In 1966, John Lennon came into Abbey Road Studios with a discovery that would change music forever. He'd been listening to a rough mix of "Rain" at home the night before—except he'd been extremely high on marijuana and had accidentally threaded the tape backward on his home recorder. Instead of realizing his mistake and fixing it like a reasonable person, John became convinced he'd discovered a portal to another dimension. "It's brilliant!" he told George Martin, insisting they use the ghostly, reversed vocals on the actual record. Martin, who by this point had learned that arguing with stoned Beatles rarely worked, agreed. That decision—born from weed, clumsiness, and John's absolute refusal to admit he'd made a mistake—would lead to a recording revolution, a decades-long conspiracy theory about Paul McCartney's death, courtroom battles over Satanic messages, and proposed legislation in California. All because John Lennon couldn't work his tape machine properly while high. 🌀🔥
The First Example: The final 30 seconds of “Rain” feature the Beatles’ first use of backmasking. Lennon’s voice enters one last time as a haunting, melodic gibberish: “Sdaeh reiht edih dna nur yeht...” When played in reverse, you’ll hear the song’s opening line: “If the rain comes, they run and hide their heads.”
The Occult Connection: Crowley’s Backwards Training
Long before the Beatles accidentally discovered backward recording’s artistic potential, the technique had a darker reputation. In 1913, the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley suggested that the aspiring magician should “train himself to think backwards by external means” by listening to records backwards. He believed that reversing normal perception could unlock hidden spiritual powers. Interestingly, Crowley’s face is among the crowd on the Sgt. Pepper album cover—John put him there, though this had nothing to do with backward recordings—Lennon simply appreciated Crowley as a provocateur and counterculture icon.
The Origin: A Very High-Stakes Accident
Avant-garde composers of musique concrète experimented with tape loops in the early 1950s, creating soundscapes that most people found unlistenable and pretentious. It was art for art’s sake, appreciated by approximately twelve people in Paris.
But the “Big Bang” for backmasking in pop music occurred in April 1966, and it happened because John Lennon was stoned and clumsy.
The Golden Era: When Backward Became Forward
The Beatles also became fascinated with the backward audio of guitars and drums, creating textures impossible to achieve with standard instruments.
“I’m Only Sleeping” (1966): This one required George Harrison to be, essentially, a musical time traveler. The song features a complex, dual-tracked “backwards” guitar solo that sounds like guitars melting and sliding through dimensions. But George couldn’t just play a solo and reverse it, because that would sound random and chaotic. Instead, he had to write the solo he wanted, then write it backward note-for-note, then play that backward version, which when reversed again would become the original solo. It’s the musical equivalent of writing a sentence, translating it to another language, then translating it back perfectly. The result is one of the most distinctive guitar moments in Beatles history. 🎸
“Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966): If “I’m Only Sleeping” was a backward guitar solo, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was a backwards everything. The song is a tapestry of backmasked tape loops, including what sounds like seagulls crying in a storm but was actually Paul McCartney laughing maniacally into a microphone, then reversing it. Ringo’s drums are treated with reverse reverb. 🔄
“Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967): Features a reverse drum track that gives the percussion a “sucking” sound where the cymbal crashes happen before the hit, creating a disorienting effect where the music seems to be pulling you backward through time. It’s unsettling in the best way, adding to the dreamlike, nostalgic quality of a song about childhood memories that may or may not be real. Combined with the song’s abrupt key change, unconventional structure, and Mellotron textures, the backward drums help make “Strawberry Fields Forever” sound like a transmission from another reality.
The “Paul is Dead” Hoax: When Fans Became Detectives
The backmasking craze took a dark turn in October 1969 when a caller to a Detroit radio station claimed that playing certain Beatles tracks backward revealed clues that Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and been replaced by a look-alike. Disc jockey Russ Gibb took the call seriously—or at least seriously enough to dedicate hours of airtime to it—and the conspiracy theory exploded. Suddenly, every backwards message, album cover detail, and cryptic lyric became “proof” that Paul had died in a car crash and the remaining Beatles had covered it up while leaving clues for fans to discover.
The backwards messages were the smoking gun, supposedly. Here are the most famous examples:
“Revolution 9”: When the phrase “Number nine, number nine” is played backward, conspiracy theorists insisted it said “Turn me on, dead man.” Never mind that “Revolution 9” is an eight-minute avant-garde sound collage that sounds disturbing played in any direction. Fans played their records backward until the grooves wore out, desperately trying to confirm what they’d already decided was true.
“I’m So Tired”: At the very end of the song, Lennon mumbles some gibberish. He’s barely coherent, clearly exhausted (the song is literally called “I’m So Tired”). Played backward, conspiracy theorists heard: “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him.” The reality: when fans played it backward and desperately wanted to hear a message about Paul’s death, their human brains—always eager to find patterns—manufactured one.
The Science: These were largely accidental examples of phonetic reversal (also known as pareidolia)—the brain's attempt to find patterns in noise. It’s the same reason people see Jesus in toast or faces in clouds. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, and when you tell it to listen for a specific phrase, it will find that phrase even if it’s not really there. 💀
In the 1995 track “Free as a Bird” (assembled from John Lennon’s demo tapes), the Beatles deliberately included a backmasked clip of John saying “Turned out nice again” as a wink to the “clue-hunters” who’d spent decades obsessing over their backwards messages. It was the Beatles’ last laugh at the conspiracy that refused to die.
Legacy: From Satanic Panic to Easter Eggs
In the 1970s and 80s, Christian groups and concerned parents became convinced that rock musicians were using backmasking to hide Satanic messages designed to brainwash the youth. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was accused of containing the phrase “Here’s to my sweet Satan” when played backward. Judas Priest faced an actual lawsuit claiming their backwards messages had driven two teenagers to suicide. The hysteria was real, even if the Satanic messages were not. ⚡
Creative Censorship and Easter Eggs: On the more benign side, modern artists now use backmasking for “radio edits” (reversing a swear word so it sounds like gibberish) or to hide “Easter Eggs” for dedicated fans to discover. Pink Floyd put backwards messages in several songs. ELO made it part of their artistic signature. Even Britney Spears has used the technique. 🎵
The Takeaway: Sometimes the Best Innovations Come from Mistakes
Here’s what makes the Beatles’ backward recording legacy so perfectly Beatles: it started with a stoned accident, turned into deliberate artistry, and ended with a massive cultural conspiracy that they eventually decided to make fun of. They proved that sometimes the most revolutionary sounds come from mistakes, that marijuana can occasionally lead to good ideas, and that if you give fans enough mysterious material, they’ll construct elaborate conspiracy theories that last for decades. The backwards messages became part of the Beatles mythology, another example of how they transformed every aspect of recording into art.
Turn me on, dead man. Or don’t. Either way, the music still works. 🌀✨
