Only in Adelaide could you find a book as good as this, and only Adelaide appears to breed such people. I doubt that our pal Martin, a regular reader and contributor to this blog even has this one. Titled, ‘Beyond Backward Masking’ this fine tome is a brilliant study in mid 1980s hippy God bothering paranoia that puts our old pal Norm Barber to shame. Nothing Norm could ever do could reach the heights of the paranoia and lunacy on display here. How good is this book? Well other than the usual suspects such as Led Zeppelin and Queen, this book has studies of speeches by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Lindy Chamberlain and Andrew Peacock, along with TV shows (Sesame Street is the tool of the Devil, as is Walt Disney and his frozen head) and much more. Seriously, I love Adelaide stuff like this – we have our own special lunatics. No wonder people think we’re homicidal and yes, these guys are deadly serious.
Authors David Oates and Greg Albrecht use cutting edge methods of examination (usually manually turning a record backwards, transferring music to reel-to-reels and splicing cassettes) to prove their point and prove it they will, no matter how much they have to bend the truth or distort facts, and their point is a simple one: much like Elvis, the devil is everywhere. The devil is in tapioca pudding! The devil is in Deep Purple songs. The devil is in Mrs Jones. Oates boasts that, at the time, he had a ‘strong interest in alternate living’, which, in the mid ‘80s was another phrase for ‘long-term unemployed with an aversion to soap’ and Albrecht was a secondary school teacher specialising in English and Christian Studies. We all had a teacher like that in high school; I had one in year ten who was convinced that UFOs had visited him one evening after he’d dropped a few mushrooms and toked some smoke and had given him the meaning of life and the universe. This was something he couldn’t share, but he knew all too well that bloody bureaucrats were out to get him. We used to fuck with his head by letting the air out of his car tyres and telling him that black cars with the windows tinted over were following us home every evening.
Satan is everywhere in this book, other than in U2 and Janis Joplin songs – go figure. For example you can find Satan in Disney movies (“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is really “Lord Jesus, yeah. He’s a bastard. We hate him.”) and you can find him in cartoons (“Popeye the sailor man” is really “Give me a fuck, give me a fuck now!” That dirty ole Popeye eh?). Apparently Fred Flintstone’s catch cry of YABBA DABBA DOO played backwards says, “I saw Lucifer, no sympathy. I’ll take the mark, the mark. What’s wrong with that? Who died today?”), and you can even find him in Gospel music. That’s correct; preachers and those singing Gospel songs are really spreading the word of Satan to their flocks. It’s when they really begin their case studies that things fall well apart. One thing they claim as researched ‘fact’ is that Marvin Gaye
covered Creedence Clearwater Revival with Heard It Through The Grapevine…despite the fact that Marvin wrote and recorded it in the early ‘60s and was already dead when the authors claim he released his ‘cover version’ (1987). Songs from beyond the grave. Still the authors become almost orgasmic over the backwards messages in Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin songs – no great surprise there really. Funnily enough, for religious fundamentalists, they leave Kiss well alone. I expect that, by this stage, they, along with a pile of other religious nuts, believed that they had beaten Kiss into obscurity, but, like a decent soufflé, they rose once more.
According to co-author
David Oates, the self proclaimed "...founder and developer of Reverse Speech technologies", its books and research like this that, “…got him into trouble with the CIA and FBI in the U.S.”(yes, he has a web-page, go and visit it, it's chock full of fun and jocularity). I’m not surprised as he and co-author Greg Albrecht, both attack and out Rin Tin-Tin, Bugs Bunny and Daniel Boone as Satanists amongst other sacred bovines. The Partridge Family love Lucifer, as does The Lone Ranger But then nobody escapes Oates and Albrecht’s withering gaze, including themselves and their families. To illustrate examples of backwards speaking in normal, everyday life, the authors taped a number of everyday situations and then played them backwards. These include Oates’s attempts to give up the darts and, in a stunning piece of literature that has to be read to be believed, they taped the birth of their own twins, reversed the tape and analysed the playback of conversations between Oates and obviously pissed off nurse. Ian Sinclair, Joh Bjelke Petersen, John Howard and Bob Hawke are revealed as backwards speaking devil worshippers. Yes, this book just gets better the more you read it.
The targets in this book are clear. Satan and Lucifer, naturally, get the lion’s share of attention, as do Nazis, Christ beating, whirlwinds, Hebrews, sex, smoking dope and other drugs, and various naughty words. The authors were clearly stunned when they played an old Hitler speech backwards to find Adolf talking up Nazis, in English. Imagine that! Hitler promoting war and Nazis. Who’d have thunk it eh? Along with the usual suspects such as Steppenwolf, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, John Lennon, Paul and Lindy McCartney (that’s right, Lindy), Judas Priest (whose Stained Glass album gets a very special mention) and the Beatles, other devil worshipping bands such as Skyhooks, Midnight Oil, Kylie Minogue, Michael Jackson, John Farnham, Boy George, Cat Stevens, Wang Chung, the Bangles, Elton John and Hoodoo Gurus are all dissected and shown for what they really are – tools of the devil in his quest to subvert the youth of the day. Yes, Bryan Adams really wants to “…anoint the music, I’ll fuck them with Hellfire!” instead of singing about the Heat Of The Night and you can bet your own sweet Satan that Barry Manilow isn’t singing about the Copacabana, not by a long shot pally. Where other people might hear words like "Flerurrrb schlumm gennupple pleeen pleeen," Oates and Albrecht hear Satan.
Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven features no less than five times in the book, more than any other song, with the emphasis on the following ‘lyrics’. “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be a law man/Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” Yep, that’s how they hear the lyrics. Mind you reversed the lyrics really say, “It’s my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is fake/There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Sat(an)”. Got that? Good. Naturally mondegreens are an invention of the Devil as well as the actual lyrics sound as such, “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now/It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen/Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run/There’s still time to change the road your own”. Ummmmm well, it’s all very good to make your own lyrics up and have people believe them, but what the authors think Plant sings (and frankly, it used to be a sport, guessing what Robert Plant sang) and what he actually does are two differtent things, so how can you believe the backmasking? Other classics that are pulled apart and analysed in depth include those ones that we’ve all heard about since we were kidlets. The Beatles Revolution 9 which really says, “Turn me on dead man,” and Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust which really says, “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.” Well, it can be when you’re young and stupid, but history shows us that the members of Queen were more into booze and cocaine than dope, so it just doesn’t wash, but then very little in this book makes sense, unless you’re a religious fanatic, are stoned, have mental health issues or all of the above.
Personally I think all the backwards messages might have been the voices in their heads. After all anyone can create their own 'facts' to 'prove' their point, no matter how error riddled they might be. "And I said, 'Hello sweet Satan, I think it's time to go'"...
Comments