
their unhappy childhood.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, but it was I mean, there was just no
way of mounting a defense without of course doing that,
you know. But yeah, from what I could tell in
that Dream Deceiver long form article, the all members of
Judas Priest found it very distasteful.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
But yeah, they all.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Seemed to understand they had to do this, but none
of them were happy about doing it. Yeah, and they
were all I mean, it wasn't just Rob Halford, like
all of them were deeply affected by this and having
to hear the story of what happened to these kids,
and like it haunted them. For sure.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
They were mad in there.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
They were mad that they had been dragged into court
across the pond over this ridiculous stuff. But at the
same time, they were definitely affected by what had created
this whole kerfuffle.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yeah, I saw too. Halford was really just upset that
it was America. He was like, this is a country
that was always so good to us, and we loved
America so much, and you know, to be taken to
court in America was just really hard for us. And
you know, they sat there every day in the trial.
And I wasn't the biggest Judas Priest guy because I
just didn't listen to a lot of that kind of.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Music, But like they were good dudes.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Yeah, you know, yeah, I've always respected Rob Halford for
coming out in the metal community. You know, like he
was as far as I know, the first and maybe
even still the last so far.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I mean, can you imagine if they knew he was
gay at the time, what they were done in that trial.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
No, because this was a really bizarre time in American history,
and there was just so much boldness to take somebody
to court over things like free speech, over things like obscenity,
just over moral policing. There was no qualms about taking
somebody to court over morality. So, yeah, you're right, who
knows that they would have done? Yeah, for sure. So
(40:30):
there was also the point of essentially debunking all the
pseudoscience that the plaintiff's witnesses had spouted from the witness stand,
And luckily they were basically able to do that. They
were All they had to do was say, there's zero
body of literature in the scientific corpus that suggests that
(40:53):
this is even remotely possible that at best, studies that
have shown an effect from subliminal messages could maybe disturb you,
could maybe trigger anxiety in you that certainly couldn't actually
create behavior, and certainly not behavior as monumental as suicide.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah for sure. And they use like the opposite just
help prove their point. They were like, when people like
want to lose weight and quit smoking more than anything else,
and they buy these books and tapes with subliminal messages
supposedly to help them do it. They're trying to do
this and using it as an aid, and it's still
not helping them achieve that goal. It doesn't work. It's
(41:35):
not working.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, that definitely helped their case too. So the defense
put up a pretty good well defense and just kind
of picked apart a lot of the plaintiff's case. But
ultimately it was up to Judge Whitehead, who, from what
I read in that article was just his face was
totally impassive. He didn't let on anything that he'd taken
in on any given day, and so I don't know
(41:59):
that they had any clue how it was going to go.
And so he ruled in favor of judas priests. He
ruled against the plaintiffs, and like you said, the plaintiffs
that brought this is essentially a product liability case, but
Whitehead viewed it instead as an invasion of privacy case.
And the big difference between those two is intent. And
(42:19):
I think Attorney McKenna put it like, if you're in
a Ford. Pinnow that blows up. It doesn't matter whether
Ford didn't mean for that to happen, it still happened.
The harm was done. But if it's invasion of privacy,
there has to be intent. And so Judge Whitehead essentially said,
I believe that subliminal messages are real. I believe that
they can impact behavior, but I don't think judas priests
(42:42):
intentionally put these in there. And I'm ruling in favor
of judas priests.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yeah, I mean, looking back, it was a totally sensible
decision on a case that never should have been brought.
But it still feels like a bit of a brave
decision for a a loone judge to make without the
assistance of a jury, don't you think.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, for sure. I mean he added to the free
speech body of law. That's enormous. That's an enormous ruling
just from that, just by ruling that subliminal messages are
not protected speech. And then yeah, in his ruling, he
didn't do anything to debunk the idea that there were
subliminal messages and that they could affect us, and that
(43:26):
metal bands are putting them in their records. So the
fact that he didn't say that that wasn't correct. Actually
bolstered people's viewpoints of that later on in other criminal cases.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Yeah, in the end, Judas Priest spent about a quarter
of a million bucks in their defense.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Did not do the conversion on that for some weird reason.
But i'd sufvise just to say it's a lot more
now I feel hollow.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
CBS was ordered to pay forty thousand dollars to those
plaintive attorneys as cost reimbursement for not complying with discovery reorders.
It all came down to their providing the master tapes
for the song. They went back and forth saying that
they didn't have them, and then finally I think after
a long time, they did provide them, but there was
(44:15):
chunks missing that, you know, the conspiracy minded plane of
attorney said was them sort of whitewashing it.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
And they said when they did receive the.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Master tapes they were sort of like flaking apart, and
that they didn't want to even they didn't even play
them because they didn't want to assume any responsibility for them.
So it was just sort of a mess in that
discovery period. So they ended up having to pay them
forty grand.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
But yeah, yeah, so the Christian Wright kept going after
metal bands for a while after this, and you might say, like, well,
how did this ever stop, Like how did it end?
It didn't, and they just changed targets and once rap
music became a thing in the late eighties, yeah, they started.
There was a new moral panic, and in fact, that
(45:00):
same year, in nineteen ninety, two Live Crew was arrested
for obscenity in Florida and went on trial and ended
up prevailing. As well.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
I had a great idea the other day that I
can't remember now that had to do a two Live Crew.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Probably their free speech Crusade.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Wasn't a podcast episode, it was something else. It was like,
I don't know, it was a good title for something
that had to do.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
With Two Life Crew. Okay, hey we want some podcasts?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Was that it miso podcast?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Well?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Sadly we should mention that. As for Jay, he only
lived a few years after that.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
He went to.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
A mental health facility for depression, and it's very hard
to find out exactly what happened because they, I know,
he suffered from an overdose, went to a coma for
a few days, showed no brain activity and died, but
there is dispute between the parties over whether or not
that was a suicide or whether it was an accidental
(46:03):
overdose of methadone, whether or not the plug was pulled.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
Like I couldn't get any straight answers.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, it seems that for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, because they wanted that lawsuit to continue, they appealed,
of course, and I imagine a suicide probably would not
have helped their case any So maybe that had something
to do with that.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
I don't know. And despite feeling betrayed by America, Judas
Priestill tours here and if you want to see them,
they will be at the Alliant Energy Powerhouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
September twenty first.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
I've never seen them. I'd love to.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
I bet I would love too.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
Well, you got anything else, nothing else.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Nothing else here either, which means, of course, everybody, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Appropriately you're going to talk about streaming music. Hey, guys,
went to your New York show the highlight of my year.
I've worked in the music industry for nearly a decade
and must give you guys kudos for summing up the
streaming debacle so well well I have a few additions
that may add color to the situation, namely that it
was a crisis for the industry and Spotify is credited
with saving the fan consumption model for music. Still, Spotify
(47:12):
is in a power struggle with the labels, and because
they pay out seventy percent of the total revenue to labels,
they lobby for lower payout rates for musicians and songwriters
to achieve profitability to a loophole involving audio books and bundles.
As of May twenty twenty four, Spotify will be paying
songwriters approximately one hundred and fifty million dollars less per year.
(47:33):
Spotify is kind of in a three way standoff with labels.
Without label owned content like Drake and Taylor Swift, no
one would use Spotify, but labels need stores like Spotify
and Apple for fan consumption. It's a convoluted power dynamic
that has trickled down effects on music that most fans
don't even recognize.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Keep finding the good fight, guys. That's from Nate in
New York, New York.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Thanks a lot, Nate, thanks for that email. Thanks for
coming to see us too. That was a fun show.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
A town hall totally.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
If you want to be like Nate. You can come
see us too wherever we perform live in the meantime,
You can also send us an email send it off
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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