by George Case
But though rock stars including Led Zeppelin were certainly putting inverted sounds onto their records, they never thought of using them to implant coded statements that could only be deciphered by listening to the discs rotated counterclockwise. That was the fans’ idea. Some of the sharper or more attuned members of the audience must have deduced that the strange sounds on “Are You Experienced” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” were manipulated audio tracks, and, through trial and error and some damage to turntables and styli, started to uncover exactly what had gone into them. At the same time, as figures such as the members of the Beatles and Bob Dylan withdrew from public appearances, followers tried to detect more in their work than just the music. Millions of young record buyers felt such artists were so influential that no lack of accessibility could keep them from reading something into the albums—perhaps their heroes were trying to convey secrets too incriminating or revolutionary or upsetting to be spelled out as verses and choruses for anyone (including parents or police) to hear.
The most shocking of these secrets was the information that Beatle Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident and replaced by a double. Rumors that “Paul is dead” were rife across American campuses in 1969, as the Beatles’ album covers and songs were minutely analyzed for what turned out to be an impressive range of “clues” offered to the studious. One of the most persuasive of these was John Lennon’s nonsense syllables muttered at the end of “I’m So Tired” from the “White Album”: Played backward, they sounded like Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him. Played backward, the sound collage “Revolution #9” also revealed something that sounded like Turn me on, dead man. From the rich apocrypha of “Paul is dead” it was not long before any popular rock ’n’ roll outfit could be given the same treatment. Though the musicians involved sometimes denied any attempt to “hoax” the public—as did all the Beatles, including McCartney himself—there were simply too many listeners chasing too few musicians for every last rumor to be duly discredited. Then, in November 1971, Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album, including the standout “Stairway to Heaven.”
Because it was never issued as a single, and because Led Zeppelin were not, for all their sold-out concerts and number one records, the most visible group of their decade, it was some time before anyone alleged that “Stairway to Heaven” carried its own program of backward messages. Perhaps this cult status helped engender the allegations in the first place—after all, if Led Zeppelin were hiding Satanic imprecations in their songs, they wouldn’t have rushed to broadcast them to all and sundry, would they? It’s possible that, in 1973 or 1978, some gathering of stoned teenagers somewhere in America put their favorite Led Zep epic on the turntable and, knowing the folklore of other rock artists’ “signs,” decided to spin the album the wrong way around. Not knowing what they were about to hear—with no preconceived results in mind—they might have been surprised, and a little spooked, to hear slurred phrases that almost sounded like There is no escaping it…. Here’s to my sweet Satan… for it makes me sad, whose power is Satan… I will sing because I live with Satan…. Back in class the next day, the story was told and retold, and, to anyone who wanted to believe it, there was no turning back. Perhaps.
Led Zeppelin had been disbanded for almost two years before the backward-message rumor was aired in public. In 1982 a Louisiana pastor named Jacob Aranza had published a slim tract titled Backward Masking Unmasked: Backward Satanic Messages of Rock and Roll Exposed, which raised the issue of a Satanic subtext in “Stairway to Heaven” and other songs. The same year, the California State Assembly held a hearing of the Committee on Consumer Protection and Toxic Materials where, on April 27, legislators heard rock songs by Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Styx, Electric Light Orchestra, and Black Oak Arkansas that were claimed by witness William H. Yarroll to contain backward messages. Colorado-based Yarroll, described as both a neuroscientist and a management consultant, told the committee that pro-Satan encryptions were obligatory duties on the part of musicians who had agreed to “perform certain things” in service of the devil. “The potential for manipulation of people completely unaware of what is going on here is truly staggering,” said Assemblyman Phillip D. Wyman, a Republican, while Democrat Chairwoman Sally Tanner agreed that the messages were “a very serious matter…. I think we have to look a lot further in this.” By June, federal representative Robert Dornan, another Republican from California, had introduced a bill in Congress providing for warning labels on records found to contain backward messages.
The anti-rock movement had been encouraged by the conservative swing in American politics (capped with Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980), and thus the hunting down of occult influences in pop music was part of a larger social reaction against the so-called moral permissiveness of the previous decades. Later in the 1980s, the Congressional Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) held hearings investigating “porn rock” as purveyed by a variety of acts, and a veritable Satanism scare swept the nation, leading to hysterical accusations of ritual abuse of children at day care centers, the diabolic undertones of the Dungeons & Dragons board game, and supposed Satanic motives in several murder cases. Backward masking in famous rock songs was noted as another symptom of the epidemic. Religious zealots led the crusade, as exampled by one preacher on a widely distributed “educational” tape titled Satan’s Secret Sabotage:
…These bands are singing about voodooism, the Occult, Satan, drugs and sex, and far more…. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is a devout follower of the teachings of Aleister Crowley and presently lives in the former Occultist’s mansion, known as the Boleskine House, overlooking the lake where the Loch Ness monster lives…. This mansion features an underground passageway where Crowley held human sacrificial ceremonies to Satan. This is the same passageway that now leads to his grave…. Herein lies the connection in Aleister Crowley’s Book of Magic: that one of his Occultic teachings should be that we should learn to talk backwards, write backwards, and play phonographic records backward, and this inspired and encouraged the use of back masking in the record industry and directly tied it to the Occult, and this was to become the channel for Satanically infiltrating the minds of unsuspecting people.
Musicians and the music business, for their part, reacted with incredulity to the backward-masking stigma. “Swan Song is in the business of making records that play in one direction,” Lauren Siciliano of Led Zeppelin’s private label was quoted. “We’ve never recorded anything backward intentionally.” Another Swan Song official asked, “What’s wrong with you people anyhow? Playing a record backward will blow your turntable.” Bob Merlis of Warner Brothers called the indictments “a non-issue…. The fact that some fanatics are looking at it is amusing. To use state money to investigate the matter goes from amusing to ridiculous.”
The irony was that all the attention put on backward masking, especially on the prime suspect of “Stairway to Heaven,” actually promoted the search for hidden messages in rock songs among listeners to whom such fantasies would otherwise never have occurred. Just as the witch trials of medieval Europe likely introduced the concept of devil worship to those who might not otherwise have considered it while condemning the mostly innocent people who were accused of it, so did the likes of Jacob Aranza and William H. Yarroll inspire thousands of fans to go back to their copies of Led Zeppelin IV (or buy the record for the first time) and listen for the Satanic urgings said to be audible therein. In 1984 a clinical study conducted by the University of Texas at El Paso, “The Role of Suggestion in the Perception of Satanic Messages in Rock-and-Roll Recordings,” was published, which concluded that subjects prompted to hear such messages disproportionately claimed that they did. “When large numbers of listeners report that they can indeed hear the demonic hymns, a reasonable hypothesis is that suggestion is playing an important role,” the study’s authors observed. “There is ample evidence to suggest that, when vague and unfamiliar stimuli are presented, [subjects] are highly like
ly to accept suggestions, particularly when the suggestions are presented by someone with prestige or authority.” It was noted incidentally that rock opponents’ use of the term “backward masking” was erroneous (it is applied in diagnoses of schizophrenia and has nothing to do with records or music). The songs selected for the University of Texas study were the Beatles’ “Revolution,” Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath,” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” a pretty righteous rock block if heard on the radio.
An obvious objection to the backward-masking charge—that the messages could never be heard unless you took the trouble of spinning the disc the wrong way around—was ignored by proponents of the theory, who argued that the messages worked on a subconscious level and were “unscrambled” by the brain, which failed to register their phonetic content. This idea was itself a holdover from the subliminal-advertising accusations of the 1950s which were popularized in books like The Hidden Persuaders, claiming print and televised commercials were doctored to feature seductive or enticing text and pictures that bypassed consumers’ rational resistance. Some rock groups, playing along with the controversy and the earlier “Paul is dead” fabrication, put deliberate backward messages on their records, including Pink Floyd on The Wall and ELO on Face the Music, but there was nothing Satanic in these spoofs. In time, lawsuits contending backward masking by Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne had encouraged teen suicides were thrown out of court and the topic became another instance of cultural myth in the age of mass communication, or a modern chapter of the 1841 treatise Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Priest singer Rob Halford testified that the backward lyrics he heard in his music ran to such absurdities as, “Hey look, Ma, my chair’s broken” and “It’s so fishy, personally I’ll owe it.”
So, what of the backward messages on “Stairway to Heaven”? Even today, long after vinyl albums and mechanical turntables have become obsolete, some die-hards refuse to disavow the rumor. Digital recording, in fact, now makes it more convenient to play Led Zeppelin IV in any direction or speed without the hassle of manually rotating a record player. Aleister Crowley’s recommendations from Magick in Theory and Practice that daily activities, including talking, walking, and spinning phonographs, be conducted in reverse provided telling proof for those already convinced (e.g., the author of Satan’s Secret Sabotage). “Let the Exempt Adept first train himself to think backwards by external means,” Crowley wrote, adding, “Let him constantly watch, if convenient, cinematograph films, and listen to phonograph records, reversed, and let him so accustom himself to these that they appear natural and appreciable as a whole.” But there were other pointers, notably the backward lettering of the album title on the inner sleeve of Houses of the Holy and the split-screen shots in The Song Remains the Same, whereby members of the band were seen in mirrored or reversed images in the same frame. Crucial to the legend was the belief that the “Stairway” messages were Satanic, so a song ostensibly about heaven would therefore have to be about hell in its sonic negative. A few Zeppelin songs do reference the devil or Satan (“No Quarter,” “Houses of the Holy,” “Achilles Last Stand,” “Nobody’s Fault but Mine”), hell (“Dazed and Confused”), “the Evil One” (“Ramble On”), the “Dragon of Darkness” (“The Battle of Evermore”), or heeding “the Master’s call” (“Houses of the Holy”). The more elaborate interpretations of “Stairway”’s reversed lyrics, around the line “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow,” are transcribed as “So here’s to my sweet Satan, the one whose little path will make me sad, whose power is Satan / He’ll give you 666 / There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” Reinforcing this tangent were the verified accounts of Black Masses where the Lord’s Prayer was recited backward and crosses were hung upside down. There was also the sensational 1970s novel and movie The Exorcist, in which what first appears to be gibberish uttered by a disturbed child is revealed to be a demonic voice speaking backward, thus “Nowonmai” equaled “I am no one,” et cetera. When all of these are implied to the typical Led Zeppelin audience, as they would have been in the years after the song’s release, the reversed snippets of “Stairway to Heaven” do have an eerie tone, and there is a haunting melancholy in the depiction of a “sad Satan” whose “path will make me sad,” but their resemblance to actual, premeditated vocalization is—once and for all—a complete and utter accident.
20
It’s Not as Hard as It Seems
The Art of Led Zeppelin
Pictures of Eleven: Led Zeppelin’s Album Covers
Though the artistic value of rock music from the 1960s and ’70s might still be debated, few would disagree that the decades were the high point of the record industry’s use of photography and graphic design. This is because the twelve-inch LP album, with its larger “canvas,” had taken over from the smaller 45-rpm single as the prime economic driver of the business, and also because of the relatively expansive budgets and creative license granted to performers and their packagers. Few rock stars were directly responsible for the imagery on their album jackets (exceptions being Bob Dylan for Planet Waves, Cat Stevens for Teaser and the Firecat, Joni Mitchell for Ladies of the Canyon, John Entwistle for The Who by Numbers, and a preteen John Lennon for Walls and Bridges), but the exterior presentations of the classic rock era were pinnacles of pop art as much as the music they showcased. Dark Side of the Moon’s prism; Sticky Fingers’ denim-straining crotch; the pissed-on pillar of Who’s Next; the crispness of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (photographer Eric Meola) and Aerosmith’s Draw the Line (caricaturist Al Hirschfeld); the surrealism of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans (sci-fi illustrator Roger Dean) and the Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxa (Rick Griffin); the beauty of Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (Frandsen De Schonberg) and Santana’s Abraxas (Mati Klarwein)—all constitute some of the most recognizable visual emblems of the last century. The covers of all of Led Zeppelin’s original albums belong in the same category.
If there is a common theme to the wonderfully diverse range of pictures and portraits from the record sleeves of Zeppelin and their contemporaries, it is that they were as far removed from the bland commercial motifs of older artists as it was possible to get. Almost anything could go onto the album covers, as long as it wasn’t a traditional grinning publicity shot of the performers themselves. The resultant creativity—what did the Jeff Beck Group have to do with an apple? Or Black Sabbath with a greenish woman at dusk? Or Rush with a nude figure and a pentagram?—shaped the audience’s opinion of the music inside. There was then a density and a depth to the records that was only partly about the tunes and the lyrics; aesthetically, the discs and their containers were inseparable (as well as useful platforms for joint-rolling). No performers from the period had a more consistent run of beautiful, haunting, and thought-provoking album covers than Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin
An initial calling card whose stark black-and-white design has become an emblem for the band itself, the cover of Led Zeppelin’s debut album got the band off to an explosive start even before the needle dropped on “Good Times Bad Times.” Although it was an obvious choice to have a zeppelin of some kind pictured on the jacket, it was Jimmy Page’s decision to use one of the most famous and disturbing news photographs of the previous thirty-odd years, from one of the first occasions when newsreels, still cameras, and radio broadcasters were on hand to capture an historic moment for rapid dissemination, as the basis for the artwork. Taken by a United Press cameraman in the first seconds after the Nazi dirigible Hindenburg exploded at Lakehurst New Jersey, following a transatlantic flight on May 6, 1937, the widely syndicated shot could fairly have been called “iconic” even before it was adopted by Led Zeppelin. According to Who bass player John Entwistle, a similar picture of the British R-101 airship’s crash near Paris in 1930 was in mind when he and Page considered forming a band after their “Beck’s Bolero” session with Jeff Beck in 1966 (“We’ll go over like a l
ead zeppelin”), and there were certainly other stock photographs of airship wrecks from the same period to have chosen, but Page picked the best one.
To avoid licensing fees, it fell to Royal College of Art student George Hardie to render the copyrighted 1937 photograph into an original picture. Like Led Zeppelin, Hardie was young and looking for a break, and he had a connection with the band through a fellow student who knew Page. Hardie first submitted more imaginative (though less visually arresting) sketches of an airborne zeppelin, but Page, showing him a library book with the Hindenburg still, insisted that the stock image be simply re-created. This Hardie did, using tracing paper and a special Rapidograph ink pen. His fee was £60 (about $400 US). Look closely and the painstaking, dot-by-dot