"Come and keep your comrade warm..."

I enjoy a good paranoid conspiracy theory. Tell me your beliefs about the JFK assassination, how he was killed by the CIA/Mafia/Cubans/LBJ, how the government has flying saucers stored at Area 51, how black helicopters are abducting cows and cutting out their sex organs, how the Illuminati actually rule the planet. I'm interested in all conspiracy theories, I just don't believe any of them.

About the only conspiracy story I believe is that some Al Quaida terrorists conspired and then flew some planes into the World Trade Center buildings.

Growing up as a liberal Democratic-type in Utah during the 1960s I felt totally surrounded. The state was then, as it is now, redder than red. Border-to-border Republicans. Talk about conspiracies! In Utah County just south of us the John Birch Society was very powerful. If you don't remember the Birchers google them. They were a bunch of right-wingy-dingies who had a lot of conspiracy theories going on, among them Eisenhower being a Communist-dupe.

One day in about 1965 a teacher of mine, who I later found out was a Bircher, played a tape for us by some evangelical type. It was Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles. I'd forgotten about the tape until a Google search of "Beatles" came up with the pamphlet you see pictured above you. Among other claims by the speaker was that the Commies controlled the music business. They had put out children's records in the late 1940s (get 'em young) on a label called "Young Peoples' Records" (aha! "Peoples" is a dead giveaway that something is pinko!) He played a part of one record called "The Little Puppet," which he claimed had a drumbeat set to the pace of a heartbeat to put the listener--a young kid--into a state of hypnosis, and make him suggestible.

The speaker even claimed to have the "first" rock 'n' roll record, and he played part of it, but I don't remember what it was. That's when I knew the guy was full of it. As dumb as I was in my high school days I knew there was no such thing as a first rock record. As anyone with even a small bit of musical knowledge can tell you, rock grew out of several different genres: rhythm and blues, country, jump, swing, big band…you name it, it had an influence on what was later called rock 'n' roll.
The speaker told us in grave tones and so many words that the music aimed at "today's youth," (and by that, I mean mid-'60s) was sent to us by wicked, evil people intent on corrupting our morals, bringing down our great country. Well, I'm paraphrasing because I'm depending on memories that are four decades old, and if my recall isn't right on, then it's clear as to the intent of the tape.

I made some noise in the classroom about how it was crap. My friend got up and marched around the classroom like the little puppet, "hypnotized." As I recall we were both told to shut up and sit down, but I felt if I had to listen to this stuff I might as well let the person inflicting it on me know what I thought of it. I don't remember it ever being brought up again in class. Maybe the teacher got told he was overstepping his bounds.

The idea that rock music was some sort of tool of the devil is still around, although I haven't heard the communists invoked in a long time, probably because they don't have a lot to do with anything anymore. They aren't the straw men the conspiracy theorists like to point at. Nowadays it's almost more likely to be our own government at the root of the conspiracies rather than some external force.

I've heard so many conspiracy theories about music that I've lost track of them. Backwards masking, satanic messages, etc. It's all interesting, though. A good paranoid conspiracy tells me more about the person who espouses it than it does about the conspiracy.

I'll bet when "Back In The U.S.S.R." came out it drove the right-wingers nuts. They wouldn't have had any sense of humor about a funny riff on the Beach Boys.

What's also funny is that while these folks with Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles were claiming the music was inspired by the communists, countries like the Soviet Union were denouncing rock music as a tool of the capitalists to corrupt their youth. Nowadays when I step into a store and hear Beatles songs played over the store sound system it's hard to believe that they were anything but mainstream. But there was a time when the Beatles were blamed for a lot of things. Our parents' generation was baffled by their popularity, what made them so appealing to us. There just had to be something else going on…no one could really like that noisy stuff, could they? Maybe now our own kids and grandkids wonder what it was about the Beatles that made us like them so much. I'd say that rather than being part of a conspiracy, the Beatles were there at the nexus of the sixties social movement, replacing the old with the new. That would seem like a conspiracy to many people, but the Beatles also had the talent. Whenever I listen to their music I'm reminded of how different, fresh and new they sounded in their era. Even if their music is now mainstream--even fogeyish to the hip-hop crowd--it still has all of the elements, lyrics, music, vocals, that made it great and turned our musical worlds upside down. You don't need a conspiracy to do that.Ciao for now.