Krazy Kristian Krusaders Against Rock 'n' Roll: Part 4
Are you ready for the 80s?
This is the fourth installment of a multi-part series about anti-rock ‘n’ roll crusaders from years gone by and the damage they do in the name of “protecting the children.” These pieces feature a parade of villainous villains of the rock censorship world, some that you’ll recognize, some that you’ve hardly even heard of. If you missed the previous articles check the Flaming Spuds Rhapsodies home page.
If you’ve read the earlier chapters of “Krazy Kristian Krusaders” you know that since at least the early 1950s through the late Swingin’ ‘60s, “concerned citizens,” indignant preachers and right-wing politicians led hysterical campaigns about this Devil music.
But these reactionary charlatans seemed to slow down somewhat at the dawn of the 1970s, at least in these United States. Maybe it was the fall of Richard Nixon, or the souring public opinion about the Vietnam war, which most these self-righteous “patriots” supported during the ‘60s, made the general public more resistant to those trying to stir up stupid moral panics.
Or maybe the music industry itself — I’m mostly thinking of commercial radio here — quietly prevented outrage against popular songs and musicians by simply refusing to play anything that might be too controversial.
Take the realm of punk rock for instance. What if The Beatles sang songs announcing “I am the Anti-Christ”? What if Bruce Springsteen sang an upbeat little ditty with lyrics like “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat”?
While The Sex Pistols sparked plenty of controversy in their native England — getting banned from the BBC for instance — here in America, the censorship squads just didn’t seem to care.
But again, no huge American reaction against the vile and profane punk rockers.
No “Teens for Decency” rallies.
No record burnings.
No Ku Klux Klan protests.
If it bothered President Jimmy Carter any, he didn’t mention it.
There was a little bit of “I told you so,” from anti-punk-rock folks after Sid Vicious was arrested in the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. But nothing like previous moral outages spurred by rockers.
I was beginning to think that there were absolutely NO official backlash to rock in the 1970s. But recently a Facebook friend named Darren Viola posted about this forgotten little incident in beautiful downtown Burbank in 1979. And most of the musicians weren’t even connected to punk.
A city councilor named James Richman in June of that year convinced a majority of his fellow members of Burbank’s governing body that an upcoming concert series at a local city-owned amphitheater called the Starlight Bowl, which had scheduled shows by Patti Smith, Todd Rundgren, Blue Oyster Cult, Roxy Music, Jackson Browne. Al Stewart and others, would be a blight upon Burbank’s morals.
According to a story in BAM magazine said a tape of the city council showed Richman saying that two of the acts “would draw a homosexual group. I really don’t think that’s what we want in town.” Richman continued, “The others would draw a long list of anti-nuclear demonstrators, dopers, hard rock...It’s an incredible combination of horrors.”
Indeed.
A couple of the scheduled shows —by Robert Palmer and Poco — were not banned by the city. Christ, if I were Palmer or Richie Furray, I’d be embarrassed as all Hell!
The promotor sued the city as well as Richman — and eventually won. But that wasn’t the worst case Richman lost.
In 1997, nearly 20 years after he protected the city of Burbank from the evils of Al Stewart and Jackson Browne, Richman pleaded guilty to bank fraud and later was sentenced to to 21 months in federal prison.
So while the ‘70s were comparatively quiet on the anti-rock censorship front, the ‘80s were just around the corner. With the rise of The Moral Majority and cable TV and that vicious phenomenon known as the Satanic Panic, as the Reagan era unfolded it, all Hell broke loose. It seemed as if there were crazed televangelists coming out of the woodwork to “expose” The Devil’s wicked works.
A 2015 article in Vice said:
When the Panic hit, the Cold War had not yet thawed, traditional social structures were eroding, and youth culture was moving into a frightening new direction—teens were shunning their hippie parents’ sappy pop records in favor of harder, faster fare like Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and Judas Priest. Pop itself was getting more risque—Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince turned off the lights and turned up the sex. It was a transitional time, and not everyone handled it very well. In fact, many Christian parents viewed it quite literally as the Devil’s work.
This was the era of “backmasking” when publicity craving preachers and pseudo-scientist made a huge splash by claiming rock stars were promoting Satan by inserting evil messages, recorded backwards, into their records.
This idiocy appears to have started on religious TV. Here’s a clip from the Praise the Lord Show in which hosts Paul and Jan Crouch listen not their son, Paul Jr. repeatedly playing Led Zeppelin’s”Starirway To Heaven” backwards over and over again.
You’d think that such overt kookery would only be interesting to a few cranks. But there were far more than a few cranks during the Satanic panic.
In late April 1982, the California Assembly’s Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee held a hearing to discuss hidden Satanic messages in rock music. Some claimed that bands, including Led Zeppelin, Styx, and the Beatles, were using “backmasking” to secretly sing their praises to the dark lord. One assemblyman hoped to pass a bill forcing record labels to put a warning on albums that contained those subliminal messages, much like the explicit lyric warnings that would come just a few years later. …
From Atlas Obscura:
After circulating pamphlets with the “backward masked” declarations spelled out, that’s precisely what Assemblyman Phillip Wyman and panel witness William H. Yarroll II did. The relevant portion of the eight-minute classic was first played forward for committee members and then reversed. Here’s what Wyman claimed could be heard: “I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off. There’s no escaping it. Here’s to my sweet Satan.” Yarroll, who identified himself as a “neuroscientist,” noted that a teenager need only listen to “Stairway to Heaven” three times before these backward messages were “stored as truth.”
Luckily I’ve only heard that song two and a half times. At least that’s what Satan told me to say …
But Led Zeppelin wasn’t the only offender. The nutty “neuroscientist” claimed you could find these subliminal messages in other songs by other artists. Them rockers is evil!
Fortunately Wyman’s bill never made it through the Legislature, whonapparently had no problem letting the children fall into the service of The Evil One. But lots of folks across this troubled land believed in the dangers of backmasking.
The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, cousin of OG rock ’n’ roll Hell-raiser Jerry Lee Lewis was a leading anti-rock preacher. He once called rock “the new pornography,” which, decade later inspired the name of this group:
Rev. Jimmy’s star began to diminish in 1988 when it hit the national news that he’d been photographed at a suburban New Orleans motel with a known prostitute. As it turned out, the photographer was in cahoots with a rival Assemblies of God preacher, Marvin Gorman, who Swaggart had helped get defrocked back win 1986 for several affairs outside the bonds of holy matrimony.
These fuckin’ guys …
So Swaggart held a big televised speech in his church where he sobbed and sobbed, apologized to his wife, his followers and to God Himself, saying "I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that Your Precious Blood ... would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness never to be remembered against me anymore."
The Assemblies of God honchos didn’t buy it and revoked Swaggart’s status as a minister.
So in his humiliation, Jimmy learned his lesson and spent the rest of his life getting back on the path of righteousness.
Nawwww… In 1991 he was busted with another hooker, this time in Indio California, when a cop pulled him over. for driving on the wrong side of the road. His traveling companion was a self-described prostitute who said Swaggart had stopped to pick her up for the purpose of hot hypocritical sex.
This time no tearful apologies. The day after his arrest, Swaggart was back in the pulpit preaching the gospel of The Lord. That’s what God told him to do, Swaggart said. He never even explained why he was driving down the wrong side of the road with this street walker.
"The Lord told me it's flat none of your business," Swaggart told the congregation, according to the Associated Press. (Swaggart did in 2025 at the age of 90.)
But tacky televangelists were not the only krazed krusaders fighting rock ‘n’ roll in the 80s. A bipartisan group of Washington housewives with powerful husbands took this battle to a new level.
It started when Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore — wife of then U.S. Senator and later Vice President Al Gore — heard her 11-year-old daughter listening to a record by some guy named Prince. It sounded like this:
Around this time, another Washington wife Susan Baker — spouse of then Treasury Secretary James Baker — was shocked and horrified when, according to American Songwriter, “was asked by her seven-year-old about “Like a Virgin” by Madonna. So Gore, Baker and a couple of other concerned parents started the Parents Music Resource Center — a name so dry and bureaucratic it sounds like an obscure agency that I’d dread covering back when I was a government reporter.
To make it even worse, the PMRC got off the ground with the financial help of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest douchebags, Beach Boys singer Mike Love. Another major financial backer was Joseph Coors, then president of Coors Brewing and unabashed supporter of far-right politicians and causes.
So Tipper and her uptight little bridge club got together and compiled a list of songs, which they dubbed “The Filthy 15.” (I’m still disappointed that I never heard of any punk band that named themselves “The Filthy 15!”) Here’s that list:
I’m getting sentimental. I feel like some inspiring music:
The main stated goal of the PMRC was to encourage record labels to slap warning labels on records deemed problematic. In their early days the group devised a rating system for the music they opposed, similar to what the movie industry has done since 1968. The initial PMRC ratings included: ‘X’ for profane or sexually explicit; ‘V’ for violence; ‘D/A’ for advocacy for drugs or alcohol …
And these ruling-class housewives made an obvious nod of solidarity to the backwoods Bible bangers — people these ladies would never invite to their cocktail parties — by including a rating of “O” for occult content.
The PMRC later backed away from these ratings, eventually settling for a simple label that says “Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics.”
PMRC members argued that the warning labels were voluntary, so this was not censorship. Opponents countered that some companies would drop certain artists for controversial content and that some major stores wouldn’t carry such records.
And one major voice for artistic freedom — Donny Osmond — said in a 1985 interview on ABC’s Nightline that the labeling plan could easily backfire, with teenage kids seeking out albums with “more restrictive labels.” Osmond asked “Won’t a PG or R rating be interpreted as a sign of adulthood? How many 17 year olds want to go to G-rated movie?”
The PMRC’s star moment happened on September 19, 1985, when the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation — of which Tipper’s then-husband Al was a member — held a hearing on “porn rock.” Even before the hearing 19 record labels had agreed to start putting stickers on albums. It took a few years, but eventually they implemented the plan
At the hearing, PMRC leaders, some consultants and some allies from the National PTA were pitted against three famous musicians: John Denver (who despite his wholesome white-bread image, actually compared the PMRC’s efforts to Nazi book burnings), Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister, and one Francis Vincent Zappa.
Zappa was his usual dry, sarcastic, hilarious, if often heavy-handed, self. I don’t want to repeat all the arguments here. Frank summed it up pretty nicely in this 12-minute sound collage called “Porn Wars,” featuring actual sound clips from the hearing. It’s the centerpiece of his 1985 album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention.
Al Gore went on to become vice president under Bill Clinton in 1993. After her husband was nominated, Tipper pulled back from her PMRC activities. When Al ran for president in 2000, I voted for him but only reluctantly due to all of Tipper’s PMRC nonsense. That election was so close, I’ve always wondered if Tipper’s war on “porn rock” could have doomed poor Al 15 years later. Probably not, that that would have at least been a symbolic consolation prize for those of us who remembered.
I think I’ll wrap up this little series in the near future with one final chapter of Krazy Kristian Krusaders Against Rock ‘n’ Roll. Keep watching this space.
