There are few moments we remember two and a half decades later. If you are over the age of 55, you can probably tell me where were you were when you heard Kennedy was killed. If you’re in your 30’s you remember when the Challenger exploded and your teachers turned on the TV’s in your classroom. I remember hearing some guy named Elvis had died, but having no concept of what it meant; it was explained by a parent as a “big deal.” Ditto Reagan and Lennon.

These moments aren’t always negative and sometimes change our lives. On a Halloween night in 1978, I wandered into a room to see 4 characters flying across the TV screen. I queried my sis, “who’s THAT guy?!” The reply, “that’s Gene Simmons. He spits blood and breathes fire.” My well-planned assessment, “ ok. That’s what I’m gonna do when I grow up.”

Michael Jackson’s performance of Billy Jean on Motown 25 was another of these moments for me. I have many thoughts about MJ, but today I figure it’s best to let his work speak. I’ll delve more into it this loss later this week. Promise. For brief context as it relates here, I was 8 years old. It was March 25, 1983. Even on a 13-inch black and white set tucked under a kitchen cabinet the moment was magic. I didn’t know I wanted to make this business my life at the time, but remembering the sense of wonderment it brought me, it’s no surprise this is where I ended up. I spent hours spent trying to moonwalk on the linoleum, but never quite got it. Nobody did it better.

Reminisce with me for a bit, won’t you?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7mEQVWQgRA

‘The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules,’ says Rob Gordon (John Cusack) in the screen version of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.

I’m no longer the maker of mix tapes, at least not in the Skid Row I’ll Remember You; followed by Kiss’ Forever; followed by GNR’s Sweet Child O’ Mine; ” I think you’re neat, please sit with me on the bus” sense. If you own one of these, I hope you’ve long since burned it. If you haven’t, please do.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t make compilations anymore, I do it with a level of OCD that should be examined. I can spend an entire evening selecting material, sequencing, re-sequencing, scrutinizing whether Alicia Keys has earned the right to be just one track separated from Otis’ I’ve Got Dreams to Remember. Do I use the Fillmore Concerts version of …Elizabeth Reed, a splice of two takes on 3/12/70 (early and late show); or stick with the original At Fillmore East version, unedited and not remastered? Edie Brickell’s What I Am was released in 1989, but I remember it from freshman year, 1990. Do I put it on my 80’s mix or 90’s? These things are important.

The mix also has to flow. It must have a theme and forward momentum, with the proper peaks and valleys. Let’s look at that 80’s mix, as an example. You can’t kick off with Hot For Teacher and follow it up with Say, Say, Say. The listener will get whiplash. I’m using my mix tape as a parable, of course. What I’m really talking about is the sequence. Every piece of recorded music is. I won’t say I’m the best at it, but I’m damn good. I made a Soul/R&B mix about 5 years ago, which I often use as pre-show music. Classic Soul, real R&B. None of this Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston crap. I routinely get requests for copies. It’s not because the songs are so great, though there are plenty of gems on it. It’s because it works. The tempo changes are correct. The builds are there. The collection kicks off with energy and lets you down sweetly at the close. Sequence.

The Beatles’ Abbey Road (or any post-bubblegum Beatles album for that matter) is a lesson in the mastery of sequencing. Come Together grabs the ears when the needle drops. The track grooves, the lyrics are solid, which is always a plus, but it’s the groove that hooks you. The arrangement, underscored by Harrison’s guitar work on the outro melds seamlessly into Something. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, to Oh! Darling, to Octopus’s Garden is a smooth build, setting up I Want You as a peak. It’s not a peak because it’s an up tempo rocker, rather it’s the employment of dramatic intensity that makes it function. It’s a carrot. You continually expect it to break wide open to revel in some kind of abandon, but it never comes. Just when you’re expecting the payoff, McCartney pulls back with, in my opinion, the best bass line he’s ever written. The languid outro builds with anticipation of a shuttle launch; a slow but powerful burn.  What’s to come? Is this where it kicks into the stratosphere? Abrupt silence, then Here Comes The Sun, a ballad. The perfect means of smiling away the frustrations left by the previous tune, while sliding across the kitchen floor in your socks; complete with brilliantly place hand claps. Without changing the time dramatically, Because picks up the intensity, but paired with You Never Give Me Your Money, leaves you exactly where  I Want You did; taking you to the edge, but leaving you with only Sun King. You’d love to be pissed and toss the damn thing across the room, but the arrangement is too beautiful. Mean Mr. Mustard kicks it up a notch. Polythene Pam arcs. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window holds steady. The three create a mini-climax, but there are still a good number of grooves on the vinyl. Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight set up a perfect close, the aptly titled The End. This track FINALLY delivers the rock you’ve been waiting for, before laying you down gently. Sequence.

Other fine examples can be found in Queen’s A Night At The Opera, Elvis Costello’s Painted From Memory, The Black Keys’ Attack and Release and Oh, My Darling, by up-and-comer Basia Bulat (If you’ve not heard her, give it a listen. Very intelligent writing and arranging).

I’ve certainly missed an unquantifiable of great albums, in terms of sequencing. I’ll await the postings by fellow pundits, but the point I make remains true. The sequencing of a record is as important as the tunes you record. How listenable your record is, determines how many times it will be listened to and by whom. It used to boil down to writing, engineering, sequencing and packaging. These days, the first three are all that matter; with engineering at a huge disadvantage in a lot of cases, due to the heavy compression required for downloads. This doesn’t render engineers irrelevant by any means, so don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll talk about my reasoning for both of these statements in a future post.

When you ready that next project for mastering, think it through. Does it have a logical progression? Does it take the listener on a journey? Try several combinations and give them a listen in different environments - in traffic, alone with headphones or on a walk. Let some confidants do the same. The objective ears will give you the best results. How does it make them feel and why? You want to make sure you get it right. Sequencing matters.

Sometime in the late 80’s, Satan came to my hometown. It’s hard to determine exactly when he arrived - he didn’t rent a room, open a P.O. Box, or establish phone service; but he was known to be lurking about. He didn’t linger in the cemetery or under the old train bridge; where the ghost of a mysterious old woman was said to have roamed endlessly in search of her dead child. I never saw him at the supposed Gates of Hell that were tucked away a short drive from town, either. Truthfully, I never saw him at all. My friends and I tried to call him out at several backyard campouts, but he never showed. We must’ve either been too holy for the Old Boy, or too lame. I won’t speculate, since neither option is a real prize. 

The adults were a different story. My old German Catholic town in the rural Midwest - the kind with the church/school combo on one side of the winding road and tavern on the other - was embroiled in a fight to the death for the souls of children.  Prompted by the strict but sweet Sisters of Charity – trained in the pre-Vatican II trenches - that ran our local parochial school, bible verses, Richard Ramirez, Dan Rather and wild rumor; our folks were on the lookout for Satan everywhere; specifically in heavy metal records.

I learned that Kiss stood for ‘Knights In Satan’s Service’. I was alerted to the secret devil signs on AC/DC and Molly Hatchet album covers; not to mention that AC/DC paved a highway to hell and then wrote about it. Queen urged us to smoke marijuana in Another Bites The Dust. Jimmy Page was a secret blood drinking vampire and ate babies in the basement of the house he bought from Aleistar Crowley. Rock stars were writing about their pen pal Beelzebub and putting him front and center on their album jackets. It was spooky shit. Most frightening of all were the secret messages Ozzy, Priest, Zeppelin, Floyd, and countless others were placing in their songs; designed to turn us into Satanist zombies. You couldn’t fight the messages because these bastards recorded them BACKWARDS and hid them deep in the mix. More diabolical still was the clever placement of the communications in kickass songs you wanted to hear over and over; helping the messages take deep root. Within a week after purchasing Shout at the Devil, you’d likely be stalking your grandmother with a penknife. 

Backmasking was the name given to this nefarious component of rock’s plot to overthrow heaven. The idea of backward masking wasn’t new in the twentieth century. Who is to blame for this terrible tool in Satan’s arsenal? Thomas Edison. Edison invented the phonograph, but failed to put safety protocol in place to prevent reverse rotation; a soul-saving clutch, perhaps. We know Edison’s phonograph flaw was deliberate. Why? He was a Freemason, whom we all know are henchmen for the devil (we also know they put the evil eye above the pyramid on a dollar bill; their treachery runs deep). Edison couldn’t write catchy tunes, though, so Lucifer would have to wait another century for a conduit. He found it in CIA target and enemy of The King (Elvis, that is), John Lennon, and his band of rabble-rousers. Yes, the Beatles used backmasking on Revolver and the White Album. Soon, the Paul Is Dead legend had every stoner in America spinning albums backwards. Legber had begun recruiting his foot soldiers, fifteen years later they were trained and mobilized - recording metal albums.

They’d have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling Churchies. Christian DJ Michael Mills sounded the trumpets in late 1981, when he pointed out that Stairway to Heaven contained secret messages; including ‘there was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan,’ which clearly means…what?! Sounds like old Scratch is taking a page from Uncle Ernie’s book, eh? He was followed William Yarroll’s testimony on the PTL Club that heavy metal singers were in legion with the Church of Satan. A group of North Carolina teenagers held a group record burning in early ’82; Dan Rather picked up the story in the spring.

As cornball as most of this sounds, our parents bought the notion that the devil’s music was going to send us straight to hell. Cassette tapes were confiscated for judicious review; every song title and album cover scrutinized. Among the casualties in my collection were Styx’s Paradise Theatre (Snowblind allegedly contained, ‘Satan move through our voices’); Sammy Hagar’s I Can’t Drive 55; and J Geils Band’s Greatest Hits. No backwards messages in the latter two, but Hagar had Dick In the Dirt (which was actually about a man named Richard. I’ll allow the lyrical innuendo, but come on.) and J Geils was encouraging everyone to piss on a wall. My folks figured they might as well purge all the evil at once. It was better to be safe than sorry. The real irony of the Hagar album was that I had purchased it via the American Publishers Christian Fundraising Company, a business that helped Catholic schools raise money by selling magazines and music. That defense fell on deaf ears as it was being crushed by my father’s hammer before my very eyes. My Kiss tapes escaped doom for reasons I will never know. Perhaps it was because my older sister was into them a decade earlier and hadn’t joined the dark army. Whatever the reason, I thought it best not to question.

Other friends’ collections met similar fates. In a matter of days our communal tape pool was purged of all iniquities. We didn’t care about Satan. We just wanted to rock. If anything, we thought the Dark One was a real assbag for ruining our favorite bands. Why couldn’t he hook up with Miami Sound Machine or El Debarge? Nobody would miss them.

We refused to be defeated. The lunchroom black market provided a means for getting dubs of the evil contraband. All the evil we loved, but in an unmarked parent-proof package, courtesy of our friends at Maxell. We simply went underground; secret stashes of tapes only to be brought out late at night at backyard campouts. We then figured out two pieces of Scotch tape, carefully placed over the knockouts on a commercial cassette, would allow us to record over other albums; including books on tape, it was the perfect decoy. My Chipmunks Christmas album held a terrible secret – Blizzard of Ozz. 

The initial frenzy tapered off toward the end of the decade, then amped up to serious levels.  John McCollum ended his life with a gunshot in 1986, while listening to Suicide Solution, Ozzy Osbourne’s self-admitted ode to the dangers of alcoholism. It was alleged several subliminal references to shooting were contained in the song, which makes sense given the subject matter, but the prosecution positioned the references as urging the shooting of a gun, rather than shooting booze. A second case was brought on similar grounds a few years later. Both times, the courts ruled in Ozzy’s favor. Serial killer Richard Ramirez was an AC/DC fan, sighting Night Prowler - actually harmless teenage hormone tune about sneaking into a girl’s room - as his favorite of their songs. Ramirez’s misinterpretation helped earn him his Night Stalker moniker. Two intoxicated and troubled Nevada teens attempted suicide (both eventually succeeded) in the summer of ’90. The blame was placed on a supposed ‘do it,’ buried in Judas Priest’s Better By You, Better Than Me. The case went to trial and was eventually dismissed, but not before a good chunk of public money was wasted. The states of California and Arkansas considered legislation requiring warning labels on albums that contained subliminal messages. The Arkansas bill was defeated by a young Governor Clinton, making it quite ironic that he’d eventually be paired with the husband of the Parent’s Music Resource Center’s (PMRC) - a music morality watchdog - loudest spokespersons on a Presidential ticket.

In my town, someone painted an erroneous pentagram (it was actually just a star inside a circle) and ‘Satin rules’ in an abandoned barn, leading to a full-scale investigation into whether there was a bevy of worshippers among us. Turns out it was a hoax by bored teens, who didn’t do their research and couldn’t pass a spelling test. I do agree, though, satin rules. These incidents were the high water mark. The fervor to root out the devil at your local record retailer eventually subsided to ‘normal’ levels.

Two decades hence, it’s hard to imagine what we were all so afraid of. I absorbed all of the music and I’ve turned out just fine. I’m your typical neurotic American, but I don’t march in the devil’s army; much to his chagrin, I’m sure. Episodes of VH1 Classic’s Metal Mania are filled with videos that have more in common with Ed Wood than Satan. Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon video is far from sinister. A torch bearing Motley Crue herding leather-clad hussies into a cattle pen is laughable at best.

I wonder what would’ve transpired if the Internet were as accessible in those days. Would the fallacy have reached a deeper saturation, fueled by the same chain-mail network that brought us ‘Obama is a covert Muslim’ this past Fall; or would it have been easily debunked, thanks to sites like Snopes? We’ll never know. What we do know is that it was a silly season like those that have happened throughout our history. It wasn’t the Salem Witch Trials or McCarthy Hearings, but it was propagated by the same core principles – misunderstanding, conjecture, and fear.

I wish I was smart enough at the time to argue the devil’s music had already come to the airwaves; and that it was my parent’s parents that discovered it. Elvis was the first to bring the Devil’s groove to a mass audience. It was my grandparents who spoke of the vulgarity of this new medium, only making their kids want it all the more. ‘Can’t you see you’re doing the same thing,’ I would’ve said. ‘You turned out okay. So will I,’ would’ve been my closer. I would have won, too. Then I would have strutted off and cranked up some Styx.