In the previous installment, I discussed the band AC/DC. But only because others mentioned it first. They also had a song…Highway to Hell…which I have repeatedly dedicated to Highway 70. If you don’t like the song titles…fine…criticize all you want; but I can remember when Christianity frowned on lying.

And now! The Reverend Larry Pyle.

And I suspect that he was an embarrassment even to all of the guys jumping on this bandwagon:

And I still don’t understand the allegations against Black Oak Arkansas, but Pyle said something mind-boggling:

Natas! Satan backwards! Natas! Natas! Natas! Natas! Begone, Natas! Does that mean that Rock music, most of it, mind you, is cinataS? They could have said..reficuL…I cast you out, reficuL! The song in question has no lyrics, yet during a live performance, the “singer” yells something into the microphone, and it is…Natas! If you listen to the song, you’ll hear all kinds of raucous shooting and whooping. You can write words backward, but words recorded forwards, then played backwards, don’t have a corresponding equation. Pyle isn’t, I hope, looking to make piles of money:

Yes, of course…the truth comes out. He doesn’t condemn his record, which you can buy in the lobby.

Other guys who crawled out from under the same Not-Rock are “General” Billy Patten of WNAP in Indianapolis. Styled a DJ, he disapproved of Rock, Country, and even Contemporary Christian Rock. I’m at a loss as to what else young people would listen to…unless it was really just a bunch of middle-aged Evangelicals who listened to him. The list of bad guys got bigger:

Journey? And the Spinners?

One of history’s premier R&B groups. You know their song…Working My Way Back to You, Natas! And the General organized RESCUE. That’s clever! And it stands for…Rock Exposure Solutions Control and Ultimate Escape to Jesus Christ. Hey! Everything after “Escape” is cheating…RESCUETJC. And he says exactly when he set this up:

I can’t find anything about the singer of AC/DC taking off his clothes off on stage. But in case you are inclined to take AC/DC’s image too seriously, I would point out:

Lead guitarist Angus Young has spent decades performing on-stage wearing a British school-boys outfit. Now take them seriously! Maybe Natas wears one too!

In 1982, Republican Phil Wyman, a California state representative, jumped on the backmasking bandwagon…and I’m sure that it wasn’t to get votes. He wanted to pass a law requiring that special stickers be put on records. He received the support of Congressman Bob Dornan. Dornan also wanted a sticker put on albums:
 

That would be a rather verbose warning sticker. They did get their comeuppance:

Snap!

Your move, doctor…and I emphasize…doctor…Berman:

It doesn’t look good for Religious Extremists who have no idea how the brain works…although I would figure that they know all about the brain not working. It gets worse:

Now…it’s time to eat a heaping dose of crow cooked up in Natas’s Kitchen:

Ok…it doesn’t do what I’ve spent all this time saying it does! But I get mad when you say I made it all up! I didn’t! I just believed a bunch of idiots who made it all up! It’s not my fault! Now, ladies and gentlemen! Introducing…the Phil and Bob Show!

We just want to protect consumers! We didn’t really believe all the pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific nonsense…although it’s blasphemous…and you might be surprised by this, seeing how I am a politician hoping to wriggle out of how stupid I now look when someone had the nerve to call on medical guys with medical degrees who know how the mind works…I have the nerve to be angry by the sneakiness of it. And it wasn’t really Diabolical Messages from Natas embedded in my kid’s rock albums that I was worried about…not me! I am worried that Natas will use backmasking to get my political opponent elected! That is the real danger here! It gets better.

That is Mike Curb who, at the time that the Phil and Bob Comedy Hour was popular, was elected Lt. Governor of California. He was also a musician. Time for Bob:

Ok. So, it is no longer a concern that Rock musicians are putting messages to worship Natas onto their records using backmasking, something we now know doesn’t work, but it is still a commercial hazard. The real concern is musicians who also run for political office. It wouldn’t be fair! They could put backwards messages on their records….vote for me! Don’t vote for the guy who doesn’t know how the human mind works! Vote for Mike! That’s not fair…that’s fraud! Maybe Phil and Bob could make an album…Phil and Bob and the Congressional Singers! Their first hit single could be…

Vote for Phil and Bob! And No! We’re Not Cheating! And No! It’s Not Fraud! Unless Mike Curb Does It!
 

Wait, I have to apologize…that wasn’t fair. Why? I just heard Mike Curb’s latest single, the one with the catchy title:

!ekiM rof etoV

Let’s hear from Dr. Berman again:

Wow! Don’t waste money on fighting backmasking, when you could be doing something that actually makes the lives of people better! Apparently, the good doctor doesn’t understand Evangelicals… Phil and Bob did help create a new hobby, one to replace looking around for clues that Paul McCartney was really dead:

Why try to find something on the cover of Abbey Road proving that Paul is Dead when you could be trying to figure out how to make the record spin backwards like Phil Wyman did? Toxic Materials?

Wow! Who needs fiction? It didn’t take long for music experts outside of the Rock music world to make some interesting observations. The following article was written by Ray Cooklis (Backward Music Precedes Bach). I re-produce it in full, as it is one of the best discussions of backmasking that I have found:

The idea of reversing musical materials is hardly a new one to serious composers. They’ve been doing things backward, on purpose, for centuries.

Examples of melodies composed to be played or sung backward as well as forward can be found as far back as the Middle Ages. An early 14th century manuscript of French music contains several pieces in the canon cancrizans (“crab” or retrograde canon) form, in which one voice repeats the melody of another voice, only backward.

One canon even has a melody that sounds the same backward or forward, the musical equivalent of a palindrome like…Able was I, ere I saw Elba.

French composer-poet Guilliaume de Machant (ca. 1300-1377), the most respected musician of his time, was especially fond of such techniques. He composed a rondeau titled…Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin (My end is my beginning and my beginning my end), where the title and text reflect, so to speak, exactly what is going on in the music.

Netherlands composers of the late 15th and early 16th centuries were also fond of writing puzzles and hidden meanings into their music.

Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach probably is the all-time champion of reversible music. His Musical Offering (1747) and Art of the Fugue (unfinished at his death in 1750), which sum up his era’s technical achievements in music, are full of canons and fugues using various combinations of retrogrades, mirrors and other devices.

Composers, in fact, commonly use the retrograde (backward), inversion (upside-down) and retrograde inversion (upside-down and backward) forms of musical themes to build their compositions. It’s part of their basic technique.

But the advent of the phonograph and other sound-reproducing equipment in the 20th century made it possible for composers to reverse actual, audible sounds, not just their notation of sounds on paper.

A group of composers in Weimar in the mid-1920s began using gramophone records to create new sounds by playing them backward, scratching them and otherwise distorting them.

It was a clumsy process, but it was all they had until about 1950, when tape recording equipment was introduced. At the time, composer Pierre Schaeffer in Paris was developing what he called musique concrete, which included collages of sounds previously considered non-musical. Tape recording made this much easier to accomplish.

One of Schaeffer’s principal techniques, along with speed variation, filtering, splicing, and overdubbing, was to play sounds backward to generate new sounds.

“Reversibility” of recorded sounds became one of the most important ideas in new music in the 1950s. And the sound of the human voice backward, wordless, speaking or singing, found its way into compositions by Ernst Krenek, Luciano Berlo, Edgard Varese, Karl Heinz Stockhausen and many others.

The technique of backward masking in rock music is clearly linked to these 1950s experiments by serious composers. The Beatles admitted they were influenced directly by musique concrete and the work of Stockhausen, and the collage and tape-manipulation effects on such records as their White Album, including backward lyrics, show that influence.
 

Fascinating insights. But as far as the vocals on the White Album…wrong.

Wow! An expert on witchcraft and Natasism says your full of it? And I’m relieved to see that Alice Cooper Goes to Hell finally received a shout-out. Alice Cooper was a Rock singer, but he was primarily a performer…he put on one of the greatest shows in Rock music history. He had a Diabolical Alice character, and the climax of his stage shows was the execution of the Evil Alice…either by hanging, guillotine, or electrocution:

And:

And:

And so the Evil Alice dies…executed for his crimes. But Cooper loved to play with this character. And so:

The song…Go To Hell does this as well. In fact, the awful things that Evil Alice is guilty of are enumerated in the song…and so Evil Alice can go to Hell…he deserves it! And what terrible things has he done? It is worth finding out.

For criminal acts and violence on the stage
For being a brat, refusing to act your age
For all of the decent citizens you've enraged…
You can go to Hell!

Surely Evangelicals would agree that Alice is guilty of those things…spoiler alert…he’s making fun of them. But Evil Alice is guilty of more:

For gambling and drinking alcohol constantly,
For making us doubt our parents’ authority,
For choosing to be a living obscenity…
You can go to Hell!

And just how terrible of a human being is Evil Alice? Let’s find out:

You're something that never should have happened,
You even make your Grandma sick!

You'd poison a blind man's dog and steal his cane,
You'd gift wrap a leper and mail him to your Aunt Jane,
You'd even force-feed a diabetic a candy cane…
You can go to Hell!

If I sent my aunt a leper for Christmas…I know what she’d say! And making a diabetic man eat a candy cane…that’s pretty bad. And Evil Alice is so bad that his grandmother doesn’t like him. Alas…there is only one place we can send such a villain! I’m sure you can see now what a million critics couldn’t see if they had a million years to see it in. The song is a spoof…on himself…on the character of Evil Alice; he is executed on stage…and he can go to…well you know. So, I have news for the guy who put this album in his list of…I have no idea what I’m talking about…and as an Ignorant Religious Extremist…I will make no effort to find out what I’m talking about…Satanically influential Rock artists! Aunt Jane is safe…law enforcement intercepted Evil Alice’s Leper-package. And no diabetics were forced to eat candy canes. In short, it’s a joke…and has nothing to do with Satan whatsoever. But you saw the word Hell…and you know that he’s controversial! And your kid likes him, so you have to hate him! But you didn’t know he was funny! And even likable. And how funny and likable could he be?

Well, Miss Piggy liked him. So did Kermit:

All the Muppets liked him:

The Big Muppets got to perform the song School’s Out with him:

One of the best episodes of the Muppet Show was the one in 1978 that saw Alice Cooper as the guest star. How Natasic can you be if the Muppets like you? Please don’t tell me that you believe the Muppets were created by the Devil to destroy your kids! Actually, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there weren’t a few Evangelicals who had a good time watching that episode back in 1978. So, thanks a lot! For some time now, I had been wondering how I was going to include The Muppets Meet Alice Cooper into an essay! I thought that you would go for the lowest common denominator and castigate Alice Cooper, as many ignorant people did, for the song Only Women Bleed. Sounds horrible? The song is a condemnation of the physical abuse of women, and I like to think, of a culture that is far too busy trying to condemn the Muppets newest best-friend to think about stamping out a true Evil…Spousal Abuse. Still, you’ve got to have your priorities.