I will never forget the day I accidentally got caught in the middle of the war between Religion and Rock.
My mom had bought me a Rush t-shirt for my birthday--I loved the band, and although they were a little too heavy-metal for her, Mom always respected my musical choices, and she did like their lyrics (I showed her a couple of the gate-fold inserts). So I walked into my high school gym class wearing this shirt sporting the logo from the album "2112"...and my gym teacher, a middle-aged dude who also taught psychology, took one look and said, "That's a Satanic group."
Yeah, seriously!
The man knew nothing about their music, which I considered brilliant (and still do), or their lyrics, which were intelligent and talked about things like Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kublai Khan," and being responsible about the way we use technology and science. Nope--the only thing he saw was the star inside the circle, which he said was a demonic symbol.
(If you're wondering how he could get away with lecturing me on religious matters during school hours, well, all I will say is, it was a very small town, and you've just read one of the very good reasons I will never go to one of my class reunions!)
In vain, I tried to tell the guy that he was wrong, that the symbol was not a pentagram in a circle as he thought, but instead an open star (right-side-up, too!); but he was convinced he was right, and when you are faced with facts and still won't change your mind, you've crossed the border from simple ignorance to obscurantism, which is basically sticking your fingers deep into both ear canals and singing "la, la, la, la" whenever you hear something you don't like!
Needless to say, I never wore my Rush shirt to gym class again; but all of a sudden, I started hearing some weird stuff--how people were spinning rock'n'roll records backwards and finding demonic messages (I tried that once; sorry, just gibberish), and how some bands made deals with the devil to make them successful, and so on. That was when Christian rock was getting more publicity (the Jesus Freaks had been making their own pop and rock for over a decade before this all exploded), and even they were accused of Satanism!
But I also noticed that some of the accused bands fought back. Probably the easiest example to hear on the secular side is the rebuttal by the Electric Light Orchestra. On their album "Face The Music," they not only portrayed themselves with red eyes and slightly-sinister smiles, they also planted a real backward message at the beginning of the first track, "Fire On High." Along with a creaking door and some ominous mood music, you hear a string of gibberish, which, when spun backward, says "The music is reversible, but time is not; turn back...turn back...turn back...turn back." Which means, "You're wasting time you'll never get back by doing this." Nice one, Jeff.
The Christian rock band Petra did rather the same thing: right before the song "Judas' Kiss" on the album "More Power To Ya," they planted a message in the blank space that ended up saying "What are you looking for the devil for when you ought to be looking for the Lord?" Good question!
I wasn't much into religion at the time, but some of that stuff scared the crap out of me. I got rather paranoid, in fact; when you're a teenager, you still sort of trust the elders in your life, and since I was hearing so much of this "rock is of the devil" stuff, I began to be afraid it might be true. But I, too, fought back. The fundamentalists might say that I was clinging to my idols, and maybe that's correct; but the music I was into was complex and wonderful--not just Rush with their prog-metal sound and thoughtful lyrics, but also Yes, whose lyrics were like one long e.e. cummings poem and whose music (I discovered later) derived from the Romantic period in classical music...the Moody Blues, who were so gentle both in words and music that I couldn't imagine them as demonic tools...and even ABBA, the Swedish quartet who were still making hits even in the new-wave 80's, and who also seemed too harmless to be plotting against God.
By the time I got to college and was exposed to other viewpoints than the culturally-inbred ones I'd endured all my life, I had pretty much decided that I had to go with what I knew from experience, rather than what others told me. I'd been told that rock led to fornication, drugs, and devil worship; since I did none of that, then it followed that what I had been told was at best badly mistaken and at worst a slanderous lie. I think it's...well, miraculous...that none of the accused bands ever sued any of the televangelists who spewed out those lies. That, or those bands were more forgiving than I would have been.
Actually, I just think musicians have better things to do than listen to TV preachers. Like make music.
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