It was always the same offenders: Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. In the late ’70s and ’80s, rock and heavy metal groups were frequently accused of using backmasking – audio recorded backwards but played forwards – for malevolent ends. Christian groups argued that tracks like The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9′, The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ contained subliminal messages designed to turn music-obsessed teens into Satan worshippers. This 1983 footage shows Christian televangelists dissecting the music of Led Zeppelin in an attempt to unearth the hidden messages within.
The history of backmasking begins with Thomas Edison, who invented the first audio playback device, the phonograph, in 1877. He soon noticed that music played in reverse sounded “sweet but altogether different.” The avant-garde composers of the 1950s went on to explore the uncanniness of reversed audio, running reel-to-reel tape recorders backwards and incorporating the resulting sound into their compositions.
Ten years down the line, The Beatles, themselves inspired by these avant-gardists, began experimenting with backwards recordings in ‘Rain’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever. The origins of Led Zeppelin’s association with backmasking and satanism lie with infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, who, in 1913, wrote that those looking to explore the realm of Magick would do well to “learn how to think and speak backwards.” Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was obsessed with Crowley. He even bought his famously haunted house on the southeast side of Loch Ness.
In 1982, a Christian minister named Michael Mills claimed that ‘Stairway To Heaven’ contained the backmasked messages: “master Satan”, “serve me”, and “there’s no escaping it”. Evangelist Paul Crouch agreed. In 1982, he claimed the song featured the backwards lyrics: “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.”
The whole furore surrounding backmasking seems ridiculous now, but it was once the bane of countless teenage music lovers, who, thanks to the paranoia of religious groups, were taught to feel intense guilt for enjoying certain types of music. You’ll find the above footage easy to dismiss, but take a moment to think about all the people in the audience who appear utterly convinced. For them, rock music was the devil’s work, and they wouldn’t have wanted their children anywhere near it.