When Pearl Jam’s Jeremy video got pulled from MTV because everyone was afraid of the school shootings it would inspire, the radio station in Raleigh NC stopped playing the song as well.
Anyone else remember examples of the Backwards Masking craze of the early 1980s?
The only one I remember specifically without googling is Olivia Newton John’s Let’s Get Physical, which was supposed to say “I’ve Got Demons” when played backwards.
My high school math teacher, a prototype for Dana Carvey’s The Church Lady, absolutely believed this and played us a cassette warning us about it in math class (it was a private school). It had other “examples” as well.
Does anybody remember some of the other songs where the devil decided to do a backward solo?
Can anyone actually understand messages recorded backwards?
I totally remember that. Wasn’t Al Gore’s wife Tipper the one who decided that heavy metal was full of subliminal messages? I think I remember Led Zeppelin being one of those backwards-message albums.
There’s a clip of someone analyzing a played-backwards version of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, where Freddie’s backwards gibberish was parsed to be “I like to smoke marijuana.” Hilarious.
Don’t Relax Until Grandma’s Sober,
Damsons Ripen Under Gooseberry Skies.
That episode was pure genius.
Well, there were all kinds of stupid Beatles song controversies, from the Paul-is-dead stuff to the list of supposed drug references, most of them ludicrous (“Fixing a Hole” = shooting up? Seriously?). When my daughter wanted to sing “Let It Be” in church, I had to explain to the pastor that it wasn’t about marijuana, but rather about Paul’s mother, who died when he was a teenager.
When Lloyd Price sang his hit “Stagger Lee” on American Bandstand, Dick Clark insisted that he write an entire new set of non-violent lyrics for use on the show. That version appears on his greatest-hits album Mr. Personality’s Big 15… it’s pretty dire.
Not exactly. Tipper wanted there to be some sort of label for offensive lyrics; backwards masking was a different “scandal” a few years earlier.
I’m surprised no one has brought up the grandfather of all rock controversies, Link Wray’s 1958 hit “Rumble” which was banned despite having no lyrics. I guess West Side Story-esque knife fights were sweeping the nation and people were scared of the title and heavy guitar sounds.
It’s still a great song, even 56 years later.
Is Broadway’s Jesus Christ Superstar sacrilegious? You had to be around when it was released to remember the brouhaha surrounding that one.
Good God Lemon.
Godspell too…I think.
I went to a religious elementary school and we were all instructed to not watch that when it came on television.
Which of course you know how that worked- all of us tuned in at least to part of it.
The strangest censoring job I remember occurred in the late 1970s when Frank Zappa’s “Titties and Beer” was a staple of Doctor Demento’s Top 10. As expected, the FCC-rejected F and S bombs were bleeped. But most of the minor cuss words were unscathed. But there was one bleep I couldn’t figure out until I got ahold of the album.
No bleeping…
Titties (many, many, many times)
whore
ass
son of a bitch
Bleeped…
farted
Huh???
The best known one by far was “Stairway to Heaven”.
The Who’s “Who Are You” has always been played on the radio with the F bomb intact.
Actually, Dr. D. didn’t get away with playing even that censored version for long. The version that he ended up playing was almost more bleeps than words. No more “goddamn,” no more “ass,” no more “titties,” and he wasn’t even allowed to say the name of the song on the air. He announced it as “Beep-ies and Beer,” even when Frank Zappa himself was a guest on the show. (“Really? They make you say that?”)
There ws some controversial speculation that Billie Joe threw a fetus off the Tallahatchie bridge.
One song that was destined to be one of the biggest Everly Brothers hits “Ebony Eyes”, was banned by almost every radio station a few days after it was released. The airliner crash notif was considered unacceptable to a number of airlines that advertised on the radio.
Johnny Horton’s watered down POS of “Battle of New Orleans”, with half the lyrics missing, was the only one considered acceptabe, and the Jimmy Driftwood original never got any more plays.
I wonder how Casey Kasem handled things when the Butthole Surfers had a Top 40 hit. 
I moved to Columbus Ohio in 1971. There was one top 40 am station. There was an fm station that switched to AOR from Classical music in the afternoon. Sometime in the wee hours they switched back to Classical.
The CSN&Y hit “Ohio” got NO airplay when it was charting in the rest of the country. I had some cousins my age who had never heard the song.
Pete Seeger wasn’t allowed to perform “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on The Smothers Brother’s Comedy Hour.
The vice principal of my Junior High School objected to 2 members of the local musical group “The Gutterbums” leading about 45 of our classmates during lunch in an impromptu rendition of our original song “Hey Motherfucker!”