In July of 1990, the heavy metal band Judas Priest walked up the courthouse steps in Reno, Nevada. Two young metal heads attempted suicide after listening to the band, and their families sued for the alleged use of subliminal messages.
Warning: this episode contains strong language and graphic descriptions of suicide. It might not be suitable for some listeners.
THE WIND NOVEMBER 7 2023
Devil Music: Judas Priest on Trial (Part 1)
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Hey, Fil here. The Wind is an independent podcast made possible by listener support. Some episodes, like this one, take a lot of time and resources, so if you want to help me keep making this thing, sign up at patreon.com/thewind. And if you’re a new listener, welcome. Make sure to check out the prologue at some point.
This episode includes strong language and more importantly… graphic descriptions of suicide… So make sure you’re in the right place for that, and take care.
1985, 2 days before Christmas, Sparks, Nevada.
A couple of young men walk up the driveway of a standard suburban home in a standard American housing development. Behind them, willow trees stand dormant in the neighbors’ lawns. // Couldesac, clap board, 2 car garage.
James Vance and Ray Belknap step into Ray’s house. They’re 20 and 18 years old, respectively, both have dropped out of highschool and for the past few years have been working then quitting menial jobs. Ray lives with his parents and this evening they head for Ray’s bedroom.
Not far away is the house of James’s mom. Phyllis Vance has been worried about James. He seems to spend a lot of time drinking and smoking, messing around and complaining about work, going nowhere fast. And instead of coming to church he seems to worship heavy metal. She’s convinced that his depression and disaffected worldview stem from that music, and she’s convinced him of that a couple times. At one point James got rid of all of his metal albums down at Recycled Records, swearing off the music and its influence.
But the prohibition never lasts. It’s the thing that seems to make the most sense. His closest friend is a metal head too, and for James’ 20th birthday, Ray begins to replenish his record collection. As a gift, he begins with a classic, Stained Class; the 1978 album by Judas Priest, which they put on the turntable this evening.
[Music: Exciter by Judas Priest]
The needle circumnavigates the black vinyl. Heavy drums, chugging guitar. Rob Halford theatrically throws his voice to the sky. Carefree and powerful, it’s a sound that seems to lift them too.
After a few beers and smoking some weed, James and Ray get up and start thrashing around the bedroom. They mosh around the thumping record player in a sort of daze. One of them locks the bedroom door, opens the window and climb out into the winter night.
Ray carries a 12-gauge shotgun.
The two climb the fence and navigate a web of backyards and alleys the way only suburban kids can; an intimate knowledge of all the shortcuts and forgotten spaces haphazardly built into their forwardly normal-looking world. A world to them that has become increasingly suffocating and hollow.
[music fade]
Eventually they reach a neighborhood church and drop into a small playground in the back. They both sit down on one of those old metal spinning human propelled merry-go-rounds. Still hyped up, adrenaline rushing, Ray puts the shotgun to his throat, pointing up. He says, I sure fucked my life up, then, he pulls the trigger. Ray dies instantly.
His body slumps and James pulls the gun from a puddle of his best friend’s blood. A weeping willow sways quietly in the breeze above the churchyard, and a dog begins to bark. James screams for it to shut up and he puts the slippery gun to his chin, shaking, and he too pulls the trigger.
Days later, James wakes up.
I’m Fil Corbitt and this is The Wind.
Judas Priest on Trial, Part 1.
James Vance had somehow survived the suicide attempt.
Timothy Post: he and his mother contacted me and, uh, they said, Are you a Christian attorney? I said, well, I, I'm an attorney and I am a Christian. I'm, I'm a Christian who happens to be an attorney. And, uh, they said, well, we want, we wanna hire you. And, and I thought, okay, is this a crank call? And I said, well, you wanna sue the devil? And they said, we think so.
This is Timothy Post.
Timothy Post: Timothy Post….I’m a sole practicing attorney here in Reno.
That call from the Vance family was in 1986 - but Post still has an office in Reno, a small commercial building filled with Abraham Lincoln memorabilia and he sits behind a huge desk…He says took the meeting with James and his mom Phyllis Vance, but immediately, he was skeptical.
Timothy Post: They said we want to sue a heavy metal satanic rock group because of the influence, the ideology, the lifestyle that, uh, James had, uh, uh, experienced with them… influenced him into trying to take his own life. And I, I turned them down. I said, no, you got a thing called the First Amendment free speech.
The legal part of this story fully hinges on the First Amendment, so to lay the ground work, I’d like to read it in full:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
That’s the whole thing. Since the ratification of the bill of rights, there have been many cases in the US supreme court that have built on this amendment, and changed it in key ways. The main exception that most people know about is that it’s illegal falsely yell “Fire” in a crowded theater. This phrase comes from a non-binding dictum by Oliver Wendel Holmes in a 1919 supreme court decision —Schenck v United States. Summarizing here, Holmes claimed that if speech creates a “clear and present danger” it is not protected.
Another landmark case in first amendment rights was in 1969 — Brandenburg v. Ohio. In short, speech that incites unlawful action is not protected by the First Amendment. The Brandenburg Test is still used today, deciding if A) The speech is “directed to incite or produce imminent lawless action,” And B) The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
Courts have found time and again that the speech of artists, no matter how violent or subversive or political, is almost always covered by the first amendment. And attorney Timothy Post knew this.
Timothy Post: And I said, I don't think you're gonna make it very far. Mm-hmm. Really? And they talked me into it. And, um, I think, I think back now that the case started out as lyrics that were, uh, incited violence….
Ken McKenna: And so at the time it was apparent to me, uh, that the case was not going to be successful. Uh, that it would ultimately be dismissed because the lyrics were protected by the First Amendment.
This is Ken McKenna
Ken McKenna: Yeah. I'm, uh, Ken McKenna, attorney and I represented the family, Ray Belknap, the one of the young boys, uh, who committed suicide. Uh, after listening to the Judas Priest album stained class.
While the Vance family was hiring Timothy Post, Ray Belknap’s family hired their own legal council.
Ken McKenna: The purpose in filing the case initially was to just make a point, uh, to create, um, public awareness that these type of lyrics were existing, that there did seem to be a causal connection and that. Morally, ethically, the industry should be, you know, held to task, uh, for what they were doing, knowing that legally they would not be held accountable, uh, for the lyrics.
[Music: Suicide Solution by Ozzy Osbourne]
Ken McKenna: this was about the time that I think it was, wasn't it Ozzy Osborne's case? Yeah. Down in la uh, had just been dismissed. Um, and the court had said, no, you can't make a connection between suicidal intentional lyrics and someone committing suicide. So I kind of knew in the beginning, you know, that it wasn't gonna go anywhere.
Around this time, another kid in California had committed suicide after listening to Ozzy Osbourne. The song was called Suicide Solution. Though on the surface that might sound like a smoking gun, when you read them, the lyrics seem to refer to alcohol as a suicide solution: as in, a liquid that kills the drinker.
“Wine is Fine but Whisky’s quicker
Suicide is slow with Liquor”
Osbourne says the song was a response to the death of the AC/DC front man, who died a tragic alcohol-related death at a young age.
In favor of Ozzy Osbourne, the judge dismissed the case and the precedent was a clear judicial speed bump in the burgeoning movement to regulate the lyrics of heavy metal, punk and hip hop. And also, it seemed to highlight the underlying weaknesses of that movement. What seems like a suicidal anthem to some, is an unlikely anti-drinking ballad to others.
But what the Judas Priest case had that the other’s didn’t was James Vance.
Timothy Post: I took the case eventually cuz my client talked me into it because he survived. I said, well, you know, there's something here that other cases don't have… It's a survivor.
It was very unlikely that James survived the attempt. And just a warning, it gets pretty graphic here.
Timothy Post:… James watched Ray shoot himself. James picked up the gun, it was covered in blood. He put a shell in it. He stood and he couldn't reach the trigger. His arms weren't as long as Ray's and so he had to kind of lean his head back to reach the trigger. And what that did is when he pulled the trigger, he blew his face off underneath his eyes.
His nerves, his slippery handle on the gun, divine intervention, whatever it was, the buckshot blasted up through his chin and missed his eyes and brain. Instead, for lack of a more graceful term, he shot his own face off, then fell forward into the dirt.
Timothy Post: …and it had kind of a tourniquet effect. That probably saved his life or he would've bled out.
James was unbelievably still conscious when EMTs arrived. He was rushed to a local hospital to stabilize him, then sent to Stanford.
Timothy Post: and started three years of rhinoplasty. He rewrote the book on. Um, facial surgery because nobody had done that much damage to their face and lived…
During one of his reformations away from heavy metal, James Vance sold all his Judas Priest albums to a used record store in Reno. 37 years later I walk in to Recycled Records just to check. The tab is empty but they do have a $6 Priest cassette which I pop into my tape deck on the way to the court house.
Inside, past the metal detectors, upstairs on a desktop computer, I scroll through the files. Thousands and thousand of digital pages, scanned, stamped, filed — and I find the letter that started the legal process. Frankly it seems a little stilted, as if James knew what he was writing might be seen by somebody other than Ray’s Mom. But that’s who it’s addressed to.
April 1986
Dear Anita,
I Just wanted to send you this picture of Ray, holding a twenty inch catfish, that my dad caught in Washoe Lake. He was doing some fishing of his own?…I hope you injoy (sic) it as much as I have.
I believe that alcohol and Heavy Metal music such as “Judas Priest,” led us or even “Mesmerized”, us in to believeing (sic) the answer to “life was death”.
I’m sorry it happen (sic) as much if not more than anyone else…
Sincerely, James Vance
I print out, and add it to my growing pile of court documents.
[Music: Electric Eye by Judas Priest]
Judas Priest was forged in Birmingham, England around 1970 and throughout the next decade, they would define the developing genre of Heavy Metal.
The rise of genres don’t happen in a bubble. It’s not usually a young savant with a new idea or a new sound — it’s a mix of many factors. In this case, it was a mix of live music infrastructure following the Beatles success in Liverpool and the booming blues rock scene in London that seemed to build a stage for something new in the UK.
Then, from the black country — a region so industrialized in the 19th century that pollution turned much of the air and water black — these rock musicians began to experiment with heavier riffs… likely influenced by Jimi Hendrix who lived in and toured England for a bit… all the while surrounded by literal metal.
Rob Halford: And, uh, it was about a mile or two mile walk from my home to school. And each day I had to walk past one of these big smelting iron metal work factories, you know? And, uh, I certainly had this incredible vivid memory I could picture it perfectly, and the smell! You could actually taste it, all the smoke and all the metal.
That’s singer Rob Halford speaking in a documentary called Dream Decievers which we’ll get to in a bit. Though it’s hard to definitively attribute the phrase, many believe that the name Heavy Metal is a direct reference to the factories in this part of the UK. Part of Led Zepplin was from the same area and at the same time, fellow pioneer of heavy music, Black Sabbath, was also forming in Birmingham. They explicitly built themselves around the aesthetics of a post-industrial landscape.
In interviews the band members have said that if their music careers didn’t take off, they’d likely be working in the factories themselves.
Part of the band’s success seemed to be the way they captured a specific type of frustration. Young metal heads growing up in cities and suburbs, felt like the stability and agency they were promised never came. Like the economy was pinning them down, and vapid social norms were dooming them to a pre-destined path of conformity.
And there was Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, just a pasty kid from a working class background up on the stage, ascending to tear down the powers that be... To lambast the failings of the world around him.
Heavy Metal created this sort of power inversion, seizing respect through musical virtuosity and sheer volume. This seemed to be what Judas Priest was to Ray Belknap and James Vance.
David Van Taylor: He was living in a dead end place that was not fulfilling to him spiritually, culturally, you know, whatever. And he was unemployed. He was on drugs. You know, that's what people do when they don't have opportunities for fulfillment.
This is David Van Taylor
David Van Taylor: and I directed Dream Deceivers, the story behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest.
Dream Deceivers is an excellent in-depth documentary that came out in 1992.
David Van Taylor: I started this film not at all as a heavy metal or Judas Priest fan…and one of the first things I did was to sit down and like sort of work myself into listening to some Judas Priest and particularly this album, and I started with music that, that I could relate to more like, uh, Jimmy Hendrix, you know? At that point, Judas Priest, when I put it on after Jimmy Hendrix was kind of a letdown, of course what's not a letdown after Jimmy Hendrix?
The documentary not only follows the trial, but really tries to understand the teenagers’ experience. Though it’s built on interviews with James Vance after the suicide attempt, the parents, the attorneys, Van Taylor also leaves a lot of space for Priest fans to explain themselves. Here’s one of those fans:
Metal Fan: “I went through a lot of problems like the Vance kid did. You know, my parents did everything they could do for me. My mom was totally against drugs and alcohol. My dad was a drug addict and alcoholic. I couldn't be around so-called normal people because of the way I acted…”
For David Van Taylor, by the end of the process…
David Van Taylor: the music spoke to me in a much more profound way than it had. because I had spent all of that time. In part, getting inside the heads of James Vance and Ray Belknap and the fans who came to the trial, and understanding what they saw in the music…
The shooting happened in December 1985.
James sent the letter to Ray’s mom in April of ’86, and that summer McKenna and Post had filed the lawsuit in civil court.
The lawsuit specified this 1978 album, the one that was still spinning on the turntable as the young men lay motionless in the churchyard, as THE reason that James and Ray shot themselves. Early documents tie it directly to the song “Heroes End”, I presume because it includes the line “Why do you have to die to be a hero? It’s a shame a legend begins at it’s end”
[Music: Heroes End by Judas Priest]
As James said in a sworn affidavit,
“But for the music, I would have not attempted to take my life as per the instructions in “Hero’s End.”
This is the form the case took as it headed through the system: claiming that the lyrics on the record and the lifestyle that the band promoted had caused the suicide pact. McKenna and to some degree Post both believed that the case would be dismissed. But then, things took a turn.
Ken McKenna: We were well into the case mm-hmm. Uh, before the subliminals were discovered.
Subliminal messages, after the break.
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Ken McKenna: So, It was myself who hired an audio guy. He was actually a biologist. But he did subliminal, he actually created subliminal recordings himself. He created them for weight loss and quit smoking. And, you know, he was in it as an independent guy. And I asked him.
McKenna had read about secret messaging in advertising back in college.
Ken McKenna: …I was a business marketing major for my bachelor's degree, and you learn about subliminal messages and, you know, the popcorn subliminal in the movie theater. The subliminals in print advertising for cigarettes and alcohol. And so I had a vague overview of subliminals.
Though it seemed like a shot in the dark at the time, McKenna, while the original filing made its way through the system, was looking for something that would keep this case from being thrown out.
Ken McKenna: So the case had been going on for months. And we were basically suing based on the lyrics. And that's what we filed on, that's what we had. So the judge… they had filed a motion to dismiss saying lyrics are protected by the First Amendment. They had the Ozzy Osborne case as precedent out of California….and the judge orders all the lawyers to appear. …we’ll call it Thursday…It’s Monday. He says, on Thursday, I want you to all appear in my chambers. I'm gonna decide the motion to dismiss. Well, I know what he's gonna do. He's gonna throw the case out. So before that happened, we had the audio tape that showed the subliminal messages, the “do it” and, and it was repeated several times in the song, "Do it"
The attorneys sent the album Stained Class to a biologist named Bill Nickloff. Nickloff moonlighted in subliminal self-help tapes, creating subliminal cassettes out of his studio in Sacramento. After review. Nickloff claimed that the album was packed with hidden messages.
Ken McKenna: … and you didn't hear it unless you isolated it. So we walk, I walked in to all the lawyers and the judge and he started his spiel about, you know, where it was headed. And I said, excuse me, your Honor. We have brand new evidence in the case. There are subliminals on the album, subliminals are not protected by the First Amendment.
Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead, of the second judicial court of Nevada, decided that the case would go to trial.
Ken McKenna: That saved the case. Then he said, you know, give us paperwork, uh, legal arguments on subliminals. And we did.
Timothy Post remembers this process not as a shot in the dark, but a conversation between McKenna and an old client.
Timothy Post:My co-counsel did a divorce for Wilson Bryan Key, the subliminal expert. He got to talking to him and he gave him a book and he called him and he said, “Hey, are they're subliminals? You better find out.”
Wilson Bryan Key — remember that name. When McKenna mentioned the popcorn story — referencing this famous claim that a movie theater had once increased concession sales by flashing subliminal messages on the screen — my ears perked up a bit. This incident seems to be in the public awareness, and was cited often by Wilson Bryan Key, who was one of the most well-known progenitors of the idea of subliminal messages. He was a professor and had several popular books in the 70s that claimed the media and ad agencies were packing hidden messages into everything. Books like Media Sexploitation and Subliminal Seduction.
Key had settled in Northern Nevada later in life to teach at the University, but his books were already taught in many classrooms across the country and he would travel on the lecture circuit.
Subliminal Seduction Lecture: tonight we are pleased to have with us... Dr. Wilson Bryan Key..”
Key: Good evening, thank you very much for inviting me back. I’m Bill Key and for the next hour and 15 minutes or so I’ll be showing a slideshow. And I’ll try to show you examples of subliminal technique.”
This is a clip of Key speaking in the early 90s at a University in Massachusetts.
Subliminal Seduction Lecture: People who think they think for themselves. That’s almost an obsession in this country, it’s a basic aspect of the so-called democratic tradition. But anybody who lives in a country where there’s 5 billion dollars a year worth of advertising pumped into their brain pan, who thinks they think for themselves is in a good deal of trouble.
Key claimed that the media was hiding references to death and sex, so that the viewer would associate the company’s product with primal and profound emotions. But, he said, if you paid close attention, you could bring them to the surface, and neutralize the threat.
Subliminal Seduction Lecture: you’re not supposed to see this stuff if you play the game in the way the media has designed the game to be played!
In this lecture and his book Subliminal Seduction, Key offers several examples of his findings. In one magazine ad for Gin, he shows a tall glass of clear liquid with a lime, overflowing with ice. He points your eye to 3 of the four ice cubes, where he has found the letters S E X. To him, this is clear evidence of tampering.
He then draws the readers eye to several faces he sees in the ice cubes. One, he claims is a reference to the WW2 graffiti character Kilroy, then to what he claims is the face of a woman in the ice. Though I can vaguely see the S caused by the silhouette of the lime, and 3 horizontal lines that could be seen as an E, I do not see the X, or the Kilroy or the woman, and I especially do not see in the reflection of the bottle cap what Key sees: “a man’s legs and partially erect genitals.”
Key saw genitals in everything, he claimed the word SEX was everywhere, and that people were being secretly exposed to latent homosexuality and as he laments in that lecture, inter-racial cunnilingus.
And he seemed very interested in ice cubes… often finding messages, boobs, and metaphorical representation of his experience of female frigidity.
“Thinking in terms of male and female,” Key wrote ”which of these ice cubes would be female? The one on the left of course…the elliptical shaped chip at the top corner of the left hand ice cube suggests something is missing — a portion of the cube’s anatomy.”
Key often seemed to sense his readers’ skepticism and periodically backed up these claims with what he called evidence. He said for instance that 90% of the test subjects agreed with his assessment of the gendered ice-cubes. But something he never did was explain who the test subjects were, what the experiment was, who conducted it, the science. Through context clues, you can put together that his experiments seemed to have been conducted by him in his university classes by vote, and he never offers documentation.
Key, along with the Biologist who sold subliminal self-help cassettes would be 2 of the expert witnesses for the plaintiffs.
Judas Priest arrived in Reno in July of 1990. Court cases can move slowly, and in the intervening 4 years since the case was filed, a lot had changed. James Vance and Ray Belknap’s cases had merged into one, leaving McKenna and Post as co-council. Together they had narrowed in on the existence of subliminal messages, found by Nickloff and Key. CBS Records, the label responsible for Judas Priest had tried to get the case dismissed, then obfuscated when asked for the master tapes, angering the judge. And before the trial started, James Vance died.
In the years after the shooting, James struggled with pain and depression, and was on a litany of medication. He had actually fathered a child after the shooting, but was admitted to the hospital for emotional distress, where he died of an overdose.
It was a hot summer day when Rob Halford, Ian Hill, Glenn Tipton and KK Downing, the members of Judas Priest, walked up the courthouse steps in downtown Reno. They were welcomed by a throng of metalheads. Kids in leather and band t-shirts lined the sidewalk with handwritten signs.
David Van Taylor: I was there for the whole thing.
Filmmaker David Van Taylor again.
David Van Taylor: and the atmosphere in the courtroom was, you know, was mixed. I mean, on the one hand some of it was quite absurd, and it was a media circus as the expression goes.
(Court tape)
Ken McKenna and Timothy Post were up against another sharp local attorney Suellen Fulstone. Fulstone still practices in Reno and turned down my interview request. Working on behalf of Judas Priest, Fulstone was smart, young and commanding and she was joined by some big guns from Los Angeles hired by CBS
All of this was overseen by Judge Whitehead.
Ken McKenna: so Judge Whitehead, Conservative, older, certainly had never listened to a heavy metal song in his life. We had, we had the audio system set up in the courtroom and big speakers and the soundboard…
At one point Judge Whitehead, clearly uncomfortable for much of the audio demonstrations, made the audio guy turn the music down.
The plaintiff’s case slowly crystallized around a few specific instances of alleged subliminal messaging. First, they had Wilson Bryan Key investigate the album cover. He apparently separated the colors and picked out a written message:
Ken McKenna: You have multiple colored layers to create the cover. If you undo those, you end up very easily seeing the word suicide. Actually, the word in letters suicide, it's misspelled, but it's suicide and you’re not having to reach…
On the non-subliminal level, visibly, the cover shows a sort of shiny metallic head with a metallic beam or rod piercing it at an angle.
Ken McKenna: So we had the word suicide within the content of the album cover. And then if you look at the album cover, it is a young man with a bullet going through his head… And so it doesn't take much of a leap to appreciate that the album cover connects to the concept of killing yourself with a bullet to the head.
If the cover clearly depicted self-harm, and the word suicide, it would be protected. But if hidden, it might not.
Then, there was the meat of the argument. Bill Nickloff, armed with speakers and an early digital audio interface, presented several instances of hidden sonic messages.
So, subliminal means below our ability to detect.— it’s any stimulus that we don’t consciously experience. So this can be the way we react to sounds or smells or subtle visual cues without having recollection of noticing them.
But, in popular culture, subliminal stimuli are often presented as backwards phrases. Placing backwards sounds in any recording is called backmasking, and it really doesn’t work that way. Your brain can’t magically decipher whole backwards phrases like this.
But, backmasking is used in recording for all types of effects. Often a guitar, piano, the hit of a cymbal will be played backwards to create a sort of swelling effect.
Artists have also used long strings of backwards messages as an aesthetic choice. So proving back-masking would not be enough for the plaintiffs.
Ken Mckenna: And subliminals, hidden, messed, hidden lyrics that are subliminal, that enter the subconscious are actionable under the law. Backward messages, eh, you know, maybe, maybe not.
The plaintiffs took a sort of scattered approach, saying that there were backwards phrases, plus the album cover, plus what they called punch-ins, hiding forward messages in the drum beats.
But Nickloff started with a few examples of what he claimed were backwards messages. One was in the song White Heat, Red Hot.
I searched diligently and was unable to find the original audio evidence from the case that Nickloff created. So I’ve done my best to recreate the evidence based on his testimony.
Here’s the first verse forward:
[Music: White heat Red Hot by Judas Priest first verse]
And then here that same moment is backwards:
[Music: White heat Red Hot by Judas Priest BACKWARDS]
Nickloff focused in on one line
[Music: White heat Red Hot by Judas Priest BACKWARDS]
And what he claimed it said was “Fuck the Lord, Fuck all of you.
[Music: White heat Red Hot by Judas Priest BACKWARDS]
The next message he claimed was hidden in the titular song of the album, Stained Class.
Here is the second verse forward
[Music: Stained Class by Judas Priest]
The lyrics go: Transfixed at deliverance, is this all there is? // Faithless continuum, into the abyss
Here is Wilson Bryan Key playing it backwards on a news report:
Wilson Bryan Key: Now when you take that line out and play it backwards you’re getting this…Sing my evil spirit
This is one the plaintiffs cited often. Sing my evil spirit
[Music: Stained Class by Judas Priest BACKWARDS]
In the court room Timothy Post could hear it clear as day.
Timothy Post: And, and you, and when you listen to a lot of it, people play albums backwards. You go. I I didn't hear that. It was gibberish. We heard, “Scream my evil spirit. Fuck the Lord. Fuck you all.” And, and the hair stands up on the back of your… that wasn't the Beatles. Turn me on Deadman. I mean, there was some really graphic, and the media asked me, almost from day one, why didn't the boys run to a church playground?
And it, I think they heard that, uh, fuck the Lord, how do you do that? Go shoot yourself at his house. I think that had something to do with the connection of going to the church.
Ken McKenna: So we're playing it in the courtroom. These big speakers. There's a full audience. There’s media, there's the judge sitting up on the bench and it gets to the end and I'm sitting there of course, and I can tell behind me that there's audience kind of going, oh, you know, oh, ah, and they're whispering to each other, so I know they're hearing it. It's come through clearly. The judge is just stone faced and not giving away any emotion or acknowledgement that he actually hears the subliminals. And I kind of turned and looked back at the judge's secretary who I knew, and she was sitting in the audience, and she acknowledged in her body language that she heard the subliminal “do it.”And I thought, well, that takes care of that. She'll tell the judge she heard it. And then he'll know that he heard it…
Bill Nickloff claimed that the backwards messages were just part of a bigger picture. He claimed there were other methods as well, including what he called punch-ins or embeds. Though the case began by citing the song Heroes End, the tune that became the trial’s focal point was a cover called Better by you Better than me.
32 years later, sitting in Timothy Post’s office, he pulls the song up on youtube.
Timothy Post: But you can hear it if you listen closely and it’s “Do it. Do it. In the court room he head that part highlighted and when he played it, everybody was like, did we just hear what we just heard? what are those do its doing there?”
DO IT became the key phrase in the case. Nickloff and the plaintiffs claimed that these initially imperceptible clips were played forward after each line of the chorus, 7 times in total. So it would go:
Better by you better than me (Do it)
You can tell what I want it to be (Do it)
and so on.
[Music: Better by You Better than Me by Judas Priest]
Audio technology has come a long way since 1990. So Nickloff was tirelessly working to separate frequencies and isolate instruments. In this trial, he then got access to the master tapes, which allowed him to play certain audio layers together. I don’t have the master tapes, but thanks to computer I was able to completely isolate Rob Halford’s vocals from this track.
So, we’ll listen for the Do Its.
[Music: Stained Class by Judas Priest VOCALS ONLY]
One more time, just the do it moment…it’s supposed to be right after he says the word “me”
[Music: Stained Class by Judas Priest VOCALS ONLY]
Nickloff isolated that moment after “me”, sped it up a little bit and mixed the kick drum back in, producing this:
[Sound: Court Evidence Audio of alleged “Do Its”]
During all of this, Judas Priest sat in the courtroom. 4 British men who for the last decade had been touring mercilessly. Playing sold out shows, traveling the world, releasing record after record and rarely looking back. And now they found themselves in a far-off land as a strait-laced judge listened over and over again to a 2-second clip of a cover song they recorded 12 years previous. They watched as the families of two of their fans grieved and as an entire courtroom seemed to hear something in their music that they didn’t. From the outside, it seemed absurd, but inside the courthouse it was very real. What would it mean if they lost this thing?
The rest of the case in part 2 of Judas Priest on Trial.
The Wind is produced by me, Fil Corbitt. If you’d like to support the show become patron. Head to patreon.com/thewind
Thanks to Timothy Post, Ken McKenna, David Van Taylor, Tim Moore, and Robert Olson for speaking with me for these episodes. Also thank you to Thomas, Edith Caufield, Ben Birkinbine and Emily Pratt.
Sources, links and full documents at TheWind.org.
This episode is part of the 4th season of The Wind, which is called Devil Music.
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