It’s been 30 years since a shocking court case involving Judas Priest and a fan’s suicide came to an end.
On trial was the British heavy metal band, which emerged victorious on Aug. 24, 1990, after a legal battle that lasted for more than six weeks.
“It was crazy for us because we were a British metal band being taken to trial in a country that we loved so dearly over an incident that we thought was preposterous,” frontman Rob Halford told Yahoo Entertainment on Monday.
“And we had to go through the motions of this month-long trial,” he continued. “It was absolutely ridiculous. It really was. We love our fans. We would never put anything in our music with the intent of harming them.”
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Singer Rob Halford (L) and guitarist Glenn Tipton of British metal band Judas Priest perform on stage at Globen Arena in Stockholm on February 28, 2009. (Reuters)
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The album in question was 1978’s “Stained Class,” which was released just before the group broke out internationally with 1980’s “British Steel.”
But on Dec. 23, 1985, after repeatedly listening to “Stained Class,” Sparks, Nev., residents James Vance, 20, and Raymond Belknap, 18, grabbed a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun to carry out a suicide pact. The two entered the nearby courtyard of the Community First Church of God, where Belknap shot himself and died instantly. Vance, who became severely facially disfigured from the self-inflicted blast, survived.
According to the outlet, Vance wrote a letter to his mother Phyllis Vance four months later and shared: “I believe that alcohol and heavy metal music, such as Judas Priest, led us or even mesmerized us into believing that the answer to life was death.”
Phyllis immediately contacted several lawyers, who then examined “Stained Class” by playing the record backward. They insisted the track “Better By You, Better Than Me,” a cover of a song by English rock band Spooky Tooth, contained subliminal messages, such as the phrase “do it.” They believed it was these taunting words that “mesmerized” both Belknap and Vance into wanting to take their own lives.
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Judas Priest's 'Stained Class'
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While the First Amendment protects free speech, Justice Jerry Whitehead ruled during a pretrial hearing that “non-decipherable sounds below the conscious threshold of awareness” were fair game.
Nearly five years after the double tragedy, Judas Priest members were subpoenaed to appear for a hearing in the Washoe County courthouse in Reno, Nev.
“As we got off the tour bus, we were told that we were going to be subpoenaed by the local police department and that we didn’t have to say anything,” said Halford. “We just had to take the envelope that was handed to each of us and carry on walking into the gig. We walked in single-file and the sheriff came up and said to each of us, ‘You’re served.’ That’s when the official legal process kicked in.”
Phyllis sued both Judas Priest and CBS Records for $6.2 million. Her suit alleged that those backward messages in “Better By You, Better Than Me” contributed to her son and Belknap’s actions. Judas Priest insisted there were no subliminal messages in their album. Still, Phyllis refused to drop the case.
The members of Judas Priest at trial. (Getty)
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Vance was originally scheduled to take the stand against Judas Priest, one of his favorite bands. However, he passed away on Nov. 29, 1988, from a methadone overdose. The prosecution moved forward with their case.
“It was just like being in a movie,” Halford recalled. “It didn’t seem real. The opening accusations by the prosecution started off with some guy going, ‘Your honor, the whole point of this is to receive justice and we will be screaming for vengeance and standing by the sad wings of destiny as we will ram it down.’ We just looked at each other going, ‘Oh my God, the prosecution is starting their accusations using our album titles in their argument!’ We were just stunned.”
After a grueling analysis of the record from both sides, Halford said he played various backward messages from Stained Class that the band had also scrutinized, attempting to prove that one’s imagination can detect sounds that can come across as any sentence or phrase.
“We wanted to prove to the judge that these sounds and ideas can be manufactured in the mind more than anything else,” Halford explained. “If you can drop a seed of what something might be, then you can convince your brain that that’s exactly the sound or the phrase that you’re listening to. And as we played those passages back, you could see the judge’s mannerism change on the spot.
Rob Halford, circa 1980s. (Photo by Brian Rasic/Getty Images)
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“He realized that the phrase [‘do it’] was there as a trick of the mind more than anything else. And I think he realized you can take anything from anybody and play it backward and create these imaginary phrases and sentences. Everything seemed to change that day.”
Ultimately, Whitehall ruled that Vance and Belknap were predisposed toward self-destructive behavior. And even if “Stained Class” had any backward messages, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that those phrases alone played a role in the suicide pact made by the two.
“Going to court is still a strong memory, because at the heart of it for us was a great sadness that these young guys who were hardcore Priest and metal fans had lost their lives through a combination of drugs and alcohol,” said Halford. “And we’ll have to live with that for our whole lives. But the state of mind that they were in had nothing to do with Priest and nothing to do with the music. They were in an unfortunate state mentally at the time that they did what they did.”
“There are always these mitigating circumstances that lead to these kinds of tragedies, but there are people that continue to blame metal music, which is really quite sad because I’ve always felt that our music helps people escape the difficulties in their lives,” he added.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
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