I guess I"d agree with backwards masking since it led people to put this on YouTube, which is mainly notable for its guitar solo, which is just as great backwards as forwards (for what it’s worth!)
The supposed “Paul is Dead” thing wasn’t backwards, it was a greatly slowed down snippet at the end of “Strawberry Fields” that was supposedly John saying “I buried Paul”. To hear it more clearly you could play the LP at 45rpm. Their press agent said he was saying “I’m very bored”, John said he said “Cranberry sauce”. I thought it sounded more like “i’m very bored”.
We had the D&D scare in high school. It even made the local news because some parents at another school wanted to have the D&D club banned. The sponsor tried to show it was all simply a game and demonstrated that “casting spells” was simply rolling dice. The other objection was that there were drawings of characters which showed nekkid breasts (with a nipple)! I’m absolutely certain that adolescent boys are completely incapable of drawing ones themselves. The solution was to have the teacher or parent take a black sharpie to the offending material.
To continue the hijack:
In the mid to late 90s, I worked for an import company in Japan which imported and sold brands such as McIntosh. The whole consumer audio business suffered from exactly this problem. The people who were buying high end systems in the 1990s were (typically) men, professionals in their 40s, but usually older, who had gotten to the point they could afford it. They had typically loved dreamed of equipment from their late teen ages through their 20s.
The business model got hit by two factors. First was the huge reduction in cost of quality systems, as you mentioned, and the other was that later generations of kids had more options, e.g., video games and cable TV so fewer people were growing up dreaming of someday owning the best of the best. [/hijack]
Also on many good turntables you can have the pickup and preamp powered while the motor is unpowered and the platter can be freewheeled backwards; you are supposed to only do that for about a quarter turn to cue the record, not to play a couple of revolutions. Turn me on, dead man…
Right, mere rumor about iffy things happening is not enough. It has to get to the point that enough people begin saying we gotta DO SOMETHING that nominally cooler-headed responsible people are willing to say “eh, better safe than sorry”. This is often the result of it being picked up by information-conveyers in a sensationalized manner and then propagated in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle, often through reporting about the reporting and about people’s reaction to the reporting rather than about the truth of the facts or lack thereof, causing the public to become concerned the threat is not just real but getting worse, which in turn leads to citizens demanding that authorities and leaders look into it, and the authorities and leaders feeling they must do so rather than tell the panicked “are you listening to yourself? sit and calm down!”.
Kaylasmom worked in the early 90s in a hospital radiology lab, developing X-rays. Every November 1, as a “service to the community,” the radiology lab would X-ray bags of candy, to reassure panicky parents that there were no razor blades.
And that’s the story of how the children of Los Alamitos, California all got mouth cancer from eating radioactive candy… 
A couple I can remember from my youth;
- Children are beating each other to death while playing Power Rangers
- Pogs are teaching children to gamble
- Marilyn Manson is causing teen violence
- Doom 2 teaches kids how to shoot up their schools
- Strangers are luring kids to their deaths via AOL chat rooms
The religious right’s fascination with the intersection of heavy metal and Satanism was memorable back in the day.
A writer for Spy magazine attended a seminar on the subject. The expert advised to watch out for references to “heavy metal bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kiss, and the Grateful Dead”, one of which, the article noted, actually *was *a heavy metal band.
I forgot about the D&D scare. Kids were going to kill themselves in steam tunnels.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that one too and wondering exactly how you lose that game.
How about the Y2K Scare :eek: We were told to stock up on canned food and water, computers were going to crash, there would be blackouts, mail delivery would cease - pretty much the world would end.
Is this about that vodka/tampon thing?
Yes, and if you didn’t remember it happening, you had "repressed memory syndrome, which proved it happened???
I’ve take to some rah-rah Christians who insist the Satanic thing continues to this day, but it is being repressed by the government because they are in it. Proof is that the FBI investigate it and found no evidence whatsoever!
The way I did it was to record the song on open reel tape, then flip the reels. Works perfectly for mono or 2-track recorders; for 4-track (actually quarter-track), you need to realign the heads, or in one auto-reverse model, just push them down to the other track pair during playback.
For true 4 track recorders, after flipping the reels, just select the tracks that are playing backwards that you want to hear. Easy as cake.
Kiss is a number of things, but heavy metal is not one of them. Though I suppose my definition of heavy metal is closer to thrash or even death metal.
That said, now I want a metal cover of Sugar Magnolia. Knowing the Internet, there’s probably more than one out there.
I read it somewhere, couldn’t tell you where.
PLEASE! Doncha know KISS stands for Kids in Satan’s Service?
I don’t recall ever hearing it, just the rumor mill. I guess some people took it seriously but I just put it up there with Mikey dying in Vietnam and other nonsense like that. Later on some bands said they did actually backward mask some things, but I don’t know if that actually happened, I remember one time hearing what was supposed to be backward masking and it sounded like ‘rhubarb up me go mo’.
I thought it stood for mid-grade musicians that figured out a marketable gimmick.
A STRANGE GAME.
THE ONLY LOSING MOVE IS
NOT TO PLAY.
[mandatory lowercase]
In the early 2000’s there was a rumor going around that the brightly colored rubber bracelets teenage girls were wearing somehow represented different sexual acts they were willing to do. I thought it was ridiculous and so did the teenage girls who were wearing the bracelets. The very next night on the evening news they did a story about the stupid bracelets. The evening news basically called a bunch of random teenage girls sluts so they could sell products to scared old people.