So Striss, you’re saying that someone could actually think that “number nine” backwards might sound like “turn me on dead man” without it first being suggested to that person? I can’t imagine anyone thinking that’s what it sounds like without first being told what to listen for. Here it is.
Dunno, Curt…
I would have loved to have been there.
It could have happened after trying “She Loves You, Yeah Yeah Yeah” and others backwards beforehand, and lo and behold…!!!
Nonetheless, I believe it is distinct and rather intriguing. Paul’s “death” was a recurring publicity stunt-theme at the time. I refer to the “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him,” backward phrase before “Blackbird” on the same album, the Abbey Road album cover etc…
It simply appears the boys were having fun with this whole concept, if you will.
On Frank Zappa’s “Them or Us” album, there was an entire song (“Ya Hozna”) with all backward vocals. In fact, he even states as much in the liner notes, adding “You figure it out.” I tried. I couldn’t.
Striss, is there any documentation that showed that The Beatles were actually intending to send “Paul is dead” messages? For one thing, the “miss him miss him miss him” line also sounds to me like unintelligible gibberish until it’s suggested that it should sound like those words. The (forward) “Paul is dead” at the end of Strawberry Fields is the same way - it’s just noise that some teenager thought sounded like those words. Kind of like people hearing “everybody smoke pot” when that wasn’t what was being said (in I Am The Walrus, IIRC). Also, I always figured the Abbey Road cover was just an interesting photograph, which people ascribed their own meanings to. Is there any evidence that The Beatles actually played this up?
You’ll find at least 5 examples per LP. It’s done very subtly, either as a background vocal or disguised.
Consider ‘Jungle’ from ‘Out Of The Blue’. What are those are nonsense lyrics that the choral backing sings? Also note that the intro to ‘Discovery’ is the outro played backwards. Or have a careful listen to the crowd noise at the start of "All Over The World’.
I’m a fan too. How else would I know? But Lynne was either off his head or having a laugh.
No cite, but I remember Judas Priest’s lawyer coming up with a number of mundane phrases from the album played backwards.
Slight hijack: Not backmasking, but ‘Hey Jude’ contains the words ‘Fucking Hell’… John Perry of Grapefruit put on headphones that were too loud and uttered those words 2m 58s into the song…
There is a Christian group called Petra.
On an album in 1982 called “More Power To Ya”, the song “Judas’ Kiss” played in reverse said “What are you looking for the Devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?”
Quite a good response to the hysteria, I thought.
Tinker
As I’ve mentioned in other threads on this subject, with a little creative spinning I managed to make the opening track of the 1959 album Four Freshmen and Five Guitars wail out “YOU GUESS WHO–WE’RE SATAN!” (It’s a partial reverse of the line “it’s ten to one you’ll kiss her in the rain.”)
Think about that for a minute. The road to Hell is paved with the backwards masked encouragement of Slayer, Judas Priest, Black Oak Arkansas, ELO, and… The Four Freshmen?
Frankly, I don’t think the Four Freshmen are smart enough to do Satan’s work. They’ve been held back a grade for over fifty years in a row now.
The song was called “Better by You Better than Me” from the album Stained Class. The plaintiffs asserted that the song contained the words “do it” placed “subliminally” within the recording, and that naturally this led two teenagers to spontaneously form a sucide pact and shoot themselves. Judas Priest absolutely denied any putting any intentional subliminal messages in the song and the judge agreed
No cite, but I recall reading an interview with Ringo where he said something like “Backwards? We have enough trouble as it is makin’ 'em go forwards!”
Er… anyone know who this “Ringo” person is anyway?
That was etched on one of his LPs, wasn’t it?
The only backward masking I know on a “Weird Al” song was in Nature Trail to Hell; two-thirds of the way through, there’s a series of screams, a satanic laugh, and then an odd-sounding message. Playing the message backwards reveals–
“Satan eats cheez whiz.” 
In the Judas Priest lawsuit the boy’s family claimed that various songs in the Stained Class album contained backwards subliminal messages, including the phrases “try suicide” and “do it, do it”. Songs alleged to contain such phrases included Better by You than by Me and Dream Deceiver.
There was a British-made documentary about the trial entitled Dream Deceiver. It has aired on PBS stations. A climactic point in the film comes when one of the singers for Judas Priest is on the stand as the song Dream Deceiver is played backwards, and he identifies for the judge the point at which he asks for a peppermint. It also appears to have been a climactic point in the trial; from the expression on the judge’s face, it is as though a light bulb just went on over his head.
IIRC, the young man later succeeded in committing suicide. Judging from the documentary, his family was not exactly a double for The Waltons. His mother, an obese caricature of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character, tells interviewers that the reason her son survived (and looked something like The Elephant Man) was because she was so tight with God. His stepfather proudly tells of the time he beat the crap out of the kid because he looked inattentive on the chance he had been smoking some of that marijuana. On the witness stand, his older sister admits she had never heard of Judas Priest prior to the lawsuit, and so can’t blame the band for her own suicide attempt.
Is there any chance anyone can identify the French album I heard about? From what I recall, it contained various other experiments as well, although I am not sure what they involved. From the way I heard it described, the woman’s voice sounded almost normal, in contrast to the dwarf who appeared in the FBI agent’s dreams on Twin Peaks. There, as I recall, subtitles had to be used to clarify what he was saying.
Bloodhound Gang: “Devil child, wake up and eat Chef Boyardee beef-a-roni”
Ringo is probably the luckiest musician alive. 
No doc’s Curt but the Beatles always denied it with a wink as John did with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and LSD (yes, I’m sure his kid did draw a picture about someone he named “Lucy” but leave to Lennon to come up with the rest.) For a cheap example besides the backwards stuff, example on the Abbey Road cover, there’s the VW who’s bottom line on the license plate says “28 IF” which would have been his age if he hadn’t had “died”. There are way too many subtle things for this to be a coincidence, they were having fun with it and frankly, so was I. Maybe a few of the teeming has further info. And I grant you, you can be fooled (duped?) into hearing something that’s not really there but I do not believe every instance is a fraud, as obviously it’s not difficult to do and many have.