Judas Priest singer Rob Halford says that the band had to fight for their lives when they were put on trial in 1990 following the deaths of two American fans in a suicide pact.
Speaking to MOJO magazine, Halford recalls how he and his bandmates experienced a sense of disbelief and then horror as their music was blamed for influencing two young men from Nevada, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, to turn a shotgun on themselves in 1985.
“We couldn’t understand it,” Halford says. “It didn’t make sense. We thought it was a laugh, a joke, at first.”
The civil action filed against Judas Priest in 1990 alleged that the band had planted subliminal messages in a track from the 1978 album Stained Class.
The track in question was Better By You, Better Than Me, a cover version of a 1969 song by British group Spooky Tooth.
It was claimed that this track was embedded with a number of subliminal messages including “Try suicide”, “Do it” and “Let’s be dead”.
The fatal incident involving Vance and Belknap occurred on 23 December 1985. At this time, Vance was 20 years old and Belknap 18. It was claimed that the two men spent that evening listening repeatedly to the Stained Class album while drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana.
After agreeing to a suicide pact, Belknap shot himself dead before Vance also attempted to kill himself but instead survived with horrific injuries to his face.
Vance died two years later, in 1988.
The families of Vance and Belknap filed a lawsuit against Judas Priest, alleging that the band were responsible for the deaths.
Halford tells MOJO: “I remember the day our tour manager said, ‘When you get off the bus…’ – I think this was in Texas – ‘…the marshal is going to hand you a piece of paper and he’s going to say these words, ‘You are served.’ Sure enough, ‘Robert Halford, you are served.’
“I thought nothing of it initially. Then, incrementally this snowball from hell starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger, until one day we – as a British band, as UK citizens – hard to get on a plane and fly to Nevada, to fight for our fucking lives.”
In court, Halford and other band members were cross-examined during a trial that lasted from 16 July to 24 August 1990.
“It was just so surreal,” Halford recalls. “What have we done? Have we done anything that would create such a horrible atmosphere that a fan would take their own lives? Are we responsible for that? Because that was the projection. I mean, even now, I'm still flabbergasted at the idea.”
In the end, the case against Judas Priest was dismissed by the judge. A crucial point was the clarification of an alleged subliminal message as “a coincidental convergence of a guitar chord with an exhalation pattern”.
In conclusion, Halford tells MOJO: “The plaintiffs, I think they were manipulated, that's the right word, into doing something that they probably didn't want to do, because they were suffering, they were grieving.”
He adds: “It turned out to be a very, very important case. Had it gone a different way, it could have opened the floodgates.”
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