 You were involved in the early 80s in quite a bit of controversy with the band Judas Priest and the claim I think was that they had backwards messages in their rock music that led to some unfortunate outcomes. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Two young men, two days before Christmas, were sitting in their basement of one of their houses drinking beer, smoking marijuana, and listening to Judas Priest. And the all afternoon and then at the end of the afternoon they picked up a shotgun, walked to a local church playground that had swings and theater daughters and that kind of thing. Proceeded to sit down on the swings or a bench, I can't remember the details now, and attempted to commit suicide. One of them succeeded, the other just blew his face off, but managed to survive. In the hospital immediately after when the police asked them why did you do this, the response of the survivor was life sucks, which is not a common response among teenagers as they were. But the parents then a few years later actually decided to sue, but they didn't decide to sue the gun manufacturer. They didn't decide to sue the brewery that provided the beer or the place that sold it. They didn't decide to go after the drug dealers who had sold it in the marijuana. No, they decided to go after Judas Priest and CBS Records. I received a phone call from the head lawyer for Judas Priest and CBS Records. It was actually a whole firm of lawyers in Reno, California, which is where the trial was going to take place. It was about a year before the trial. I received this phone call because of the work I'd done on backward messages and rock music with Don Reed, a colleague of mine then at the University of Lethbridge, that we'd done in response to this pastor from California coming to town and holding his big rallies about backward messages and rock music that were leading young people down the path of life such as sex and drug use. He claimed it was because of the backward messages and rock music. It led to a big rally at the end of his two days there where people showed up and broke records and things like this. It was quite the Custle I've written in Lethbridge. I was a brand new professor in 1982. I just arrived in Lethbridge and so I got a phone call back then from a local announcer of a rock station in Lethbridge calling me up after Pastor Gary Greenwald had arrived saying is there anything in psychology that we could use to speak about this alleged backward messages and rock music or subliminal messages they were calling him. I turned to my colleague Don Reed and we both went not that we're aware of and we did a little research but couldn't find anything on backward messages. I went to one of his actually one more than one of his rallies to find out what he was doing. On the basis of what he was doing it seemed to be pretty clear that there really wasn't the effect that he thought it was going on but rather just some standard psychological phenomena that we were well aware of, old, old phenomena in psychology. So it was on that basis then that Don Reed and I said but to be fair we should run some research. This is a claim nobody's investigated. He was earnest. It wasn't like he was just a con man or something. He was actually earnest as far as I know he still is. He actually believes this is true. So we decided well fair enough. His claim and it's more subtle than most people think so when it really hit the press in the mid-80s people had the wrong idea of what in fact he was claiming. So his concern is not that messages are being served in rock music. Obviously the forward messages in many rock songs are promote drug use and the like. So that was in his concern. His concern was that as he rephrased it at one of his meetings, I'm paraphrasing now, is that well good Christian teenagers with a forward message would hear it to understand and reject it. But his concern was this. It's much more subtle and to be fair I thought that the guy deserves a shake because he's not just thinking very glibly about this stuff. His concern was that because it was backwards and it's hard to register consciously, if the message was still getting through the meaning of the backward version of the message was getting through then they would be unaware of the source. They wouldn't be able to attribute it to the record. But if the thought popped into their head by some unconscious mechanism, he never specified what that would be, but if it did then they would have a message in the head with no attributable source except themselves. And so they couldn't protect themselves against it. Exactly. So they would now be looking at thinking, oh, it's fun to smoke marijuana, must be my idea. So what he would do is he would then come in, he'd say okay this is for example Queen, another one bites the dust and he would play a passage of Queen's another one bites the dust in the forward direction. Perfectly fine to you. Famous song. And then he'd say, you know, here's the same section I'm going to play backwards and I want you to listen for and in this particular example it's fun to smoke marijuana. And sure enough everybody starts laughing because everybody hears it. We use it as a classroom demonstration now. And it's quite apparent. You know, it's quite apparent. Yes, it sounds like that sort of, but it's like visual illusions. You're also aware at the same time that it isn't really like that, right? So it's got those two levels going on at the same time. But you could go, yeah, okay, I see what you mean, right? It does sound like it's fun to smoke marijuana. And he's many other examples like that. But that's his procedure. And he just comes in for an hour, says here's another passage I want you to listen for, then plays it. And by the time he's done after, but an hour of people are totally convinced. All these backward messages, I heard them all when he asked me to hear them. So we thought, okay, he's got a theory. He's got a he's got an explanation of why he's concerned that if it did manage to get in without you being aware of it's of the source that that in fact could be some concern. So we thought and there's no research. So why do we actually see if you can influence people's behavior consistent with the meaning of the backward passage? But they're not hearing the backward passage. That's the point. They're going to hear it in the forward direction.