All Evangelists should have a special nickname. Michael Mills gave himself one:

Watchman Michael Mills…it has a cool ring to it. If Jimi Hendrix’s best song is…All Along the Watchtower, then was Michael Mills watching the Watchtower?

Wow…this is the first allegation I have ever heard that Rock bands are secretly glamourizing…humanism. As a philosophy, humanism advocates that human knowledge be based upon the application of critical thinking, and is often associated with empiricism, which stresses that knowledge be based upon evidence perceivable by the senses. That is also the key basis upon which a dreadfully horrible thing is based. Satanism? Natasism? The worship of Reficul? No…science. Let’s get rid of that too! This is the first time I’ve heard of a conspiracy of Rock bands spreading Humanism. And I love this claim:

I am open minded. I am not waiting in the bushes…

You can’t be a watchman if you hide in the bushes unless you’re…

Sean Spicer! Wait…that’s not him. That’s fake Sean Spicer.

Sorry, I meant “among the bushes.” Open minded? Hmmm.

Wow, 80%! I wonder which Rock musicians fall in the 20%! And what an interesting list…and how positively diverse! Judas Priest and Prince…Madonna and the Rolling Stones…Elton John and Alice Cooper. And yes, Boy George was the singer of Culture Club, and has made public statements about his sexual orientation However, these have been relatively recently. In 1981, his orientation was questioned because of his distinctly androgynous look:

The answer? Well, he avoided giving concrete answers. But why shouldn’t he have? It’s nobody’s business. You either like his music or you don’t. One of the things about Evangelicals that I find the most disturbing is their utter obsession with what OTHER PEOPLE are doing in their bedrooms. Perhaps it’s because there’s nothing going on in theirs. Elton John? You didn’t discover that? Maybe take a second look at the actors and actresses in your favorite movies! Which you will now have to go around the country denouncing. You either like the artistic output of someone or you don’t. Based on the type of people who think that you can’t enjoy a painting until you have thoroughly researched the sexual behavior of the artist, documented it accordingly, analyzed the results, and then decided whether you consider it morally acceptable or not…then you can say whether you like it, and then you can right books about it and tour the country declaring it to the narrow-minded people that form your audience. Sorry, I meant “open minded.” And make money. I’m not saying that about anyone specifically…just in general, and that represents nothing more than a…digression.

In other words, he sits around watching…

MTV all day! And I’m not clear just who made this gaffe:

Actually, I didn’t know that Ozzy Osbourne had anything to do with the Wizard of Oz. His band was called:

Perhaps they’re one and the same, so I made my own cool graphic:

This will be the best version ever!

Wait ‘til you hear the duet!

And I would point something out. Every once in a while, Evangelical crusaders will, in addition to the usual names, toss out names like Venom, The Dead Kennedys, The Misfits, and other such bands. It should be noted that this is disingenuous. There is a subset of Rock, hard-core punk, which is overtly violent and disturbing. There is a genre of heavy-metal which is called speed metal, death metal, black metal, thrash metal, and dozens of other names. These bands are overtly Satanistic in imagery, lyrics, stage-show, etc. To include bands like these among bands that are usually in the lists of bad guys creates a false perception. What is that? These other bands are on the fringes, they are not mainstream, they don’t get played on the radio, and if you talk to typical heavy-metal fans, they can’t tell anything about Venom, if they’ve even heard of them. And I must admit that it wasn’t until…

Tipper Gore picked a fight with the Rock music industry, that I heard of The Mentors, and based on what I’ve seen, I feel no compulsion to go and listen to them. It is an undeniable fact that there is present in Rock music fringe elements that I would prefer my kids to stay away from. And if you want to go after those guys…all the power to you! You have my blessings…for what that’s worth. But if you rattle off Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Venom, and Blue Oyster Cult, and then show your audience the filthy images of Venom, and read off their Satanic lyrics, then you are doing so in an effort to throw the other guys into the same filthy bucket as Venom. And that is totally deceptive. The fact that the middle-aged-frightened-parent-church-goers you are preaching to don’t know any better, makes it all the easier. And far as Venom is concerned, how seriously can you take the occultic credentials of three guys who essentially

 utilized the Baphomet pentagram of the Church of Satan:

 
and who somehow came to the conclusion that...

…Hell is an infernal place consisting of 1-inch-deep-water.

On the subject of Mrs. Gore, the hearings boiled down to the worst of the worst…the Filthy Fifteen. And if I knew fifteen demons, I would change the name of my band to…The Filthy Fifteen. As it is, I only know fourteen demons, so I guess we’ll have to keep our current name. Venom made the list…and that’s a given if want to look at bands that few kids listened to in the 1980s, as did Mercyful Fate. Tipper didn’t like them because of their “occult” subject. I would have said…Devil-Worship Content. Black Sabbath and Def Leppard made the list for substance abuse…that must have been hard to find. Motley Crue made the list for a violent song, and Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It also was labelled “violent,” which it’s really not…it’s a rebellion anthem. You can always tell when people who nothing about the music are trying to act like they do when they pick out the song Bastard from a Motley Crue album called Shout At The Devil, but leave that the song alone. And they missed the meaning of the song Ten Seconds to Love, which I would have thought would bumpSheena Easton from second place, and even Prince from first place…

Here I come, my mind is set;
Get ready for love, you’re my ten second pet.
Touch my gun, but don’t pull my trigger;
Let’s make history in the elevator…

And I could have spent all day long giving Tipper a list of songs about dope, booze, violence, rebellion, and various weird Devil-Metal bands. Well, not the latter, I could have thrown out a couple of names. I would have to have gone to a record store, walk to the “Weirdo Bin” at the back of the store, and see what bizarre bands no listens to were gathering dust back there. But 9 of 15 songs showed that the hearings weren’t about finding weird Devil-Metal bands, or songs about beating up some guy who pissed you off, or telling your parents you weren’t going to listen to them anymore, or drugs and alcohol. The remaining nine were- Prince, Sheena Easton, Vanity, Madonna, Mary Jane Girls, Cyndi Lauper, AC/DC, Judas Priest and W.A.S.P. I’ll bet the first six never imagined that they’d ever be on a list with other three, and vice versa. The content that was objectionable was…sexual. And, on the same album as AC/DC’s Let Me Put My Love Into You are Have a Drink on Me, which is about serious drinking, and Hells Bells; oh, Shake a Leg is the best song on that album, but I digress. But they passed over those, until they found the one about…SEX. And finding…Eat Me Alive on Judas Priest’s album…Defenders of the Faith, they choose to leave off the song that immediately proceeds the song they picked. The song they passed over is Love Bites. Cyndi Lauper? Sheena Easton? Vanity? The Mary Jane Girls?  Favorites of AC/DC, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Def Leppard fans? Prince belongs with the former, and nowhere near the latter. I think that they lumped Rock musicians into two categories…the ones the Anti-Rock Matrons knew their sons listened to, and the ones they knew their daughters listened to…those are the two, completely opposite groupings that made it onto the Filthy Fifteen. Their sons…sure, we’ll throw a few on there, but they’re boys…ok. But their daughters being exposed to sex? Onto the list goes Sheena Easton and Cyndi Lauper, whose song She-Bop is really about masturbation. Their sons…well, whatever, right? Who cares. Their daughters…never, never, never! I wonder how many little-girl Cyndi Lauper listeners ever picked up on the subject. In the end, the hearings weren’t about violence, the occult, drinking binges, smoking dope, or beating up your enemy…9 of 15 of the Horrible Hits were about SEX…the real issue, and the one that horrifies Evangelicals more than any other. They’d take out the entirety of Rock music if it meant purging Christendom of S.E.X. And it is simply the truth that Rock music was first demonized by the Evangelicals in…1956. Parents attacked Elvis Presley because of the effect he had on their daughters. That would be the same effect that the Beatles would have on their daughters. And that was worse because they were foreign. The real assault against Elvis came in the wake of Elvis’ performance on the Milton Berle show that aired on June 5, 1956. For the first time, Elvis was not shot from the waist up or with his guitar in front of him. He put down the guitar and:

And now parents saw first hand the obscenely sexual gyrations of Elvis the Pelvis, and the effect that it had on their daughters. That was the real beginning of the war…and it started in 1956. I find it very amusing to read newspaper columns written by young Elvis fans pointing out how older women, who remained unnamed, and who, when younger, had reacted in a similar way to Frank Sinatra. In fact, the kids back then made statements that would have been fitting in 1981:

Take that…you squares! Get Hep! Maybe learn something before you go on the attack.

Shut up you mere man! What do you know? And I wouldn’t turn your back on Debbie!

Any guy with the nickname…crunch, can’t be a square! 4 cars and a motorcycle! You’re just jealous…kill-joy squares! And even one mom came down on the side of the King of Rock and Roll. Commenting upon the supposed sexual inappropriateness of Elvis, she took a shot at a hypocritical society…and hypocritical fathers and husbands:

Wiggle Monroe!

And no…the open lips with an excessive amount of red lipstick is not sexually suggestive at all.

Darn! If her dress could be raised just a little more…then we’d be in the kill-zone. I’m glad that there was no nothing sexually suggestive about Wiggle Monroe.

Still, everything else aside, Michael Mills relayed two wild claims involving the Beatles and drugs. The first was a nutty allegation that Strawberry Fields Forever was about drug use. But not pot, or apparently LSD. He suggests that it was about intravenous drug use, and that the “Strawberry Fields” refer to the track marks on the arms of intravenous drug-users. This is a totally ludicrous claim. The name comes from…

When John Lennon was a boy, he used to play in a wooded area behind Strawberry Field, which was a Salvation Army children’s home near Liverpool. That is the source of the name. And if the song is psychedelic, then it would only make sense that if there were any drug associations with it, and I’m not saying that there are, then psychedelic drugs would make more sense…pot, acid, mescaline, peyote. These drugs are not taken intravenously.

The song Hey Jude, and this staggers the mind, was also accused of being about drugs. Why? That’s obvious, the following lyrics:

The minute you let her under your skin,
Then you begin to make it better

And you inject dope by sticking the needle through the skin to reach a vein. It is also the case that heroin, which has a dizzying array of slang names, was at one time called Judas, hence Hey Jude. Paul McCartney wrote the song for John Lennon’s son Julian, after John ran off and left them for Yoko Ono. Julian was particularly upset during the resulting divorce, and so Paul wrote…Hey Jules. When the Beatles decided to record the song, Jules began Jude because the hard-ending of the latter worked better in the chorus.

Apparently, guys like Mills didn’t know very much about music in general. The song called…I’ve Got You Under My Skin, was written by Cole Porter in 1936. The song was originally performed by Virginia Bruce in a famous musical called…

The signature version of the song appeared in 1946, sung by…

In 1966, the Four Seasons recorded the song. If you look up the meaning of the expression…under the skin, which Evangelicals seem to have felt as equally unwilling to do as they apparently were unwilling to research the use of the expression in popular music, perhaps to avoid accusing Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra, Virginia Bruce, and the Four Seasons of singing a love song dedicated to heroin, you will find two different meanings. Oh, none are related to drug use. The expression can denote feeling annoyed or irritated by someone, or reaching a deep understanding of, or connection with, someone. I suppose you could refuse to look at the use of the expression in music since the 1930s. I suppose you could refuse to look up the use of the expression in modern, American English. To be complete, you then must ignore the lyrics:

Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start, to make it better

The parallel-lyric:

The minute you let her under the skin,
Then you begin to make it better

Heart?

For the record, there are a few songs recorded by Sinatra that I really like. And that makes me a…square!

I’m sure Mills would be disappointed to learn that intravenous drug-users don’t shoot smack into their heart muscle. And I’ve discussed the much maligned, and perhaps wrongly so, Judas Iscariot who, I feel confident, was not a heroin addict. You do, of course, let someone into your heart…just ask Cole Porter and the Chairman of the Board. Ignorance? Or flat out deception? I was stunned to hear that groupies are a form of prostitution. Prostitutes demand money for their services…groupies do not. And I could point out something about groupies that would horrify all Evangelicals like Mills. My favorite song by Kiss is…Plaster Caster. And it is named after a group of ladies who really liked Rock musicians and had something about themselves that separated them from more ordinary groupies, puting them at the top of the Groupie Food Chain:

And it would seem that

Where was I? Oh, I remember. They made plaster casts of certain anatomical parts of Rock stars. You should see their collection! And you can! Google it! So, I share some lyrics with all Evangelicals of the Michael-Mills-Type:

The plaster’s gettin’ harder, and my love is perfection,
A token of my lover for her collection

Plaster Caster, grab a hold of me faster,
And if you wanna see my love, just ask her

Well, Shakespeare it ain’t…I’ll grant you. But it does rhyme! And I am very grateful to Michael Mills and his comment about groupies. I never thought that I would ever get a chance to mention the Plaster Casters in one of these essays.

There was of course another highly impossible link between the Beatles and the Manson Family:

Susan Atkins, a Manson Family member, who had connections with the Church of Satan:

This appeared to be limited to a topless performer role of some sort. But any connections between the Mansonites and Anton Le Vey, which it would seem that there weren’t any, but even if there was, it would be irrelevant to the Beatles’ music. Atkins would take the easy way out:

Did anyone ask Satan whether Atkins was his child? Perhaps she was Satana’s younger sister.

Sure to be a best seller! Satana had sisters?

I like the bats and hellhound. Still, who did Manson blame?  That’s right…the Beatles.

But even if a connection between Le Vey and Manson wasn’t relevant, there was a bizarre connection between the Beatles’ and Rosemary’s Baby, a movie that I will discuss in another installment of this essay. A connection between the Beatles, Mia Farrow, and Prudence Farrow definitely existed.

The song Dear Prudence, one of the best Beatles songs, was written about Prudence Farrow, Mia’s sister. All attended a religious retreat associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Valley of the Saints. It involved Transcendental Meditation. The Beatles wrote part of the White Album in this context. It was also in this context that Lennon came up with the idea for the song Sexy Sadie. This also happens to be the Manson Family name for Susan Atkins. It is disputed whether Atkins was called this before the song was heard by Manson, or after. It’s certain that she was called Sadie Mae Glutz before the White Album was released. Sharon Tate had wanted the role of Rosemary, though she lost the race to Mia Farrow. Perhaps she should have kept a closer eye on Swiss time. Tate had starred in a British horror film shot in 1966 called:

Eye of the Devil! In the movie, Sharon Tate played a witch:

Sharon Tate’s film was not a precursor to Rosemary’s Baby, though the latter film, which I will discuss in another part of this essay, is a very important precursor to the McMartin Preschool Trial.

So how do we get to 1982? That’s the really strange thing! There is an answer! And it accounts for the shift from the special effect in Rain to Satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven. I will leave Captain and Tennille out of this. What is my answer? That’s the strange thing. The guilt for this rests purely on the shoulders of a Man of God…a Cleric. Who?

Yes! Father Damien Karras…of the Exorcist. Notice the reel-to-reel tape player, which is what you need to place things backwards. I’ve written about my belief that the tape purporting to contain Regan MacNeill speaking English backwards was a falsification created from two other tapes…the tape of Regan’s message for her father, and the growling and howling that Regan engaged in when Karras threw the It’s-Not-Holy-Water-It’s-Really-Only-Tap-Water-So-She-Shouldn’t-Be-Having-Fits-And-Speaking-Backwards-Anyway water on her. He did this because he had no foreign language gimmick to justify an exorcism which I think Father Dyer blackmailed him into obtaining. The movie enjoyed saturation exposure, and it entered into the Mind of Popular Culture in a dramatic way. And it was here…not in the Beatles Nonsense…but in the Exorcist, that the public, who in general were terrified by the Exorcist, encountered the idea that stuff on a tape can actually be messages from Satan, Pazuzu, Lamashtu, or Aunt Mina that must be listened to backwards to be heard. It’s the Exorcist that bridges the gap between harmless allegations about the Beatles and a Satanic War against God being waged through the records listened to by young people. But! Don’t blame the Exorcist! It was a movie…one that is not terrifying…one that is actually amazing…and one that everybody misunderstood. And the backwards masking? It was faked…by a cleric! And the Clerical TV Evangelical Frauds who sought to out-Karras Karras spent their time manufacturing their own tapes. Sure…the effect was, and is, used. But the effect traces itself back to Rain…it’s just a really cool effect, and, for the most part, as harmless as the B-side to Paperback Writer.

Yes, I say that you can’t blame the Exorcist. Well you can, but you’d be wrong. However, there was a crazy pseudo-scientist named Wilson Bryan Key, who did exactly that. And this guy made sure to include subliminal messages to everyday grocery-store products. Now if Earling, Iowa had its pornographic cars, then Wilson Bryan Key had his pornographic crackers:

Yes! Ritz crackers with sex baked right into them. I knew there was a reason I like Ritz crackers! And he gave us pornographic cigarettes to smoke:

In Subliminal Seduction, Mr. Freudian claimed that advertisers were filling ads with barely-perceivable allusions to sex. The subconscious mind picks these up and induces us to buy the products. But I’m confused, if a weird man with a hard-on hidden in a camel causes me to smoke camels…what does that say about me? What about those who smoke Marlboro? And there’s a guy I know that will no longer smoke Camels…way to go Mr. Freudian…he changed brands after I showed him this picture! He said he found a book on subliminal images in products, and now he smokes a brand that has a secret vagina hidden on the back of the pack! So insecure. It is actually quite a lot of fun to take Mr. Freudian’s examples of popular advertisements and look for naughty things in them.   

Surely everybody likes:

And we all know that on some pages, you get a drawing of something and you look for the hidden things in the drawings. Now…I will show you an inappropriate way to play this Find-Subliminal-Brain-Washing-Things game. This is from a 1950s Highlights magazine:

Now I will play this in a way that Mr. Key would like:

What kind of pervert would put something that is so obviously an erect phallus in a wholesome, children’s magazine? Of course! That’s not what it is. But if you’re some guy who wants to find genitals in every picture he sees…well, just go get a Penthouse magazine. But you can’t, because that’s evil! So, you study a pack of cigarettes looking for a penis.

How about this one:

Now this is particularly disturbing. Not sexually, but because it seeks to undermine the political values of American children and to replace them with something very malevolent. And it’s as clear as the nose on your face!

There, now you see it!

A Nazi Little Red Riding Hood? Goose-stepping her way through the woods? This is fun! And it is simply the case that if you have a dirty-mind, you can find sexual images or innuendos anywhere. Here’s a great example:

Hmmm…

Ok…the last one was easy. Here’s one that takes a little work:

Butter…so what?

You don’t need to work so hard on this one:

I wonder if the Grand Rapids Creamery Company started as the Earling Iowa Creamery Company!

Advertisers use sex overtly all the time, so they don’t need to hide a non-existent phallus in a camel on a cigarette pack. People write ads that can end up being taken a certain way that wasn’t intended, although Mickey’s declaration is certainly funny. And it’s not always clear how overt sex in advertisements is supposed to work:

So, sexy lingerie lady in heels is licking a box of detergent. Is this some way to get husbands willing to do the wash? They can stare at the box!

If I could go back to the 1940s, and could add one other element to the graphics on these Made-In-Earling-Iowa Detergent Boxes, it would be:

And the author of Subliminal Seduction was actually taking the whole thing seriously! But he also gave us a warning about backwards masking and meta-contrast. He specifically identified the Exorcist as having used various types of sound effects that would be recognizable if fully heard, but are in fact not fully heard when watching the movie. That was 1973, in 1976, he pointed the finger at the Exorcist again, claiming that the subliminal techniques used in the movie created intense emotional reactions. And I will say that he is sort of right. Sort of. There is a world of sound in the Exorcist that hovers just at the perception threshold. As such, it is very hard to hear. Well, I mean…back in 1973 and 1976. Actually, it was impossible to hear until computer technology made it audible. This is one great example:

If you turn up the volume on your computer, or better yet, put on headphones, and look away from the screen, you will hear very strange groaning sounds as Karras walks around to the other side of Regan’s bed. And in those sounds you will hear…Why? Why? Why? And why is that? Because Karras killed his mother. And! The most important examples involves a phone conversation that Chris MacNeill was having with someone, and she says something that it took me two days isolating the sound to finally hear. And I will go into that in a different essay. But I found Captain Howdy’s Bird Box in the attic, and all kinds of very, very cool things…like turning around one of Regan’s drawings and finding all the Black Priest-Birds slowly making their way up to a very frightened face. But I said that Crazy Guy was sort of right. He perceived things that it takes work to perceive. But he is wrong when he says that all of these things are simply effects that can have unintended consequences for those who watch the movie. He couldn’t be more wrong. The makers of the Exorcist have hidden clues throughout the movie…I have argued that all along. Some are visual…like the fact that Karras pulled out a bottle of medication that he planned to inject into Regan, or the fact that as he left his mother’s apartment, he turned up the radio so the neighbors wouldn’t know that his mother wasn’t moving around. And others are auditory. What I think all this means is that if you simply go by what is apparent in the Artificial Reality, you see and hear the wrong movie. The Exorcist is a movie that to understand and appreciate correctly…you have to work at it. You can’t be the passive movie-watcher you can be if you watch Rosemary’s Baby. And no! Sharon Tate wouldn’t have made the story any better. Neither would Yoko, although she had the screaming and screeching thing down to a science. I believe that there are two Exorcists…one is terrible…the other is absolutely genius. I could be wrong…maybe I’ve worked too hard at it. It certainly was harder than finding the weird little guy in the Freudian Highlights Magazine featuring Joe Camel. And even then, I still had trouble seeing his…not that I wanted to…mind you. The strange thing about Mr. Freudian’s work is the point that it makes about the fact that human beings are sexual animals. You can try to repress it, and to that end you can call on any number of False Religious Principles to assist you. But it won’t matter! The sexual impulse will come crashing through no matter what you do. So, go get what you need…and that way you won’t feel the need to turn the Land O’ Lakes Indian Girl into a stripper.