Fact #77142

By Johnny Black. First published in Q magazine, March 1998

EVENT : The Trial of Judas Priest
DATE : 23 Dec 1985 - 24 August 1990
LOCATION : Washoe County Courthouse, Reno, Nevada.

When heavy metal fans Raymond Belknap and Jay Vance attempted suicide with a sawn-off shotgun, Belknap died instantly. Vance, horribly disfigured, survived.


Jay Vance : There was just tons of blood. It was like the gun had grease on it. There was so much blood I could barely handle it, and I reloaded it and then, you know, it was my turn, and I readied myself. I was thinking about all that there was to live for, so much of your life is right before your eyes, and it was like I didn’t have any control … I went ahead and shot.

Glenn Tipton (guitarist, Judas Priest) : Obviously, we’d heard about the two lads in Reno. Ray Belknap, who killed himself with a shotgun on 23 December 1985, and his friend Jay Vance who was badly disfigured. We knew they’d been Priest fans, and we even heard rumours that the parents thought our music had somehow driven them to it.

It was almost five years later, when we did a concert in Nevada, that we were handed a writ claiming that our album Stained Class had been responsible for the double suicide, and we were being sued for $6.2m. Apparently you have to be handed the writ in the state where the allegations are being brought against you.

Basically, the families claimed we had subliminal and hidden messages on Stained Class, but the First Amendment in America covers freedom of speech. In other words you can say whatever you like, so the only way they could get it to court was to claim that you couldn’t hear these messages, because then it wasn’t protected by the First Amendment.

Bill Curbishley (manager of Judas Priest) : The only subliminal I would put on an album would be ‘Buy seven copies’.

Glenn Tipton : Anybody in their right mind would realise that, if we were going to put a message on our records, it wouldn’t be to encourage our record-buying public to kill themselves,

Then we started to hear things, like that there had been other suicide attempts in those families. They had gambling problems, drug problems, they were both violent towards the children. The two boys were kids that nobody liked, they’d allegedly been planning mass murder.

Not being au fait with the American legal system at the time, I just couldn’t believe that anybody could take it seriously enough for it to get to court. But I was wrong.

Jay Vance was to be their star witness. As the court case got closer, it must have dawned on him that he would be on the stand, looking like he did, facing a band he’d always thought was great, and then finally when the judge said there would be television cameras in court, just prior to the case, he died of an overdose. You have to ask yourself who really was responsible for that lad’s death?

Mike Henderson (reporter, Reno Gazette-Journal) : When the trial opened on 16 July 1990, I was assigned to cover it. The notion that something masked and played backwards might cause someone to commit suicide was such a legal novelty, and you had rock stars involved as well so, of course, it became a huge, international media circus. Also, because of the age of the boys involved, it became an intensely emotional thing which kind of split the population. Obviously the families had a lot of community feeling for them locally, but others felt that the case seemed a bit far-fetched.

Glenn Tipton : The very first day in court, one of the prosecution lawyers stood up wearing one of Ray Belknap’s suits. It was just like Perry Mason, you know, this man standing in the clothes of a dead lad, holding the shotgun that had killed them, and he turned round and looked at us. That was the point when I finally realised how serious the whole thing was.

Rob Halford (vocalist, Judas Priest) : I thought there would be drive-past shootings at the courthouse but the American public really supported us. I was walking in downtown Reno, and this old guy, who must have been in his seventies, came up and said ‘Hey, Rob, I just want you to know I think this is a real waste of taxpayers’ money and should never have come to trial.’ Every day there were at least forty fans outside the court.

Mike Henderson : I’ve never been a heavy metal fan but I had to spend a lot of time with the band, and I realised very quickly that they are virtually actors on stage, and their offstage persona is completely different. I watched them playing golf, I went window shopping with them, and these were regular, quite ordinary guys.

Glenn Tipton : It’s a fact that, if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense. So I asked permission to go into a studio and find some perfectly innocent phonetic flukes. The lawyers didn’t want to do it, but I insisted. We bought a copy of the album in a shop, went into the studio, recorded it on tape, turned the tape over and played it backwards. Right away we found ‘Hey ma, my chair’s broken’ and ‘Give me a peppermint’ and ‘Help me keep a job’.

Mike Henderson : The band’s demeanour in court was very gentlemanly. They wore sober suits, Rob had covered up his tattoos, and they were polite at all times, taking it very seriously.

Glenn Tipton : We chose Rob to give evidence in court, because he was the one who had actually sung the lyrics so, in that sense, he was the one being most directly accused.

Rob Halford : I admitted on the stand that we had actually recorded backwards before … but it wasn’t any hidden message. It was just gibberish. And you could hear the prosecution opening the champagne when I said that.

Glenn Tipton : Then Rob played a lyric from our song Invader, ‘Even so we must prepare a defense’, but when he played it backwards it sounded like ‘I have heard some music’. It was so stunning that the prosecution lawyers stood up and shouted ‘This is rubbish, we don’t believe this.’ So our lawyer offered to pay for them to make the same test in a studio of their choice with their own engineers.

We never heard another word about reverse messages, but we still had to deal with the supposedly subliminal messages. One particular line in question was ‘Better by you, better than me-yuh.’ They claimed that in reverse it said ‘Do it, do it’.

Rob Halford : We brought on our expert witness, Anthony Pellecrano, the bloke who analysed the Watergate tapes and the tapes of the shots of the Kennedy assassination.

Pellecrano played ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’ and established that the sounds you hear are me exhaling, coupled with the guitar, which gives a sound like ‘oowee oowee’ and, when you hear the drums over that, it could be mistaken for ‘Do it, do it’.

Glenn Tipton : Their expert had been genuinely convinced we’d put subliminal messages on the record but when she came face to face with Pellicano I saw it dawning on her as they spoke, that she realised she’d got egg on her face, you know? Like she suddenly realised she’d been talked into something she couldn’t really justify.

It took about six weeks before a judgement was handed down that any subliminal messages on the album were not responsible for the deaths of these lads. But that implies that there were subliminals, even though we had proved in court that there weren’t. It was contradictory and unsatisfactory. We were absolved of blame but the implication was that there were messages on the album. This was presumably to save face for the American legal system which had allowed this ridiculous case to get this far, at a huge cost to taxpayers.

Really, it was test case for the arts in general, not just heavy metal, because if we had lost, the floodgates would open. Every book that was written, every film, every record … there would be cases based on subliminal messages.

In effect, we did win, yet it cost us over a quarter of a million dollars. We went through hell for six weeks but we came out of it stronger, more knowledgeable, and you learn. It’s all experience.

Thanks : Jayne Andrews, Bob Andrews, Jodi Summers, Candy Cooper, Jesse Hamlin, Mary Billard.