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. At the other end of the sociosensual spectrum, fundamentalist Christians have gotten into the act. 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 If that sounds too spacey to be taken seriously, consider that it was the fundamentalist groups who 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.
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. 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 track only. Records and tapes have two independent recordings, of course, normally played simultaneously for stereo effect. On a record, each stereo track occupies one side of the V-shaped groove for the needle. 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 tracks are interchangeable—the sound mixer can put anything he or she wants on each track. (High notes do not 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 loud 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.
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 33½ rpm record), it could not be played normally on home equipment.
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 backward. Thus “number nine” in the Beatles’ 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—
Reversed messages are difficult to recover at home. 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. But hardly anyone has a steady enough hand to produce satisfactory results.
With patience, it is possible to reverse a cassette recording. Transfer the music from the original record or tape onto a blank tape cassette. Place the cassette flat on a table. Draw out the part of the tape with the suspected message and snip it off at both ends. Hold the tape segment horizontally. Rotate it 180 degrees keeping it horizontal at all times. This turns the tape end for ena. Splice the reversed tape segment back onto the two îoost ends of the cassette with strong adhesive tape. Reel the tape back inside the cassette The spliced segment will play backward on an ordinary cassette 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 message* were treated similarly To test claims of reversed messages, recordings on the master tape were edited out and spliced in backward Twenty cuts or portions of cuts from sixteen albums were tested.
Rumor When played backward, the lyncs say, “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.”
Findingò 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 as 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. When the phonetic properties of song lyrics are such that they can be reversed to sound like something else, that is a phonetic reversal.
“It’s fun to smoke marijuana” is clearly a phonetic 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, that just doesn’t wash. It’s too easy to find coincidences. If, for instance, 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 ? becomes “easy.” “It’s fun to smoke marijuana” is likewise a coincidence.
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.
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 see.” Reversed, this passage be comes 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.
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.”
Rumor: According to a mimeographed list of suspect records distributed by Congressman Dornan, the words “Satan move through our voices” when played backward. Findings: Negative. Despite repeated listenings, it was not even possible to identify the part of the reversed track that Dornan et al. are talking about.
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 isn’t. The other alleged lines are unremarkable. All are phonetic reversals of the entirely lucid forward lyrics and obviously just accidents.
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.
Rumor: The unintelligible lyrics at the end are reversed. Findings: A true 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 starting 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.
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, scrambled 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 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.
Rumor: In reverse, “You have just discovered tnc secret message.” Findings: The “secret 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 as “What shall we do now?” on the record sleeve. Played forward, the message is less apparent than the “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.”
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, thougha lot of people said it did. So Styx has included a sure enough backward message on Kilroy Was Here. It is at the very beginning of “Heavy Metal Poisoning.” The reversed speech lasts about; three seconds. There is no musical background. The words reverse to ”Annuii cœptis. 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.
Rumor: A reversed message. At the time of the Paul-is-dead stories, the segue from “I’m so tired” to “Blackbird” 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 is a mysterious low muttering between 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. This produced four versions of the two-second passage: right forward, left forward, right reversed, and left 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.
Rumor: It was, of course, claimed that John Lennon says “I buriea 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” partis 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 similar-sounding words, but basically, the lyrics jibe with the published version.
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 lVEs-second rhythm. The running-water sound at the end of the prologue is on both stereo tracks.
Rumor: Different voices on the two tracks, in the party conversation in the middle of the song.
Findings: The same assignment of genders to stereo tracks asabove, male voices on the right track and female voices on the left. The main female voice switches over to the right stereo track when she talks to lead singer Morris Day.
Rumor: The fadeout contains several lines from King Lear. According to The Beatles A to ? 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 plav it was until years later.
Findings: Right and left stereo tracks of the ending were compared, but there was little difference. There seem to be four vocal components to the ending of “I Am the Walrus”:
1. A chanted “Goo goo goo joob”—which is in the published lyrics and is taken from Finnegans Wake.
2. Another chant that seems to be “Oom pah, oom pah.”
3. A third chant that has been identified as “Everybody’s got one,” beginning approximately when the “Goo goo goo joob” chant dies away.
4. The lines from King Lear.
Chant no. 3 makes it nearly impossible to understand the Lear dialog. But it fades away just before the last line from the play. For a moment at the very, very end of the record, there is only the King Lear recitation. If you turn the volume way up, you can hear (on both tracks) “Sit you down, Father; rest you.” This is a line from Act IV, Scene iv. Once you turn to the right place in the play, it isn’t too hard to hear the other lines spoken as you read along. “I Am the Walrus” contains eleven lines from Lear, the three characters speaking in distinct—not the Beatles’—voices:
T? Edmund, Earl of Gloucester; seek him out
Upon the English party. Oh, untimely
death! Death!
I know thee well. A serviceable villain,
As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire.
What, is he dead?
GLOUCESTER EDGAR
Sit you down, Father; rest you.
“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, thirty-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-third 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 here.
“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 occur on the backward recording of the right stereo track: “She used to be assistant” and “There were two men …” Neither is clear enough or long enough to be convincing. Some of the music, including the recurring theme, sounds more natural in reverse.
“Turn me on, dead man” is a typical phonetic reversal. The forward “number nine” (repeated throughout the cut) is clear; the reversal is slurred—something like “turn me on dedmun.” It has been claimed that “number nine” must be pronounced with a British accent or with some careful inflection in order to reverse to “Turn me on, dead man.” This seems not to be so. As an experiment, three American-accent renderings of “number nine” were reversed. All sounded about as much like “Turn me on, dead man” as the record did. Like the other phonetic reversals, “Turn me on, dead man” must be considered a coincidence.
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 track only, though the words that follow are in 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 four minutes, fifty-eight seconds into the cut and run for about twenty-two seconds. They are not likely to be noticed in stereo because of the much louder left track. The sound of applause begins on the left track at about five minutes, one second into the cut. Deafening noises—the clapping, sirens, music—continue on the left track until five minutes, forty seconds. It may or may not have been Lennon’s and Ono’s intention to conceal the spoken passage. Given the haphazard quality of “Revolution 9,” the concealment may have been accidental. To recover the passage, the left track must be switched off. The right track can then be heard to contain a sound like 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.
The Beatles, 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 dog, 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 record label lists the length of “A Day in the Life” as five minutes, three seconds. Yet, if you time it, the music seems to be over in about four and a half minutes. Certainly the “full” five minutes, three seconds are not played on the radio.
“A Day in the Life” was recorded with a forty-two-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 didn’t think so Recording hardware is tuned to the human range of hearing and has a 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 much more than twenty thou sand cycles per second, anyway. So much for the idea of Fru-Fru being hypnotized by “A Day in the Life.”
Those fifteen grooves aren’t really empty, though. The end of “A Day in the Life”—starting with the final loud “daaa” 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 split 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 the volume up 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.