Last week’s massive international celebration of Vinyl Record Day (wait – you say that big party they showed on TV was about the Olympics?) reminded me of my teenage fascination with backmasking and its (occasionally) unintentional counterpart, the backward “secret message.” And that memory, in turn, reminded me of the single dumbest thing I ever did with a recorded piece of music.

First, concerning backward messages: As a fan of bands like Led Zeppelin and Electric Light Orchestra during the ’70s, I had of course heard stories about the backmasking those bands allegedly (and, in at least one case, actually) used on their records. I had heard the following clip before, but only this past weekend did I find that someone had interpreted the “lyrics” to say, “Oh here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” In retrospect, it should have been obvious all along…

Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (backward)

My interest was piqued, however, during the extended bout of Beatlemania with which I was afflicted after John Lennon’s death. It was while reading Nicholas Schaffner’s essential book The Beatles Forever that I became obsessed with exploring all the “clues” identified during the “Paul is Dead” hysteria of 1969, including the supposed White Album backward incantations “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him” (at the end of “I’m So Tired”) and “Turn me on, dead man” (during “Revolution 9”).

The Beatles - Revolution 9 (backward)

The trouble was, at the turn of the ’80s my dad had bought me one of those newfangled linear-tracking phonographs; among its many flaws was an inability to reverse the direction of the turntable, so I couldn’t play records backward. I had to wait until a day when my parents weren’t home to use my dad’s turntable, fearing the whole time that I’d either break the phonograph or scratch up the numbered, first-printing copy of the White Album that I’d found at a second-hand store outside Cleveland. Fortunately, neither disaster occurred; unfortunately, I couldn’t scrounge up a turntable to use at school when my sophomore-year World History teacher assigned an oral report on an incidence of “Mass Hysteria,” and I chose (of course) to discuss the “Paul is Dead” hoax. (The things I got away with in high school…) (more…)