Stuff You Should Know - The Judas Priest Suicide Trial

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

A greatest hit of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s came when the metal band Judas Priest was put on trial for the suicides of two teens. While the case was preposterous – based on alleged hidden satanic messages in the music – it arose from a real tragedy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the homestretch, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun,

thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee and Charlamagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Guess what, Will? What's that, Mango? I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we've done over 250 episodes, we don't really talk about murders or cults.

I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy. We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money? And then of course, can you game a dog show? So what you're saying is everyone should be listening. Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

We're just rocking out, worshipping Satan, hearing stuff you shouldn't. Yes, and I believe there's a COA at the top here. Just a trigger warning, this one features content featuring drug and alcohol use and suicide, some pretty serious stuff. So we just wanted to give listeners a heads up. Also a heads up if you want to read a really, really great long form in-depth article about this, there's an article called The Dreamer Deceiver from 1990 from the Village Voice

by Ivan Soloterov. It's amazing. It's fantastic and, like, really gets into it. So thanks to Dave for this and as well as Ivan. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and like you said, this is kind of a heavy subject, but it's also just totally fascinating because it comes from that really bizarre chapter

of American history from essentially the 80s, the beginning to the mid 80s, where there was a segment of the American population, specifically Christian fundamentalists, who were convinced that Satan was working his magic through rock and roll music, but specifically they eventually came to target heavy metal bands. And I mean that was a pretty easy target because at the time there were plenty of bands

who were using satanic imagery or just looked weird so they must be Satan worshippers or something like that. There were bands that definitely encouraged it as soon as they figured out that the more the Christian right shouted about how there were Satanists out there, that they could sell more records, so they really kind of leaned into it. Um, so that's kind of where this story begins.

And then the other thing you need to understand, what we're talking about is something called backmasking. And that is putting essentially hidden messages by That that appear when you play music backwards So those two things the satanic panic of the early 80s combined with backmasking kind of laid the groundwork for what we're talking about Today, that's right. And if you want to Really get a background before you listen to this, you can listen to our, I think one of our best episodes,

our Satanic Panic episode that we recorded and also go to a bookstore, buy our book, Stuff You Should Know, colon. Colon. I don't even know what's the name of it. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Hey, are you looking at it or is that for memory? Right off the top of my dome as the cool kids say.

Nice work. You can go out and get that book because we have a really, really fun chapter on backmasking or backward masking in there. And yeah, so go read that, listen to that. Now read this, welcome back everybody. And we can talk about the Judas Priest trial. But first, even before we get to that, we'll talk about California bill AB 3741,

the very first bill that said, hey, we should have warning labels on records that have backward masking. Yeah, it was introduced by a California assemblyman named Phil Wyman, who was an assemblyman for decades, I think two different times. And he had been contacted by a constituent who'd seen a show about satanic messages being subliminally hidden in music on the Trinity Broadcast Network. And she was very upset about this.

And Phil Wyman ended up introducing a bill based on that phone call. That's right. And part of this bill said, the records of many rock groups contain anti-Christian and pro-satanic messages transcribed on them by backward masking. And I'll paraphrase the rest because they basically say like, while you can't, you can

only understand it basically if it's played backwards, but when it's played forwards, your brain still subconsciously picks up on this stuff, which is ludicrous and pseudoscience. We know this for a fact now, but they, in this bill, which by the way, didn't even get put to a vote, thank goodness, this bill literally said like, hey, this stuff, your brain is picking up on it, even though it's playing in the wrong direction, your child's brain is still hearing these messages. Right, and again, these are messages about Satan.

Anti-Christian, pro-Satanic messages. And the big fear was that not only would it make kids drop out of high school and start drinking beer prematurely, but that it would drive them to suicide. That was, you know, and to the Christian rights credit, they were deeply concerned about teenage suicide and they were seeking a way to easily explain it because usually teenage suicide is the convergence of a lot of different factors. A lot of times it comes from

people you would not want to identify as part of the problem. So it makes a lot more sense and it's a lot easier to just point at heavy metal bands and say, you guys are putting messages in your music that's causing kids to commit suicide, right? And like you said, there were experts that came and testified about this, but experts with scare quotes, and I think you should actually put scare quotes around the scare quotes when you write experts

when you're talking about these people, because one guy in particular, William H. Yarrow, the second, was a self-taught neuroscientist. That's how he played. What is that? It's a, I can't say here. Yeah, okay. This is a family podcast.

Yeah, he's self-described as a self-taught neuroscientist. He does not have academic credentials that are anything close to what he has described himself as. And he has a, again, in quotes, probably scientific theory about these messages that they are, they can be decoded by the unconscious, which I already covered, if it's heard enough times. And here are the two keys here, as far as this is gonna play out in a trial situation, is that he said once you have decoded this message

your unconscious mind has, then you process it as truth, and that these truths can influence your behavior, like suicide and drug use and any other antisocial behavior you can think of. Right. And so again, this is total pseudoscience based on nothing like facts, but because there was a man who presented himself as an expert in this, who was willing to go testify as an expert and was saying these things that backed up the Christian rights beliefs. This is how like junk science starts to get a hold in culture. Cause then a lot of times like people don't want to be impolite and tell you

how ridiculous what you're saying is. And so it ends up like on the record and it just kind of grows from there. And this is a really good example of that. Yeah, for sure. In the satanic Panic episode, I know we talked about the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource Center. That was the group formed in 85,

not a super group of musicians, but a super group of DC political spouses, notably Tipper Gore and then wife of James Baker, who was Treasury Secretary, his wife Susan Baker, when they got together and said, hey, we need warning labels on music, X for profane or sexually explicit, V for violent, DA for drugs and alcohol, O for occult, anti-Christian or satanic music. And this is where we got those very famous hearings in 1985 with everyone from Frank

Zappa to a very fired up John Denver testifying. I watched some of John Denver's testimony today. It's great. I mean, he is fired up in what he's saying, but he's also mellow John Denver. Yeah. But he talks about how his song Rocky Mountain High was banned in some places or not played in some places because it was taken as like a pro drug song. And he said it was banned by people who'd obviously

never been to or seen the Rocky Mountains. Right, or smoked good weed. Yeah, but he really kind of went to bat against censorship. He said, I'm opposed to censorship in any form. And especially that's dictated by a self-appointed group of watchdogs who were telling everybody else what morality is. He had some really great messages, but in the end, the PMRC prevailed, uh, because the warning sticker, that parental advisory explicit lyrics that essentially

helped sell way more records than would have sold had that label never been created, that came out of that, that push by the PMRC. Yeah. And you know what? Uh, I didn't mind it back then so much. I think when the PMRC was doing their thing, I was really young and I didn't understand it. Later when the parental advisory label came out, I was kind of like, well, who cares? It's fine. It's just a rating. And parents need ratings as guidelines. But I don't know, now that I see how it all went down, it's really, I don't know, how you draw those guidelines and what is right and what is wrong is really kind of the big question for me. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you're essentially

providing a service for parents who don't want to go to the trouble of finding out what they're doing you know at the expense of free speech although to me I kind of agree with Past you where it's like this is this barely qualifies as censorship. No one's saying you can't say it Yeah, there's just a warning on there that some things might be offensive to some people. I don't know how I feel about it, but I'm not as virulently against it as I once was too. Yeah, I think so. But point being, during those hearings, you had Frank Zapp and the gang out

there, but you also had a group of, again, quote,, quote, expert, unquote, people testifying that like, hey, this music will, I mean, there was one guy, Joe Stussy, that said there are scientific studies that prove that rock music warps young people's minds and that these sub audible messages can, you know, infiltrate the unconscious and lead to suicide. They talked about all these, and these are, to be sure, sad, sad cases of teenage suicide, but trotting these cases out there saying, and you know what, they were listening to Twisted Sister before it all happened,

and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, and also, if you say that there are scientific studies, and no one asks you to explain what scientific studies you're talking about, that's again how junk science gets a foothold in the world. Totally. So, I say we take a break and come back and talk about how this kind of went from Congress

into the courtroom once this idea took hold that musicians were putting dangerous, harmful, hidden messages in their music. It's a real pro-transition. Thanks. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd.

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All right. So, we're back. We promised to get into the courtroom and we are not going to start with the... Well, I guess they were both pretty popular trials in the media or at least captured everyone's attention, but one trial went decidedly longer than the first. In 1985, Ozzy Osbourne was sued, along with CBS Records, when their son John McCollum, these are parents in California, took his life after listening to Suicide Solution, the Ozzy Osbourne song. It was dismissed,

very key ruling here on First Amendment grounds that basically said, hey, music lyrics are free speech and it doesn't matter what they say, you can't sue someone for writing a song and singing it. Very quickly after this, there were two more pending suicide cases that were scrapped. But then a couple of years, well, I guess it wasn't a couple of years, it was just a few months later in December of 1985, a very tragic thing happened in Reno, Nevada, just outside of Sparks, Nevada. Matthew 14 So yeah, this is a very sad story.

This is where it gets tragic. Because there were two boys who were best friends. They didn't really like most other people. They were just as tight as two people could be with one another though. And they loved Judas Priest. Their names were Raymond Belknap, who was 18, and James Vance, who was 20. And everybody called them Ray and Jay because they were essentially inseparable. And I think I said it before, but it bears repeating.

They loved Judas Priest. They did. It was their favorite band. These are guys that you know if you sort of think about the typical metalheads in the 1980s maybe some anti-social behaviors like you said they just hung around with each other hung out in their room drinking and smoking grass and listening to heavy metal over and over and over and reading lyrics and looking at the posters and you know number one fans basically but these were deeply troubled kids who were very unhappy Raymond had

had one attempted suicide before and that night they made a suicide pact that they were going to end their lives. They got a shotgun, a sawed-off shotgun, went to a playground after drinking and smoking pot all day, and went to a playground behind a Lutheran church, and Raymond shot and killed himself with a shotgun under the chin.

Yeah, it gets even worse than that though, because like you said, it was a suicide pact. So after he witnessed Ray shoot himself with a shotgun, point blank range, Jay was like, well, I guess it's my turn. So he picked up the shotgun that was covered in blood and gore and ejected the shell, put in another shell and then put it to his own chin. And in that article from the Village Voice that you cited, the author calculated based on the 911 call

and when the ambulance got there that he probably sat there for a full five minutes contemplating whether to do this or not. And he said later, because he actually survived this, that it was the sound of sirens that essentially hurried him up. And I guess the gun slipped, or he didn't quite line it up the way that he had intended to,

or there was just some little part of his head that was like, I don't want to die. But he did pull the trigger, but he shot himself under the chin at an outward angle away from himself. So he survived, but he also took off like a significant portion of his lower face. Yeah, his chin and mouth and nose, you know, he was reconstructed as best possible.

If you, again, big trigger warnings here, but if you wanna go look up, you know, parts of this trial or interviews with this kid, you can do that. Just, you know, do so at your own risk. So, yeah, so Jay survived, Ray died, and it was in a letter to Ray's mom that Jay wrote that he first said he identified the Judas Priest record they were listening to over and over all day while they were getting trashed as something that prompted them to take their lives. And he said, quote, I believe that alcohol and heavy metal music such as Judas Priest led us or even mesmerized us

into believing that the answer to life was death. He also spoke to a guidance counselor afterward and told her that he had heard do it, do it in the song that they were listening to. And the song in particular is Better By You, Better Than Me, which is off of the Judas Priest Stained Class album from 1978. And there's a lot to talk about with that song. Yeah, there is. It was their fourth record. The song is actually a cover song. Maybe, ironically, it's a cover song, in that these weren't even Judas Priest words that they

had written. And, you know, we'll get to the do it part, but, well, I guess we should just go ahead and say that supposedly at the end of like three different lines in the chorus right afterward, you hear, do it. And the boys heard this and thought that meant to take their lives. There were also four other parts that they thought were back-masked. One that said, try suicide backwards. Not try suicide backwards. Try suicide. Suicide is in. Sing my evil spirit. And curse words here, but I'm gonna clean it up for the crowd here, F the Lord F all of you. So more about that song, Chuck, the other thing about it, it's on a Judas Priest

album, it's associated with these boys suicide and suicide attempt, so of course you'd think like this is some dark material that you're talking about. And like you said, it's a cover. It was originally written by Gary Wright, who was a member at the time of Spooky Tooth, who recorded it in 1969. That same Gary Wright went on to have

quite a successful solo career with his number two hit, Dream Weaver, in 1976. That Gary Wright. But it was a song, I don't know if it was an anti-war song. his number two hit Dreamweaver in 1976, that Gary Wright. But it was a song, I don't know if it was an anti-war song. At the very least, it was a look inside the psyche of a boy at war, sensibly in Vietnam, who was having such a rough time

that he couldn't express himself to his girlfriend back home. So he was actually talking to his best friend, saying like, you talk to her, you tell her how I'm doing, because I can't express myself. It's better by you, better than me. That's what the song's about. There's no, nothing about suicide in there.

There's nothing about taking your life or killing other people. It's just kind of like a soul bearing song about somebody who's going through the horrors of war. It's a good song. It is a good song, and I really like Judas Priest's version of it, too. I like Judas Priest, but I'm also like, after a while, everything sounds like Motorhead in a certain way.

This does not. This sounds like Judas Priest. a certain way. This one doesn't. This does not. This sounds like Judas Priest, you know? It's really good song. Yeah. It doesn't even sound that metal actually. No. It's almost like do-wop.

Yeah. Did you say do-wop or do it? I said do-wop. Wow. See? I said do-wop everybody. I definitely did not say do it. Don't do it.

Then I hope there are no blood sucking attorneys listening because that's just what happened. This is where the story to me gets a little gross because in 1986, three attorneys headed by a man named Ken McKenna, who was quoted at one point as saying, I was born to sue people, I guess, is the dot dot dot. That sounds like a vanity plate. It really is born number two, Sue.

So they mount a case file, a case rather, a lawsuit against Judas Priest and CBS records, which, and this is just sort of a nitpicky thing, but it is specifically was a product liability lawsuit, meaning the same kind of lawsuit you would bring if any other product had something that like made you sick to your stomach or something. Exactly, and in this case the the plaintiffs were bringing this as if CBS records and Judas Priest had put out a product that had a harmful flaw to it, which was these subliminal messages that had brought harm to Ray and Jay, which had caused them to kill himself and then attempt to kill himself.

So that was essentially what they were coming at it with, and they drew a judge in Washoe County, what they were coming at it with. And they drew a judge in Washoe County, where Reno is, I think the courthouse is in Reno, Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead heard this case. And in pretrial hearings, he heard a lot of expert testimony. He heard testimony from a lot of junk science scarequote experts. And he agreed to hear the case. There was no jury, it was just him, but he allowed the case to come to trial. And just that was a landmark decision because what he's saying is, I think there's enough possibility that what the plaintiffs are saying is right,

that these guys inserted subliminal messages that got these kids to take their lives or attempt to take their life, that I'm willing to hear lawyers debate whether it's correct or not. That's enormous. Right. And that it didn't get bumped because of the Aussie free speech ruling because they were specifically because they were subliminal messages, which to him, setting this president, doesn't count as free speech because there's no dialogue that can happen

where you can determine if something is correct or true. And on top of that even, subliminal messages were an invasion of a right to privacy because the listener didn't know this going into it and had no way of avoiding this. So very landmark rulings. Another thing, two things I want to point out here was part of this, part of this is because these attorneys stepped forward, of course,

and they thought they could make a lot of money. Part of it was because these parents hated this music. These weren't like rock and roll parents who were like, oh man I was kind of into that too, but it turned my my son wrong. These are people like when you see interviews, I watched that that documentary on YouTube, it's not very good, it was sort of from the time though, but it showed a lot of the trial and interviews. The mom, I believe it was James's mom, you know they asked her like what kind of music she was into and she liked music that her parents were into

so People from like the 1940s and 50s. She was like, you know, like Roy Rogers and the singing nun So the idea of Judas Priest being in their household they hated this so they're angry about that to begin with Mm-hmm. And then the other thing that people I don't think thought about much at the time was, is that Judas Priest, like, they were devastated by this. These were big fans of theirs. And Rob Halford in interviews was even like, well, first of all, we're not inserting

backward messages anyway. But if we were, like, it's ludicrous. Why would we have our biggest fans and tell them to kill themselves? And he's like if anything we would say buy more shirts and buy more records yeah and it like it devastated them emotionally that these these kids took their lives and that they loved Judas Priest and they were being blamed for it yeah yeah that really struck me too in reading quotes from Rob Halford is just the amount of empathy that he had, and that

he was able to kind of like cut through all the other stuff and be like, you guys don't lose sight of what this is all about. These two kids like died. And yeah, but also at the same time, defending their music and defending their other fans too, saying like, don't pick on these kids just because they listen to Judas Priest. Like there's nothing wrong with listening to Judas Priest. It was a's nothing wrong with listening to Judas Priest. It was a really strange, awful position that the band was forced into by, like you said, those ambulance-chasing lawyers who created this lawsuit out of whole cloth, basically.

Yeah, the other thing too from watching the documentary was just the complete lack of, and I'm not saying like parents are responsible if a child takes their life because like you said, there's so many things at work here. But the complete and utter lack of these parents' ability to look at the environment they were raised in was just startling. The stepfather of James was an alcoholic and had a gambling addiction. And when they asked her about it in court

in cross-examination, she couldn't even say the word alcoholic, the wife. She was just like, well, he had a drinking problem, but James, the quote was, James would make extremes out of situations. And then it cut to an interview with her on the couch with her husband that said, big deal, you had a drinking problem. And like a lot of people have drinking problems and

their kids don't kill themselves. And she said, everyone tries to blame everything on me and none of this is my fault. And I'm having empathy for her because she lost her child, but also just like, the utter lack of like, it's all this rock band's fault and nothing had to do with this. And the kid said like being raised in that home was awful. Like he said that, you know? Yeah. And not just him, I think his siblings also were basically in the same boat. Yeah, for sure.

And I read an article in Skeptical Inquirer by one of the psychologists for the defense, for Judas Priest, who was saying like, this is not blaming the victims. We're not blaming the victims here. But you can't not take into account all of the other factors in these boys' lives that made them extremely high risk for suicide. Yeah. And to instead just ignore all that stuff, like an inability to stay employed, engaging in tons of crime,

fighting. Having trouble at school, fighting, being beaten at home, all of these things put together, you can't just throw those out. And it doesn't mean it's these kids' fault. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it doesn't necessarily make it these kids' fault. And, you know, in a lot of ways, it doesn't necessarily make it the parents' fault either. But it's certainly not the band's fault. Like, you're really failing to take any sort of accountability if you're, like

you said, you're placing all the blame on Judas Priest. Yeah, absolutely. So, all right, so they go to court. The thing that they had to do to persuade Judge Whitehead, they really had a four-prong approach that they had to prove in order to prove that Judas Priest and CBS Records had to pay money. One is that there was definitely a physically present message on that song that you could identify. They brought in this guy, William Nickloff Jr., who, this is, for some reason this struck me as funny,

he had a business that specialized in detecting subliminal messages, but it went out of business. He also made money selling subliminal message tapes himself, those self-help tapes that supposedly help people quit smoking and lose weight. Right. He also made money doing that. Right, so he supposedly was people like quit smoking and lose weight. Right. He also made money doing that.

Right, so he supposedly was an expert at that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. He, you know, isolated and slowed down and amplified the parts of the song that supposedly said, do it, we'll get to, you know, the outcome of that later. And then he also played some of the backward masking stuff in court.

Yeah, so that's really important too. Like there were two components to this. If you listen to it regularly, you heard do it. If you listen to it backwards, you heard all those other satanic messages, right? Right. That wasn't clear to me at first. It took a little while to kind of sink in. So they were trying to get them both ways, forward and backward.

Yeah, but the one thing that I don't get is in trial they were talking about just lyrics in general and that's the stuff that should have been protected by free speech. Because the judge even said at the beginning like, the only thing that matters here is the subliminal messages, that's the only thing this case hinges on. Yeah, but I think backmasking would fall into subliminal messages too. Well, no, no, no, I'm saying they were just talking about regular lyrics on the album. Oh, gotcha.

Probably just prove the case or establish the case that Judas Priest is evil, you know? Yeah, sure. So one of the things that really helped the plaintiffs that came from Rob Halford is on the stand, he was asked, like, have you ever included any backmasked lyrics? And he said, yeah, we actually have before.

And it was not to hide any kind of secret message or anything like that, but it was a cool effect playing something backwards when you listen to it forward. That was the point of it. But the plaintiff lawyers were like case closed basically. And of course the case wasn't closed, but it was not a, it was not, it didn't help the defense at all. No, for sure. And that was the second prong. First one, like I said, was there was an identifiable message. The second one was that they deliberately put it there if they're going to be held liable.

So yeah, just the fact that they did that at all doesn't mean anything, because a lot of bands are doing that kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. Just read our chapter on backmasking, go do it. But they couldn't, but they, Rob, however, couldn't say no, we've never done that. Right.

Which would have been really helpful if you'd done it once, who knows if you've done it before, right? So there was another one, the next part that they had to prove was that these messages were in fact subliminal. Because the point of them being subliminal is that you couldn't resist the messages you were getting.

Because you couldn't identify them, and you couldn't be like, this is not right. And so the idea that there was such a thing as subliminal messaging, apparently there was a guy named Wilson Key, and I don't know, did you say that he didn't actually testify at the trial, but he was an advisor to say like William Nickloff? Yeah, I mean, he basically, he literally wrote the book on subliminal advertising.

Yeah. And they interviewed him a lot, like he never took the stand, I think, but they used a lot of his quoted testimony to back up their case. Yeah, and he was a hammer in subliminal advertising as the nail. He saw it everywhere. He saw the word sex in the ridges of a Ritz cracker

on the box. That old chestnut that there was a naked woman hidden in the ice cubes of a Johnny Walker ad that came from him He said it was in the Sears catalog is in the Sistine Chapel. It was everywhere that just Subliminal messaging was everywhere in the media and it worked that was that was the point then that really helped bolster that that plaintiff's case that the messages were subliminal. And then they also needed to show that subliminal messages could create the impulse to die by suicide.

Yeah, by the way, I got a quote, a real quote from Wilson. Okay. Wilson Key on science. He said, science is pretty much what you can get away with at any point in time. At least he didn't say that he's a self-taught neuroscientist, but it's definitely in the same ballpark. That's a good point.

All right, so you said they had to prove that they contributed to that impulse, those messages contributed to the impulse to take someone's life. They brought in, the plaintiffs brought in a guy named Howard Shevron. This guy was an actual legitimate clinical psychologist, very respected guy. Yeah. And he is the guy that basically in court showed experiments that showed how the unconscious mind and the conscious mind operate and how they're separate,

but how they do interact with one another, and that subliminal messages are potentially very, very powerful because your brain is confusing it and hears it as a truth. Yeah, and this guy, like you said, he was legit. Back in the 60s, he and a colleague essentially proved that Freud's theories on the unconscious mind were right, that we do have an unconscious mind. They detected it by showing subliminal messaging to people or images and then analyzing their brain waves. And they were like, yep, this is actually a thing. He went too far, though, and he attributed way too much potency to subliminal messages on the unconscious mind and he essentially said that when the unconscious mind

gets its hands on a subliminal message or is presented with a subliminal message it doesn't understand that it's just been it's just taken it externally and so the mind confuses it as an internally generated thought. And it gets all, it's accorded all the importance that your own thoughts and beliefs are given. Even though somebody else told you to do it, you just don't understand it like that. So ergo, if you suddenly have this idea like, oh, I should kill myself, even if it's subliminal, you might act on it. Right. Yeah, too far.

I believe he was a guy in court, too, that said, that was talking about just their lyrics and their anti-religious connotations, which I didn't, you know, it just cut right there, so I don't see if the judge was like irrelevant or whatever, because again, that's the part that was supposedly not on trial right Should we take another break? Yeah, let's take our break. All right. Let's take our final break here

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that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OK. Okay, so we went over the plaintiff's case and Judas Priest had defense, pretty well established one. Essentially, they had to show, number one, that the words do it were not actually the

words do it. That they were random sounds that to the ear, especially when somebody pointed it out to you that it sounded like do it, you would hear is do it. And so I couldn't find it anywhere. I couldn't either. Yeah. I listened over and over to that section and I just don't hear it at all.

But apparently if somebody is pointing it out, especially if they're slowing it down and isolating and all that, you supposedly hear do it. It was played over and over again in the court. So there is something there enough that no one said, objection, this doesn't sound anything like it. And it became like just one of the central components

of this, like do it, is do it there? Is it purposefully there? And then conversely on the defensive side, does do it even exist? Like are these actual words? And so a lot of weird stuff happened. Rob Halford sang a better, better by you better than me in the witness box. And, um, he was basically showing how he likes to say, yeah, at the end of like every line.

Yeah. It was very interesting part, uh, because they were like, you know, and why do you do that? Like it was an implication. He was like, he's like, just the emotion of the song, and you know, like basically I'm just a singer, man. Yeah, Satan told me to. Yeah, well, he shouldn't have said that,

but he let it slip. So just like how the plaintiffs brought in Nickloff, William Nickloff, a sound engineer, um, the defense brought in their own sound engineer and they managed to slow it down and essentially prove that do it was just a random combination of sounds, not even speech, but it was a combination of a guitar sound and, um, Rob Halford, the lead singer exhaling on a line. And that you put those together if you listen to a certain way, especially if somebody said, sounds like Do It, doesn't it? You could

hear Do It. Yeah, there were like three more things though. It was in that big, big article from the Village Voice. I just can't remember. I know the hi-hat had something to do with it and like some sort of an echo. But yeah, the point is they were like, do it's not even in here. So why are we even in here is what they were thinking. Right, yeah. Again, still having empathy this whole time. One of the most troubling parts of this trial for the defense, of course, is having to, you know, cross-examine these families and talk about the having to, you know, cross-examine these families

and talk about the history of depression and these antisocial behaviors that these boys had. Um, like one of these guys, and this is seven years before Columbine, one of them, I don't think it was Jay, I think it was Raymond. It was Raymond talked about getting automatic weapons and, like, shooting up large gatherings.

And, you know, the defense attorney is asking this mom, like, can you agree to hear something like this? You know something is wrong with your son? And she's like, well, I don't understand what your question is. Like, what do you mean something's wrong with him? And she was just, you know, it was a tough thing to bring the sister out and say like you had two previous suicide attempts and you never listened to this music, right? She's like, no, I just listened to Roy Rogers.

It was all very hard to watch because they had to paint a picture of their unhappy home life and their unhappy childhood. Yeah. But it was, I mean, there was just no way of mounting a defense without of course doing that you know But yeah from what I could tell in that dream deceiver long-form article The all members of Judas Priest found it very distasteful But yeah, they all seemed to understand they had to do this

But none of them were happy about doing it and they were all I mean It wasn't just Rob Halford like all of them were deeply affected by this and having to hear the story of what happened to these kids and like it haunted them for sure. They were mad. They were mad that they had been dragged into court across the pond over this ridiculous stuff.

But at the same time, they were definitely affected by what had created this whole kerfuffle. Yeah, I saw too, Hallford was really just upset that it was America. He was like, this is a country that was always so good to us and we loved America so much. And to be taken to court in America was just really hard for us.

And they sat there every day in the trial. And I wasn't the biggest Judas Priest guy because I just didn't listen to a lot of that kind of music. But they were good dudes. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I've always respected Rob Halford for coming out

in the metal community. Like he was, as far as I know, the first and maybe even still the last so far. I mean, can you imagine if they knew he was gay at the time, what they would have done in that trial? No, because this was a really bizarre time in American history, and there was just so much boldness to take somebody to court over things like free speech,

over things like obscenity, just over moral policing. There was no qualms about taking somebody to court over morality. So yeah, you're right, who knows what they would have done. Yeah, for sure. So there was also the point of essentially debunking all the pseudoscience that the plaintiff's witnesses had spouted from the witness stand.

And luckily they were basically able to do that. All they had to do was say there's zero body of literature in the scientific corpus that suggests that this is even remotely possible that at best studies that have shown in effect from subliminal messages could maybe disturb you could maybe trigger anxiety in you that certainly couldn't actually create behavior and certainly not behavior as monumental as suicide. Yeah, for sure. And they use like the opposite to help prove their point.

They're like, when people like want to lose weight and quit smoking more than anything else and they buy these books and tapes with subliminal messages supposedly to help them do it. They're, they're trying to do this and using it as an aid and it's still not helping them achieve that goal. Like it doesn't work. It's not working.

Yeah, that definitely helped their case too. So the defense put up a pretty good, well, defense, um, and just kind of picked apart a lot of the plaintiffs case. And, but ultimately it was up to Judge Whitehead, who from what I read in that article, his face was totally impassive. He didn't let on anything that he'd taken in on any given day.

And so I don't know that they had any clue how it was gonna go. And so he ruled in favor of Judas Priest. He ruled against the plaintiffs. And like you said, the plaintiffs had brought this as essentially a product liability case, but Whitehead viewed it instead as an invasion of privacy case.

And the big difference between those two is intent. And I think attorney McKenna put it like, if you're in a Ford Pinot, that blows up. It doesn't matter whether Ford didn't mean for that to happen, it still happened, the harm was done. But if it's invasion of privacy, there has to be intent. And so Judge Whitehead essentially said, I believe that subliminal messages are real,

I believe that they can impact behavior, but I don't think Judas Priest intentionally put these in there, and I'm ruling in favor of Judas priest. Yeah. I mean, looking back, it was a totally sensible decision on a case that never should have been brought, but it still feels like a bit of a brave decision for a, a lone judge to make without the assistance of a jury, don't you think?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, he added to the free speech body of law. That's enormous. That's an enormous ruling just from that, just by ruling that subliminal messages are not protected speech. And then, yeah, in his ruling, he didn't do anything to debunk the idea

that there were subliminal messages and that they could affect us, and that metal bands are putting them in their records. So the fact that he didn't say that that wasn't correct actually bolstered people's viewpoints of that later on in other criminal cases. Yeah, in the end Judas Priest spent about a quarter of a million bucks in their defense. Did not do the conversion on that for some weird reason, but suffice it to say it's a lot more now.

I feel hollow. CBS was ordered to pay $40,000 to those plaintiff attorneys as cost reimbursement for not complying with discovery orders. It all came down to their providing the master tapes for the song. They went back and forth saying that they didn't have them. And then finally, I think after a long time, they did provide them, but there was chunks missing that, you know, the conspiracy-minded plaintiff attorney

said was them sort of whitewashing it. And they said when they did receive the master tapes, they were sort of like flaking apart and that they didn't want to even play them because they didn't want to assume And they said when they did receive the master tapes, they were sort of like flaking apart and that they didn't even play them because they didn't wanna assume any responsibility for them. So it was just sort of a mess in that discovery period.

So they ended up having to pay them 40 grand. But yeah. Yeah, so the Christian Wright kept going after metal bands for a while after this. And you might say like, well, how did this ever stop? Like, how did it end? It didn't end, they just changed targets. And once rap music became a thing in the late 80s,

they started, there was a new moral panic. And in fact, that same year in 1990, Two Live Crew was arrested for obscenity in Florida and went on trial and ended up prevailing as well. I had a great idea the other day that I can't remember now that had to do with Two Live Crew. Probably their free speech crusade. What wouldn't a podcast episode? It was something else. It was like, I don't know. It was a good title for something that had to do with Two Live Crew.

Okay. Hey, we want some podcasts, was that it? Oh my God, Miso podcast. Well, sadly, we should mention that as for Jay, he only lived a few years after that. He went to a mental health facility for depression and it's very hard to find out exactly what happened because they, I

know he suffered from an overdose, went to a coma for a few days, showed no brain activity, and died, but there is dispute between the parties over whether or not that was a suicide or whether it was an accidental overdose of methadone, whether or not the plug was pulled. I couldn't get any straight answers. Yeah, it seemed kind of clouded for sure. Yeah, because they wanted that lawsuit to continue. They appealed, of course. And I imagine a suicide probably would not have helped their case any. So maybe that had something

to do with it. I don't know. And despite feeling betrayed by America, Judas Priest still tours here, and if you want to see them, they will be at the Alliant Energy Powerhouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on September 21st. Oh man, I've never seen them. I'd love to. I bet it's great. I would love to as well. You got anything else? Nothing else. Nothing else here either, which means of course everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. or either, which means of course everybody it's time for listener mail. Appropriately, you're going to talk about streaming music. Hey guys, went to your New York show, the highlight of my year.

I've worked in the music industry for nearly a decade and I must give you guys kudos for summing up the streaming debacle so well. I have a few additions that may add color to the situation, namely that it was a crisis for the industry and Spotify's credit was saving the fan consumption model for music. Still, Spotify is in a power struggle with the labels and because they pay out 70% of the total revenue to labels, they lobby for lower payout rates for musicians

and songwriters to achieve profitability through a loophole involving audio books and bundles. As of May 2024, Spotify will be paying songwriters approximately $150 million less per year. Spotify is kind of in a three-way standoff with labels. Without label-owned content, like Drake and Taylor Swift, no one would use Spotify, but labels need stores like Spotify and Apple for fan consumption.

It's a convoluted power dynamic that has trickle-down effects on music that most fans don't even recognize. Keep fighting the good fight, guys. That's from Nate in New York, New York. Thanks a lot, Nate. Thanks for that email. Thanks for coming to see us, too.

That was a fun show at Town Hall. Totally. If you wanna be like Nate, you can come see us, too, wherever we perform live, and in the meantime, you can also send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everyone.

It's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric,

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