On 27 April 1982 the California State Assembly's Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee sat in Sacramento and listened to "Stairway to Heaven" played backwards. A witness named William Yarroll, a self-described neuroscientific researcher, told the members that the brain could decode speech buried in reverse on rock records, and Assemblyman Phil Wyman wanted a state law requiring a warning label on any record that carried a backward message. The English quartet whose eight minute song had been sworn in that afternoon was Led Zeppelin, and its label, Swan Song, answered in a single dry sentence: its turntables, a spokesman said, played in only one direction.
That afternoon holds the whole heavy metal controversy in a single room. The accusers handled a record the way a seventeenth century witch-finder handled the woman strapped to his ducking stool, swinging the plank out over the millpond and plunging it under, reading guilt into every bubble that broke the surface, and ready to call it innocent only once it had sunk without a sound. Vinyl never sinks quietly.
Across the decade that followed, from church halls in Minnesota and a Senate committee room in Washington to a district courtroom in Reno, Nevada, the music was accused of hiding the devil in its grooves, of steering teenagers towards violence and suicide and of rotting the minds of the people who bought it, and every one of the famous lawsuits that put a record before an American judge ended with the band cleared. The music's own story, from Aston to the Swedish revival, runs through the heavy metal overview. Its charge sheet ran alongside, and it is longer than most fans remember.
Played backwards: the evangelists and the tape machine
Backmasking, the trick of recording a sound in reverse so that it makes sense only when the tape runs the wrong way, was studio furniture long before anyone called it sinister; The Beatles had run vocal and guitar tapes backwards on "Rain" and on Revolver in 1966, and engineers copied them for the sheer strangeness of the noise. The accusation came later. It came from the pulpit.
By the early 1980s travelling evangelists were holding seminars on hidden messages, playing reversed rock records to church audiences and letting each congregation hear what it had just been told it would hear. The youth preacher Jacob Aranza put the case into print in 1983 as Backward Masking Unmasked, and the heresy hunters had their manual. Heavy metal, loud, dark and fond of the devil as a subject, was the natural suspect.
The Huntington Park quartet that answered the preachers by doing exactly what it stood accused of was Slayer, which opened Hell Awaits, released by Metal Blade in April 1985, with a chant of voices recorded in reverse, a two word invitation that anyone with a turntable could spin backwards by hand and hear in plain English. Nobody was fooled. Everybody was delighted.
Science took the tape machine apart the same year. The psychologists John Vokey and Don Read, at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, recorded passages including the Twenty-Third Psalm and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" in reverse and played them to volunteers, who drew no meaning from backward speech, could not be steered by it, and heard a hidden message only once someone had told them what it was meant to say. The results ran in American Psychologist in 1985. The seminars carried on regardless.
The sticker at the centre of the heavy metal controversy
The Parents Music Resource Center, the Washington lobby founded in May 1985, put "Eat Me Alive", from Judas Priest's Defenders of the Faith, on its list of fifteen objectionable songs and carried the list to a Senate committee that September. What came out of the hearing was an object. On 1 November 1985 the member companies of the Recording Industry Association of America, the labels' trade body, agreed to mark records they themselves judged explicit, and from 1990 the mark became the standard black and white Parental Advisory logo still printed today.
The sticker went onto the sleeve like a quarantine notice nailed to a cottage door in a plague year, and it worked on teenagers exactly the way a quarantine notice has never once worked on anybody under seventeen, marking the one house in the street worth breaking into. The retailers were less amused.
Walmart, the discount chain that sold more records than any other retailer in America, refused to stock albums that carried the sticker from soon after its introduction, which pushed labels into making edited versions for its racks. In July 1990 the Louisiana legislature passed a bill that would have made selling a stickered record to an unmarried minor under seventeen a criminal offence carrying fines of up to five thousand dollars, until Governor Buddy Roemer vetoed it, questioning its constitutionality.
Radio had been refusing the music for years without any law at all. American album rock stations of the early 1980s built their playlists around established names and the adult listeners advertisers wanted, leaving little room for a new metal band, which routinely reached the Billboard 200 on the strength of touring and word of mouth rather than radio. The exceptions proved the rule. The Long Beach station KNAC turned to a full time hard rock and metal format on 8 January 1986 and held it until 15 February 1995, when it switched to Spanish language programming as KBUE.
In Britain the refusal came from the BBC. The East London band that took a horror film song to the top of the chart in the closing days of 1990 was Iron Maiden, with "Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter", written by Bruce Dickinson for a Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack. Radio 1 kept the single off its daytime playlist and Top of the Pops showed barely a minute of the band performing it live, so that the station's own chart show had to announce a number one it would not otherwise play on 30 December 1990. The record shows the band did not need the help.
Suicide Solution and the First Amendment
The Aston singer fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 and launched as a solo act the following year was Ozzy Osbourne, and "Suicide Solution" closed the first side of his debut, Blizzard of Ozz, written with the guitarist Randy Rhoads and the bassist Bob Daisley. Daisley has said he wrote the words about Osbourne's own drinking, and Osbourne described the song as a warning about alcohol, tying it to the death of the AC/DC singer Bon Scott in February 1980.
On 26 October 1984 John McCollum, aged 19, died by suicide at his family's home in Indio, California. His parents sued Osbourne and CBS Records in 1985, arguing that the song, and messages they said were buried in it, had encouraged his death.
The courts in Los Angeles took the complaint apart without ceremony. The Superior Court dismissed it on 19 December 1986, and on 12 July 1988 the California Court of Appeal held that the song was protected speech, applying the test the Supreme Court had set in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, under which speech loses that protection only when it is aimed at producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. The judges dropped the complaint into that test the way an assayer drops a doubtful nugget into nitric acid, and the claim fizzed away like base metal while the song came out of the beaker untouched.
The claim fizzed away like base metal while the song came out of the beaker untouched.
A song about despair, the court found, is not an instruction to act on it. Later suits over the same track ended the same way, among them Waller v. Osbourne, brought in Georgia after the death of Michael Waller, sixteen, in 1986, in which a federal judge granted judgment for Osbourne on 6 May 1991 and the Eleventh Circuit upheld it in 1992.
Reno, 1990: Judas Priest on trial
On 23 December 1985, in Sparks, Nevada, Raymond Belknap, 18, and James Vance, 20, shot themselves. Belknap died that day. Vance survived with severe injuries and died on 29 November 1988. Their families sued Judas Priest and CBS Records, claiming that the words "do it", hidden beneath "Better by You, Better than Me", a Spooky Tooth song the band had covered on the 1978 album Stained Class, had led the two young men to act.
The Birmingham band that flew to Nevada in July 1990 to sit through a nineteen day trial about a cover version was Judas Priest, and the case, heard without a jury by Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead in the Washoe County District Court, turned on a point no court had yet settled. The judge had ruled beforehand that a subliminal message, unheard by the listener, was not speech the First Amendment protected, so the families had only to prove the message was there and that it caused the deaths.
The experts went at the master tapes the way a bomb squad goes at a suitcase left on an airport concourse, clearing the hall, X-raying the lining, snipping the straps one at a time, and finding inside exactly what the owner had packed, a guitar figure and a singer breathing out between two lines. Rob Halford supplied the comedy. On the stand he played other passages of the album in reverse to show the gibberish any recording yields when it runs backwards, a request for a peppermint among it.
They found inside exactly what the owner had packed, a guitar figure and a singer breathing out between two lines.
Whitehead ruled for the band and the label on 24 August 1990. He found that the sounds were a chance combination of the guitar and Halford's exhalation, that nothing had been placed there on purpose, and that the families had not shown the messages could produce such an act, though he fined CBS 40,000 dollars for being slow to hand over the master recordings. The documentary Dream Deceivers, made by David Van Taylor in 1992, followed the families and the case.
| Case | Where and when | The claim | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| McCollum v. CBS and Osbourne | Los Angeles, 1985–1988 | "Suicide Solution" encouraged a death | Dismissed December 1986, dismissal upheld on appeal July 1988 |
| Vance and Belknap v. Judas Priest and CBS | Reno, 1986–1990 | A subliminal message on Stained Class | Judgment for the band and the label, 24 August 1990 |
| Louisiana labelling bill | Baton Rouge, 1990 | Ban on selling stickered records to minors | Vetoed by Governor Buddy Roemer, July 1990 |
| Waller v. Osbourne | Georgia, 1988–1992 | "Suicide Solution" encouraged a death | Judgment for Osbourne 1991, upheld 1992 |
The pulpit and the bonfire
The satanic panic of the 1980s, the belief spread by talk shows and police seminars that devil worshipping cults were abusing children across America, swept heavy metal into the same net as role playing games and day care centres, and no such network was ever found.
The three Minnesota brothers who turned the objection into a public ceremony were Dan, Steve and Jim Peters, whose Zion Christian Life Center ministry in St Paul held its first record burning on 24 November 1979, and their bonfires ran like a harvest festival turned backwards, the congregation carrying the year's crop of Kiss and AC/DC albums up to the altar not to be blessed but to be heaped onto the flames.
Bob Larson made the objection a career. The radio evangelist had published Rock and the Church in 1971, and through the 1980s his call-in programme put teenage metal fans on the air to argue with him, which gave the music more airtime on Christian radio than it ever got from the album rock stations. On any honest reading, the pulpit was the most reliable promoter the music had all decade.
When The Number of the Beast went round America in 1982, church groups picketed shows and burned or smashed copies of the record. A record declared anathema on Sunday was in half the school's bedrooms by the following weekend.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
Folk devils in denim
The Johannesburg-born sociologist who gave the language the phrase moral panic was Stanley Cohen, who built it in Folk Devils and Moral Panics in 1972 out of the way British newspapers had turned the seaside fights of mods and rockers in 1964 into a national emergency. His sequence, a group cast as a threat, newspapers that inflate it, experts who pronounce on it and authorities who act, fits the heavy metal fan better than the rockers it was written for.
The folk devil had a uniform and a face by the middle of the 1980s. Heavy Metal Parking Lot, shot by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn on 31 May 1986 in the car park of the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, before a Judas Priest concert, caught the fans drinking and posing for the camera and passed from hand to hand for years on copied videotape. In 1993 MTV gave the stereotype two permanent residents in Beavis and Butt-Head, a pair of teenagers in AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts.
In Britain the stereotype reached a courtroom. Sophie Lancaster, 20, was attacked with her boyfriend in a park in Bacup, Lancashire, on 11 August 2007, because of the way they dressed, and died of her injuries thirteen days later; two of the teenagers involved were convicted of her murder in March 2008. In April 2013 Greater Manchester Police became the first force in the country to record attacks on people from alternative subcultures as hate crimes.
In the United States the stereotype became evidence. In 1994 three teenagers from West Memphis, Arkansas, were convicted of the murders of three eight year old boys in May 1993, at a trial where prosecutors argued the killings were a satanic ritual and put Damien Echols's reading habits and taste in heavy metal before the jury as evidence of that belief. All three were released in August 2011 on Alford pleas, which let them maintain their innocence while pleading guilty.
The laboratory and the lecture hall
The first wave of research came at the fans like a trawler dragging a beam net across the seabed, ripping up the weed beds, the old boots and the fish together and landing the whole heap on the quayside as a single species. Jeffrey Arnett's 1991 study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that boys who loved heavy metal reported more reckless behaviour than boys who did not, and Arnett himself argued that the music reflected that restlessness rather than causing it.
A 1994 paper by Steven Stack, Jim Gundlach and Jimmie Reeves set heavy metal magazine subscription rates against youth suicide rates across American states and reported a correlation; its critics answered that a correlation is not a cause. Later work turned the picture round. The psychologist Adrian North, at Heriot-Watt University, surveyed more than 36,000 people in over 60 countries and reported in 2008 that metal fans and classical fans were strikingly alike, creative and at ease with themselves.
At the University of Queensland in 2015, Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle made 39 extreme metal listeners angry on purpose, played them their own choice of the music, and found it steadied their heart rate and hostility rather than inflaming it. The same year, in the journal Self and Identity, a Humboldt State University team led by Tasha Howe reported that adults who had been metal fans in the 1980s were about as well adjusted in middle age as their peers who had not been. The barrage of good news arrived thirty years late.
The Chicago sociologist who treated the fans as a culture rather than a symptom was Deena Weinstein, whose Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology appeared in 1991, two years before the musicologist Robert Walser's Running with the Devil set metal guitar solos beside Bach and Vivaldi and took both seriously, and Keith Kahn-Harris's Extreme Metal followed in 2007.
The universities tried to take the music in the way an entomologist takes a wasp, dropping it into the killing jar, pinning it to cork and labelling it in Latin, and found that this specimen went on buzzing in the cabinet. The first academic conference given over to heavy metal met in Salzburg in November 2008, the International Society for Metal Music Studies followed in 2013, and its journal Metal Music Studies began publishing in 2015.
The faithful never needed the footnotes. What the courts, the pulpits and the laboratories all missed was the thing people actually bought the tickets for, a singer pushing a note past all reason in a hall full of people answering him, and that belongs to the voice and the ritual. The trials ended. The concerts did not.
