Stairway to Hell

BY Louis Dai

It was 1981. America was still nursing its 70s hangover when a far right Christian radio host weaselled his voice into the living rooms and cars of American men and women. The man was Michael Mills and his message was simple: Led Zeppelin were tied to the occult.

Mills set the religious world on fire. Zionist Christians held public record burnings with crowds a thousand strong. Pastors blamed Zeppelin albums for luring children into the den of the Antichrist as ministers guest starred on Entertainment Tonight and ABC Nightline to discuss the religious logic behind their ire. Christian zealots damned Zeppelin songs on the internet and invented a whole new genre of anti-literature.

More than two decades on, the paranoia has cooled down and the writings of the church have been reduced to “crackpot literature”, but the message from the far right still remains the same. “Rock and roll is a part of Satan’s plan to achieve a world-wide moral decay,” wrote televangelist Bob Larson, and Led Zeppelin were and still are the headline act.

Led Zeppelin were obvious targets. Their taste for the occult drove Page and all the band members to saturate the Zeppelin catalogue with occult lore. Members of the band etched their own insignia on the sleeves and inside labels of Led Zeppelin IV. Page had even set up his own occult store in London and bought a house in Scotland that was once the site of satanic rituals.

Mills’s radio sermons told Christians that, “by taking the record, putting it in a mutual position, and spinning the record backwards”, the words, “We gotta live for Satan. Master Satan” could be heard. Over time the message has mutated to include, “Here’s to my sweet Satan” and “I live for Satan”. Mills believed that Plant had engineered the words so that when reversed, the recorded chain of sounds would provide coherent satanic messages, absorbed in the subconscious.

Others, such as Zionist brothers Dan and Steve Peters, have said that Satan was the sole architect of the devil worship messages. “It’s just the anti-Christ, speaking through rock stars, his unwitting agents, via their evil music,” wrote Johnny Marr, summarising the Peters brothers’ doctrine.

Fears of a moral Armageddon are scaremongering the right-wing Christian church into a paranoid crusade. The music of Led Zeppelin is but one more sin in a growing list for the church, which clashed with other bands too. Electric Light Orchestra lost the religious vote when their 1974 song “Eldorado” was thought to have satanic messages in reverse. The Peters brothers even accused Queen of putting “Decide to smoke marijuana” in reverse their classic hit “Another One Bites the Dust”.

As the masters of No Comment, Led Zeppelin gave their religious prosecutors the cold shoulder until Plant said in 1983, “As far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that’s not my idea of making music.” A mass of scientists agrees. “The apparent presence of backward messages in popular music is a function more of active construction on the part of the perceiver than of the existence of the messages themselves,” concluded researchers from the University of Lethbridge. More succinctly, ELO frontman Jeff Lynne called the claims “skcollob”.