Note: all text in italics, except for titles of books and records and emphasized words, is by Malinda.
Two mentalities are at work here: 1960s rock fans and 1980s fundamentalist Christians. The idea of phonographically concealed messages dates from the Paul McCartney death scare of 1969. For hard-core types, the secret-message rumors never really died. Avid rock fans have auditioned every album release since the late 1960s for hidden nuances. Backward messages, barely audible messages, and messages on one stereo track only have been alleged. [deletia] TV programs such as "Praise the Lord" and "The 700 club" have propagated rumors of a satanic plot in the recording industry, no less, in which various albums conceal "backward masked" demonic murmurings. [deletia] The fundamentalisrt groups were behind House Resolution 6363, a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert K. Dornan (R., Calif.) in 1982 to label all suspect records: "WARNING: THIS RECORD CONTAINS BACKWARD MASKING THAT MAKES A VERBAL STATEMENT WHICH IS AUDIBLE WHEN THIS RECORD IS PLAYED BACKWARD AND WHICH MAY BE PERCEPTIBLE AT A SUBLIMINAL LEVEL WHEN THIS RECORD IS PLAYED FORWARD." In February 1983, the Arkansas State Senate passed a similar record-labeling bill by a vote of 86 to 0.
(Wherefore art thou, Tippy?)
Contributing to the quasi-occult status of these rumors is the difficulty of checking them out on home audio equipment. You pretty much have to take someone else's word for it, or dismiss the rumors out of hand. From a technical standpoint, there are four simple ways to conceal a verbal message on a recording.
(I expect computer folks and DAT owners and so on to contribute the new and improved methods --since 1983-- here. This is also pre-CD, if I remember right.)
The most obvious is to record the message at a very low volume. The message may then be recovered by turning the volume up while playing the record or tape. If the message is faint enough, though, noise levels of home equipment may garble it. If the accompanying music or lyrics are loud enough, or if the message itself is indistinct or electronically modified, it may be hard to hear on any equipment.
A second gimmick is to record a message on one stereo rack only. Records and tapes have two independent recordings, of course, normally played together for stereo effect. On a record, each stereo track occupies one side of the V-shaped needle groove. On a tape, the tracks are recorded in parallel lanes of the magnetic material. The two tracks are called "right" and "left" after the stereo speakers they will play on. Otherwise, the trscks are interchangeable--the sound mixer can put anything he or she wants on each track. I.e., high notes don't have to go on one track and low notes on the other. A message on one track can be masked by simultaneous loud music or lyrics on the opposite track. With normal stereo balance (or mono equipment) the lud track drowns out the message track. At home, single-track messages can be recovered by adjusting the stereo balance so that only the desired track plays. Sometimes this trick also makes indistinct words clearer. Even if the words are not exclusively on one track, they may happen to be more audible on one track.
(I admit I used to play with the balance knobs to try and understand some of the Who's lyrics. Sheesh! It wasn't always easy without a Brit slang dictionary and a crisp vinyl record. :) Another vivid memory involves frustration over a mumbled line in "The Chauffeur", which didn't make the cut-off date for this book I guess...)
A message could be recorded at a speed different from the rest of the record. Then the record would have to be played faster or slower than usual to recover the message. Unless the message was at one of the standard speeds (say 45 rpm on a 33 1/3 rpm record), it could not be played normally on home equipment.
(And since I used to own a record player that played 16, 33 1/3, 45 and 78 rpms, I can say that you'd probably be able to understand it if it were forwards anyway. It might sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks or the One-eyed One-horned Flying Purple People Eater or Methuselah at the bottom of a deep well, but you could probably pick it out.)
The fourth and most commonly alleged trick is to record a verbal message backward. Reversed speech has several unexpected features. One is that syllables are not a constant in the reversal process. A one syllable word can have two or three syllables when played backwards. Thus "number nine" int the Beatle's "Revolution 9" reverses to "turn me on dead man" (or something like it), a jump from three to five syllables. There is no simple way to predict what a word or phrase will sound like reversed. Obviously, you can't just reverse the letters. The slightly less naive approach of reversing phonetic spellings [@ represents the upside-down 'e']---
_ ^
num*b@r nin turn me on ded man
\ / \ /
X X
/ \ / \
_ ^
nin r@b*mun nam ded no em nrut
Reversed messages are difficult to recover at home. [Most] record turntables are not built to go backward. Some have a neutral setting, in which the pickup and amplifier remain active and you can turn the record backward by hand. By hardly anyone has a steady enough hand to produce satisfactory results.
(Or the patience! Unless you're a teenager wanting to hear something 'cool' or a religious zealot determined to 'find and expose Satan's evil influence on our children'.)
[Deletia--describes how to cut, rotate 180o and splice a cassette recording with adhesive tape so that you can hear the spliced bit play backwards on an ordinary tape player.]
Big Secrets rented a recording studio to test the secret-message rumors. New copies of the records in question were transcribed on quarter-inch master tape. Where rumor alleged that a single stereo track contained a message, right and left stereo tracks were transcribed separately. Records with alleged inaudible messages were treated similarly. To test claims of reversed messages, recordings on the master tape were edited out and spliced in backward. [Hopefully not with Scotch tape! :) ] Twenty cuts or portions of cuts from sixteen albums were tested.
"ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST"
Queen, The Game
RUMOR: When played backward, the lyrics say, "It's fun to smoke marijuana."
FINDINGS: There is something that sounds like "It's fun to smoke marijuana" in the reversed music. It is repeated over and over. It might be rendered no less faithfully, however, as "sfun to scout mare wanna." This "message" is the reversal of the song title, which is repeated a a line in the song.
Let's make a distinction between engineered and phonetic reversals. When an artist records a verbal statement, reverses it by turning the tape end for end, mixes the reversed statement onto a master tape, and has records and tapes produced from the master, that is an engineered reversal. [I.e., it's deliberate.] When the phonetic properties of song lyrics are such that they can be reversed to sound like something else, that is a phonetic reversal. [I.e., it's a coincidence most of the time.]
"It's fun to smoke marijuana" is clearly a phonetci reversal. The lyrics are perfectly plain played forward ("Another one bites the dust"), not so plain played backward ("sfun to scout mare wanna"). With an engineered reversal, the opposite should hold true: gibberish forward, clear as a bell backward. Some are prepared to believe that phonetic reversals are just as intentional as engineered reversals--that the songwriter painstakingly planned the phonetic double-entendre. In the absence of confirming evidence, it just doesn't wash. It's too easy to find coincidences. If, for example,the letters of the alphabet are recited in conventional fashion (Ay, Bee, Cee, etc.) and reversed, at least five sound like English language words. D reverses to 'eden', F becomes 'pray', S becomes 'say', V becomes 'even' and Z becomes 'easy'.
"A CHILD IS COMING"
Jefferson Starship, Blows Against The Empire
RUMOR: When played backward, "son of Satan."
FINDINGS: Another phonetic coincidence. The repeated "It's getting better" reverses to an iffy "son of Satan," the "of" drawn out and the "Satan" strongly accented on the first syllable.
"ELDORADO"
Electric Light Orchestra, Eldorado
RUMOR: When played backward, "He is the nasty one/ Christ, you're infernal/It is said we're dead men/Everyone who has the mark will live."
FINDINGS: Coincidence. The supposed message lurks around the line "On a voyage of no return to sea." Reversed, this passage becomes the expected syllable salad--no one hearing it cold would describe it as anything but reversed music. Only if you listen while reading along with what you're supposed to hear will you get anything. The rumored version of the message is somewhat fudged. The passage sounds more like "He's to nasty one/ Christ you are, Christ, you're fernal/ There wiss suh, we're dead men..." There is no "in" in what is taken to be "infernal". The line that is supposed to be "Everyone who has the mark will live" isn't even close, though the syllable count is about right.
"FIRE ON HIGH"
Electric Light Orchestra, Face the Music
RUMOR: When played backward, "The music is reversible, but time---turn back!"
FINDINGS: "Fire on High" is instrumental. About twenty-six seconds into the music, reversed speech is heard. It is mostly louder than the accompanying music and begins with a two syllable unit repeated several times. The seeming speech lasts for about fourteen seconds. Reversing the music confirms that there is a true, engineered message. In reverse, a voice (Jeff Lynne's?) says, "The music is reversible, but time---turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!" All the words are clear and unambiguous. Anyone comparing this to the alleged reversal on ELO's "Eldorado" will have no trouble telling which is genuine.
"SHOO BE DOO"
The Cars, Candy-O
RUMOR: When played backward, the word "Satan" repeated approximately eleven times.
FINDINGS: Coincidence: The rumor refers to the reversal of the "Shoo be doo, shoo be doo, shoo be doo..." near the end of the song. Given the mysterious logic of reversed phonemes, these three-syllable units can be heard as a repeated two-syllable word. The word sounds a little like "Satan". (Of course, "Moving in Stereo" is blatant trickery with the tracks. I still like that particular song. I guess it wasn't 'sneaky' or 'secret' enough to be mentioned. :] )
"SNOWBLIND"
Styx, Paradise Theater
RUMOR: According to a mimeographed list of subject records distributed by Congressman Dornan, the words "Satan move though our voices" when played backward.
FINDINGS: Negative. Despite repeated listenings, it was not even possible to identify the reversed track that Dornan et al. are talking about.
"HEAVY METAL POISONING"
Styx, Kilroy Was Here
RUMOR: A red sticker on the Kilroy Was Here album cover warns, "By order of the Majority for Musical Morality, this album contains secret backward messages...."
FINDINGS: This is a case of second-generation backward-masking. Styx' Paradise Theater did not contain a backward message, though a lot of people said it did. So Styx has included a sure enough backward message on Kilroy Was Here. It is at the beginning of "Heavy Metal Poisoning". The reversed speech lasts about three seconds. There is no musical background. The words reverse to "Annuit Coeptis. Novus ordo seclorum." This is the Latin motto encircling the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. The usual translation: "God has favored our undertakings. A new order of the ages."
The cover sticker's "Majority for Musical Morality" is a fictitious Falwellesque group in the Kilroy Was Here video. Although the sticker suggests a plurality of "messages", only one was found.
"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN"
Led Zeppelin, IV (untitled, a.k.a. Stairway to Heaven or Runes)
RUMOR: In reverse, "I live for Satan...the Lord turns me off...there's no escaping it...here's to my sweet Satan....there's power in Satan...he will give you 666."
FINDINGS: Coincidence. If you listen very carefully to the "And it makes me wonder" lines in reverse, you'll hear something approaching "There's no escaping it." A better description is "There's no escape do." Knock off the last syllable and you have "There's no escape," a complete, intelligible sentence in reverse. It's there, all right, but it's not an unlikely enough coincidence to--well, make you wonder. The "Satan" in "I live for Satan" is good and clear. The "I live for" part is not. The other alleged lines are unremarkable. All are phonetic reversals of the entirely lucid forward lyrics and obviously just accidents.
(That's not what Jimmy Page wants us to think! :] )
"WHEN ELECTRICTY CAME TO ARKANSAS"
Black Oak Arkansas, Black Oak Arkansas and Ronch and Roll
RUMOR: In reverse, "Satan, Satan, Satan, Satan, Satan. He is God. He is God."
FINDINGS: The Black Oak Arkansas cut was reversed. Again, pairs of reversed syllables are being freely interpreted as "Satan." "He is God" was not identifiable.
"LORD HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL"
Black Oak Arkansas, Black Oak Arkansas
RUMOR: Simulated sex in the background behind Jim Dandy Mangrum's spoken prologue. Also, different voices saying different things on the two stereo tracks.
FINDINGS: The rumors refer not to the song itself but to the prologue and the whispering behind it. The whispering starts after Mangrum's words, "God and the Devil, however you want it." Played in stereo, the whispering seems to be someone saying, "I want it, I need it, I want it, I need it..."
When the stereo tracks are split, it is apparent that there are two voices. The right track contains some low breathing or moaning before the whispering starts, and then a male voice repeating "I want it." The "I need it"s begin a moment later, in a female voice on the left track. Another left track voice repeats "Good" between the "I need it"s in a more or less sexual 1 1/2-second rhythm. Reversed, it sounds like "tiki...martini...tiki...martini....". {I made that up to see if you were paying attention! >;] } The running-water sound at the end of the prologue is on both stereo tracks.
"WILD AND LOOSE"
The Time, What Time Is It?
RUMOR: Diferent voices on the two tracks, in the party conversation in the middle of the song.
FINDINGS: The same assignment of genders to stereo tracks as above: male voices on the right track and female voices on the left. The main female voice switches over to the right track when she talks to lead singer Morris Day.
"SHEEP"
Pink Floyd, Animals
RUMOR: A Moog-modified voice recites a parody of the Twenty-third Psalm.
FINDINGS: The part in question begins six minutes, thrity-five seconds into the cut, in an otherwise instrumental passage. In stereo you can barely hear a muffled, electronically modified voice begin, "The Lord is my shepherd/ I shall not want..." The voice continues but is drowned out by the music and the bleating of sheep.
The two stereo tracks were split. The voice is relatively clear on the left track, all but absent from the right. Only the first two lines are directly from the Twenty-thrid Psalm. The rest (thirteen lines) is a passably clever parody of man/God and man/sheep relationships: "He converteth me to lamb cutlets." Pink Floyd's music publisher refused permission to print the lyrics in Big Secrets.
"GOODBYE BLUE SKY"
Pink Floyd, The Wall
RUMOR: In reverse, "You have just discovered the secret message."
FINDINGS: The 'scret message' is at the very end of the instrumental passage following the "Goodbye Blue Sky" vocals. It comes just before the words "What shall we do" at the start of the song that is identified as "Empty Spaces" on the record label and "What shall we do now?" on the record sleeve. Played forward, the message is less apparent than ELO's "Face the Music" reversal: A reasonably attentive listener might play The Wall through and not catch it. It suggests speech not quite close enough to be overheard. In context this is not unusual because the "Goodbye Blue Sky" instrumental passage includes 'airport noises' and other sound effects. A loud climax in the music further masks the unintelligible voice.
When played backward, the voice (Roger Waters'?) plainly intones, "Congratulations, you have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to old Pink, care of the funny farm..." As the voice fades out, there may be another word--perhaps "Chalfonte" or "Chelsea"--after "funny farm".
Now for the grandaddies of reputed backward-masking, the Beatles.
"RAIN"
The Beatles, Hey Jude
RUMOR: The unintelligible lyrics at the end are reversed.
FINDINGS: True--an engineered reversal and not really a secret. "Rain" seems to have been the first popular recording to incorporate an obviously reversed lyric. The story is that John Lennon accidentally spliced the last part of the song in backward and liked the effect. When reversed, the strange-sounding vocals at the end become intelligible as a reprise startign with the drawn-out word "sunshine". The reversal is less apparent to the casual listener than it might be because the accompanying music is not reversed. The ending fits in smoothly with the rest of the song, the vocals suggesting a foreign language.
(I'm surprised that the Sgt. Pepper album's track [You know, the one
about Henry the Horse :>] "The fabulous Mr. K"
Space between "I'M SO TIRED" and "BLACKBIRD"
The Beatles, untitled, a.k.a. The White Album
RUMOR: A reversed message. At the time of the Paul-is-dead stories, the segue from "I'm so tired" to "Black bird" was offered as evidence. It was held to contain John Lennon's voice, reversed, saying, "Paul is dead, miss him, miss him, miss him." That interpretation seems unlikely now, but there's a mysterious low muttering betwen the songs.
FINDINGS: The mumbling is actually just to the "I'm so tired" side of the shiny "space" between cuts on the record. Each of the stereo tracks was recorded separately, twice, and a copy of each track was reversed. Thsi produced four versions of the two-second passage: right forward and reversed and left forward and reversed. All were equally unintelligible. It was not even apparent whether the voice is forward or reversed. Nor could John Lennon be identified as the speaker. There are nine or ten syllables. The first six, when played forward, are a two-syllable unit repeated three times. There is little or no difference between the stereo tracks. Any claimed interpretation of the sounds seems doubtful.
(I wouldn't hear anything at all if I wasn't listening for the message--it would be "unintelligible" lik the man says. Plus, I recognize that reversed phonemes do weird things. Still, it really sounds like what the RUMOR says it sounds like. Steven has dinked with it using more modern equipment and he swears it sounds like the RUMOR. Maybe we just want to hear it.)
"STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER"
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
RUMOR: It was, of course, claimed that John Lennon says "I buried Paul" at the end. (It's forward, at the very end after the music fades to complete silence, returns, and starts to fade out again.) But Lennon told Rolling Stone that the words are "cranberry sauce".
FINDINGS: They are "cranberry sauce". The "sauce"/"Paul" part is indistinct, but the first syllable sounds a lot more like "cran-" than "I".
"BABY YOU'RE A RICH MAN"
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
RUMOR: On one of the tracks the line "Baby you're a rich man too" is sung as "Baby you're a rich fag Jew," a dig at Brian Epstein. Or some think it's "rich fat Jew" and claim it as evidence of Beatle anti-Semitism.
FINDINGS: Negative. The two stereo tracks are nearly identical. It's always possible to hear words as similiar-sounding words, but basically, the lyrics jibe with the published version.
"I AM THE WALRUS"
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
RUMOR: The fadeout contains several lines from King Lear. According to The Beatles A to Z by Goldie Friede, Robin Titone, and Sue Weiner (New York: Methuen, 1980), Lennon taped the lines from a BBC radio production and did not even know what play it was until years later.
FINDINGS: Right and left stereo tracks of the ending were compared, but there waslittle difference. There seem to be four vocal components to the ending of "I Am the Walrus":
OSWALD
Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse:
If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body,
And give the letters which thou find'st about me
To Edmund, Earl of Glocester, seek him out
Upon the English party. Oh, untimely death!
Death!
EDGAR
I know thee well. A serviceable villain,
As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire.
GLOUCESTER
What, is he dead?
EDGAR
Sit you down, Father, rest you.
"REVOLUTION 9"
The Beatles, untitled, a.k.a. The White Album
RUMOR: Various reversed and/or one-track speech. The reversal of "number nine" to "turn me on dead man" has pretty much been discounted as coincidence (though it is mentioned on Congressman Dornan's list).
FINDINGS: Distinction between lyrics and any hidden message blurs on "Revolution 9". The eight-minute cut is a montage of sounds collected by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (and not by credited cowriter Paul McCartney, per White Album usage). It includes discordant music, radio broadcasts, sirens, applause, gunfights, sports cheers, the crackling of a fire, screams, a baby gurgling, a choir singing, and much that cannot be identified. For this investigation, "Revolution 9" was transcribed four times, twice on each stereo channel. One copy of each of the tracks was reversed. The four resulting versions were compared against each other and against the original two-channel version. "Revolution 9" contains a lot of talking. Played in stereo, forward, the longest stretch of understandable speech is probably an announcer saying, "...every one of them knew that as time went by they'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower..."
One believable instance of reversed speech occurs: someone saying "Let me out! Let me out!" (once held to represent McCartney in his totaled Aston-Martin). Two iffy reversals: "She used to be an assistant" and "There were two men..." Neither is clear enough or long enough to be convincing. Some of the music sounds more natural in reverse. "Turn me on dead man" is a typical phonetic reversal. The forward "number nine" (repeated throughout) is clear; the reversal is slurred--something like "turn me on dedmun." It was been claimed that "number nine" must be pronounced with a British accent in order to reverse to "turn me on dead man". [deletia explaining that they tested this and found it to be false.]
Much of "Revolution 9" is on one stereo track only: near the end a voice says "A fine natural imbalance...the Watusi...the twist...Eldorado... Eldorado." "A fine natural imbalance" is on the right, the rest is stereo. One of the longer bits of speech--"Who could tell what he was saying? His voice was low and his [unintelligible] was high and his eyes were low"--is clear on the left track, a bare whisper on the right.
There is a stereophonically concealed "secret message" on "Revolution 9": the words are on the right track. They begin about 4:58 into the cut and run for 22 seconds. They aren't likely to be noticed in stereo because the left track is louder. [deletia describing the deafening noises on left track. Author hazards a guess that the concealment was accidental. To recover it, he suggests switching the left track off. The right track will then have a stopwatch ticking behind these words:]
So the wife called, and we better go to see a surgeon...[a scream muffles a line that sounds like 'Well, what with the prices, the prices have snowballed, no wonder it's closed'.]... So any and all, we went to see the dentist instead, who gave him a pair of teeth, which wasn't any good at all. So instead of that he joined the bloody navy and went to sea.
"A DAY IN THE LIFE"
The Baatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
RUMOR: The seemingly blank grooves at the end of the record contain a note so high that only dogs can hear it, intended for Paul McCartney's sheepdog, Martha.
FINDINGS: Anyone who examines the record carefully will notice fifteen widely spaced grooves at the end of "A Day in the Life". They seem to contain no music. The reocrd label lists the length of "A Day in the Life" as 5:03, but the music seems to be over in ~4:30. Certainly the full 5:03 is not played on the radio.
"A Day in the Life" was recorded with a 42-piece orchestra from the London Philharmonic. The loud climaxes were created by playing in different keys simultaneously. A synthesizer was also used. Could a record contain a note too high-pitched for humans to hear? The sound engineer Big Secrets consulted sisn't think so: recording hardware is tuned to the human range of hearing and has very poor response outside that range. The same is true for the equipment that plays back the sound. Even if the BEatles had somehow managed to record such a note, no commercial tweeter would respond to it--not if it was more than 20,000 cycles/second, anyway. So much fo rthe idea of Fru-Fru being hypnotized by "A Day in the Life". Those 15 grooves aren't empty, though. The end of "A Day in the Life"--starting with the final loud "DAAAAA" and going all the way into the center of the record--was transferred to master tape and the stereo levels monitored. Initially, the final note is spilt evenly between stereo tracks. As it tails off, most of the note is on the right channel. The level never hits zero until the end of the record. By turning up the volume repeatedly, the final note can be heard all the way to the end.
Dogs can hear fainter sounds as well as higher sounds than humans. So at a given volume setting, a dog should be able to hear the final note longer than a human. Whether the dog hears the entire recorded note depends on the volume level and the dog.