by Ian Christe
If the dark visions of heavy metal music often lacked nuance, the same was certainly true of its attackers. As John Cardinal O’Connor hurled insults at Ozzy Osbourne from his pulpit, it seemed that the press-hungry priest was praying for the worst response. “What is a Satanist anyway?” asks King Diamond, whose dress and image would seem to fit the description. “If you say it’s a person who will kill babies and drink their blood, I say those people are deeply insane. Why do you tell people that is what Satanists are like? You only give them instructions on how to behave.”
Most metalheads found the misapplied analysis of such adults comical and reprinted excerpts in fanzines. Yet inflammatory bias had a way of snowballing, as law enforcement responded to mosh-pit manners with a primitive form of prejudicial profiling. An educational tract used by police departments, Youth Subcultures, identified “Heavy Metalists” as follows: “This category covers a wide age range, perhaps from 8 to 24. Currently it is the largest group in most schools…. They are heavy drug users…. Many are not motivated to do much of anything constructive. They get their drug money from thefts, and from dealing in drugs themselves.”
In the crosshairs—from Youth Subcultures
Through the feeding cycle of misinformation, heavy metal became targeted as a problem, and broadly inaccurate propaganda soon became probable cause to detain and search any high-schooler in a Ratt T-shirt. Companies like the Back in Control Training Center explicitly advertised their expertise in cult deprogramming techniques to “de-punk” or “demetal” troubled teens and bring them in line with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. “Once kids become part of the heavy metal or punk culture,” said Back in Control’s founder in the book The Satan Hunter, “there is an attitude they frequently pass on to the parents: ‘I’m going to do what I want, the hell with you, leave me alone,’ and with the metallers, in particular, better than 90 percent are involved with drugs.” Just as Satan chasing proved effective in mobilizing fundamentalist Christians, the prejudiced presumption of drug use was alarming to adults everywhere—leading to cures that were often worse than the symptoms.
The most antiyouth growth industry of the 1980s, the private adolescent detention centers, used the heavy metal scare to pad their profits. Thanks to the testimony of antimetal experts in juvenile trials, frustrated parents and municipalities were persuaded to enroll problem children for costly doses of tough love and group encounter therapy to shake off the influence of the occult—the amorphous source of all problems. Like a scene from Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, in which a journalist investigating a corrupt mental asylum is trapped as an inmate, these expensive and often privately owned campuses were soon populated with benevolent metalheads guilty of little more than listening to Slayer or growing long hair.
Well-meaning as the parental intentions were, the scenario repeatedly led to abuses of power against their captive populations. Many of the centers were shut down for rights violations in the 1990s, following investigations by the Department of Justice.
In fact, concerned parents could have done much worse than discover that their children had fallen under the influence of heavy metal. As Dave Mustaine promised Kick Ass Monthly about Megadeth, “The crowd that we play to, whether they’re 12 or 20, they’re the leaders of tomorrow for us. If we poison their minds or intoxicate their thinking in any way, or leave their curiosity untapped without making them think or expand their education by looking up words that are more than the basic words they learned in sixth grade—the average education of an American—then we’ll have failed.”
Whether successful or not, each attack on heavy metal fed the next in an incestuous soup of insinuation. Accusations of Satanism and drug use led to a second and more consequential breed of problems, when personal-injury lawyers and prosecuting attorneys played on these prejudices to bring heavy metal to court. After the PMRC opened the door to labeling records with warning stickers, opponents began to argue that heavy metal was a dangerous product and that musicians who created it could be liable for damages or criminal charges when the behavior of fans went astray. These were perilous cases—loaded with courtroom hysteria that proved hard to dissipate.
Heavy metal first had its day in court in 1988, when a personal-injury attorney named Kenneth McKenna alleged that a California boy had committed suicide as a result of exposure to Ozzy Osbourne songs, namely “Suicide Solution.” The album Speak of the Devil—a collection of live Black Sabbath material not including “Suicide Solution"—was found spinning on the record player in a room with the young man’s corpse. Previously McKenna had lost a case against Paul Revere & the Raiders, brought on behalf of a woman struck in the head when Revere tossed his trademark three-cornered hat into the audience at a concert. In setting his sights on the madman of rock, McKenna apparently thought he had found an easier target.
The crux of McKenna’s suit was bizarre evidence obtained through extensive computer analysis that “Suicide Solution” contained hidden messages. What sounded to normal listeners like Ozzy singing “suicide” into an effects box during the guitar solo became “get the gun and shoot it"—incitement to a final solution. Presenting the actual lyrics, plainly printed on the record sleeve, Ozzy’s defense attorney successfully explained that the song was concerned with a liquid solution, namely alcohol. In fact, the words lamented the excessive drinking that had nearly killed Ozzy and took away his friend Bon Scott: “Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker / Suicide is slow with liquor.”
Furthermore the judge found that creative expression could never be equated with harmful criminal speech, such as yelling fire in a crowded theater. He concluded, “Reasonable persons understand musical lyric and poetic conventions as the figurative expressions which they are.” But with tens of millions of heavy metal albums going over the counter, there were plenty of unreasonable people listening to the music. Many of them were right-wing zealots with axes to grind. They did not wait to hear that McKenna’s backward masking was nonsense—the appearance of the case in the newspapers was enough to legitimize their belief in subliminal programming.
Buoyed by the publicity from the failed “Suicide Solution” case, McKenna returned in 1991 with a lawsuit against Judas Priest in Reno, Nevada—a less favorable venue for freedom of speech than California. The Reno suit was a wrongful-death action, holding the band responsible for a dual attempted suicide. Apparently after drinking and listening to the album Stained Class, two teens went out to a playground with a shotgun and desperate plans. In the bloody hours that followed, one died of self-inflicted wounds. The other survived for a short time, with half of his face damaged, before expiring.
Summoned to a Nevada courthouse, the members of Judas Priest were greeted by cheering fans holding album covers and cardboard guitars, many of them friends of the deceased. In court, according to analysis in the book They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court, McKenna’s complaint altogether ignored the actual song lyrics, which were protected by the Constitution. He hammered away instead at his belief that the band had inserted subliminal and backward messages to drive the disturbed teens to suicide. “It’s like we’re ghostbusters or something,” commented a lawyer from McKenna’s team.
As chronicled in the documentary film Dream Deceivers, the members of Judas Priest were confused by the inquisition as they defended themselves against charges of mind control, dangerous negligence, and cult conspiracy. They found themselves victims of the occult loophole in post-PMRC music attacks—the irrational idea that heavy metal had supernatural power over its listeners. Yet despite claims of a secretive cult conspiracy, there was simply no factual basis for the charge, and the band prevailed. “You just don’t back away from those things,” says Judas Priest singer Rob Halford of the experience. “Firstly, you can’t back away when you’re given a subpoena, but it’s more than that. It’s basically standing up [when] being accused of doing something that we did not do. In the Reno trial we defended ourselves, and we defended the music, and we defended our fans.�
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Heavy metal did not shy away from the disaffected. As would often prove true, when heavy metal appeared at a crime scene, its role appeared to be a last-ditch safety net against a harsh existence. Dream Deceivers revealed that prior to finding Judas Priest, the two Reno boys had both suffered miserable lifelong physical abuse at the hands of their alcohol-ravaged families. The bands’ interests were certainly in keeping the fans alive. “I never sat down to write lyrics with the intent that anyone should kill themselves,” said Ozzy Osbourne of the “Suicide Solution” case in They Fought the Law. “I feel very sorry for these kids. But why can’t you sing about suicide? It’s a thing that really happens.”
These grandstanding attempts to vilify heavy metal by alleging subliminal messages and other hocus-pocus had increasingly real effects. They served to build an unwanted mystique that completely obscured the benefits of the music. In 1996 an appalling case of persecution in West Memphis, Arkansas, came to widespread attention following the release of Paradise Lost, an HBO documentary directed by Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger. “We work in New York,” says Sinofsky, “and though many people think New York is crazy, it’s a very civilized society. When we got down to West Memphis, we’d be sitting in our hotel room watching the evangelists talking about the evils of heavy metal, and it would come up when we’d be talking to people at Burger King and Wal-Mart about the case. We couldn’t believe they were thinking that Metallica and Megadeth and Slayer could ever possibly have something to do with this crime.”
The crime in Paradise Lost was the horrendous group murder of three little boys, discovered stripped and mutilated one afternoon in May 1993 after a frantic overnight search. Police had few leads, and most of those were cast aside as investigators focused increasingly on three teenagers in black T-shirts: Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols. Although no physical evidence or witnesses connected any of them to the crime, during the subsequent trial the district attorney presented lists of occult-related books Echols had checked out from the local public library. Though aggressively challenged by the defense attorney—the accreditation of his alma mater was later taken away by the state of California—the testimony of familiar satanic “expert” Dr. Dale Griffis clouded the judicial process with dire proclamations and misinformation.
Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest could afford to battle career-minded district attorneys and Christian crusaders, but not so the three young defendants in Arkansas. In the spring of 1994 all three were convicted. Echols received the death penalty. The West Memphis jury may have sacrificed its outcasts in order to seal away the pain of its ghastly hometown murders. “Damien Echols was intelligent,” says Bruce Sinofsky. “He was thoughtful. He experimented with a lot of religions, which is common if you’re fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. I think his being different scared people, because he wasn’t the clean-cut football player following what was happening with the University of Arkansas team. Down there wearing a Metallica or Megadeth shirt is a crime. It was scary to them. He might as well have been Godzilla marching through a Japanese town.”
In fact, Paradise Lost showed that rural America was where Metallica most dignified the lives of “unforgiven” kids as they sought relief in a stifling environment. The directors edited Paradise Lost to a score of Metallica songs before appealing to the group for permission. “We figured we’d have to end up with some cheesy knockoff metal group,” says Berlinger. But Metallica took a personal interest and granted free use of a range of songs, the first time they had allowed their music in any movie. “Lars explained to us that there was a truth in Paradise Lost,” says Sinofsky. “They have that kind of relationship with their fans. They wrote to Damien in jail.”
Metallica again donated music for a sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, released in March 2000. “There’s a wonderful moment where two mothers are talking about their children in jail,” says Berlinger. “One says, ‘I sort of dedicated my life to Jason, and the song “Nothing Else Matters” is what my life is all about now. Nothing else matters but getting Jason out of jail.’ We showed Lars a rough cut, and he said he was moved to tears.”
Paradise Lost 2 brought further attention to the mishandling of evidence in the trials of the so-called West Memphis 3, and, unlike the evenhanded approach of the first film, it suggested a possible culprit—the erratic stepfather of one of the little boys (the stepfather vehemently denied any involvement). After viewing the movies, the boy’s biological father contacted the West Memphis 3 website. “I am not satisfied with the investigation of my son’s murder,” he writes. “I am not satisfied with the verdicts of the trials, and I want everyone to know that I believe the wrong people are in prison for this crime.”
In its review the New York Times compared the film to the Denzel Washington social-justice picture The Hurricane, which dealt with the ten-year imprisonment and subsequent acquittal of an African-American boxer wrongly accused of murder in New Jersey in the 1970s. Despite its critical success, Paradise Lost 2 did not achieve the ultimate accolade scored by the 1988 death-row documentary The Thin Blue Line, which successfully secured a reversal of conviction for an innocent man. “I’m very disappointed that those kids are still rotting in jail,” says Berlinger. “To me the film failed because it never moved this story from the arts section of the newspaper to the front page.”
Disgusting and confusing as the charges in this case were, and worthy of intense scrutiny, the fog of occult allegations should not have trumped the basic legal right of innocence until proven guilty. Despite mounting questions—and no physical evidence of guilt—the West Memphis 3 remained victims of satanic panic, the poster children for heavy metal discrimination. “I think maybe for the general public, it’s not quite as scary to believe that bloodthirsty Satanists are murdering children,” said Damien Echols in Paradise Lost 2, “as it is to believe that parents are actually murdering their own children.”
Apart from Arkansas most of America had grown less afraid of devil-worshipping metalheads by the mid-1990s, as attention shifted to the street violence of gangsta rappers. While heavy metal embraced sorcerers and barbarians, hardcore rappers now emulated the fictions and moral codes of inner-city pimps and drug pushers. When rap musicians put on gang colors and garnered arrest records, the strongest criticism initially came from within the black community. “I just thought NWA [was] doing aggressive music based on what Public Enemy was doing first,” says Chuck D of Public Enemy. “They just talked about themselves and killing black folks more. Shrinking yourself to negativity and talking about killing niggers is just the same old racist game anyway. I guess to white folks it might be on the edge. To black folks it’s counterproductive.”
The first national assault on heavy music since the PMRC was incited by a merger of gangsta rap and thrash metal. Though the press focused on its rap image, Body Count was a live thrash metal group fronted by vocalist Tracey Marrow, aka Ice-T. As a solo artist he cultivated a pimp image on several hard-edged albums in the 1980s—after writing lighter rhymes for the break-dance movie Breakin 2 and a Mr. T motivational video for kids. In Body Count, flanked by shirtless black men hammering metallic ghetto nightmares on guitars, Ice-T became the first metal singer to dedicate his gut-chugging music to “people of color throughout the entire world.”
In 1992 a national uproar followed the release of the Body Count song “Cop Killer,” a graphic revenge fantasy against police brutality that advocated fighting back against the men in blue. Police groups protested in the parking lots of Six Flags amusement parks, a corporate relative of Body Count’s record label. President George Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle both decried Body Count’s music from the campaign trail as an incitement to violence and a threat to the safety of law-enforcement workers.
Defending his right to express angry political thoughts, Ice-T fought for freedom of speech while teetering on the brink of danger. That July police officers and NRA spokesactor Charlton Heston disrupted the annual Time Warner shareholder m
eeting in Beverly Hills. A coalition of sixty members of Congress wrote a letter to Warner Bros. to persuade them to drop “Cop Killer” from the album, and more than a thousand record stores returned their copies to the distributor. Under heavy pressure from corporate brass, Ice-T ultimately removed the song voluntarily and excused himself from his contract with Warner Bros. “I learned that lesson in there,” Ice-T told Rock Out Censorship, “that you’re never really safe as long as you’re connected to any big corporation’s money.”
Corporate help for challenging music dwindled as the Body Count debacle ushered in a new age of conservatism in the music business. Metal bands were among the first to go as big business faced boycott threats by religious protesters, many of whom were veterans of past censorship shakedowns. Metal Blade Records, partnered with Warner Bros. since 1989, felt the ripples as it was forced to justify the lyrics of death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse. After the Body Count fallout, the label’s next slated release was from Gwar, former art students from Virginia whose gleefully offensive stage act involved castration, decapitation, cannibalism, and other acts perpetrated in jest with the help of foam rubber, latex, and untold gallons of fake blood and other stage ooze. “All of a sudden there was a guy at Time Warner, and you had to give him all the lyrics to all the records coming out,” says Metal Blade’s founder, Brian Slagel. “We’d give him a set of lyrics, and he’d come back and say which songs had to come off. That didn’t work for us.”