Raymond Belknap, 18, was excited about the Christmas present he was giving his best friend, James Vance, 20: a heavy-metal rock record by the British band Judas Priest. For five hours the young men listened to the raucous, apocalyptic throb of the music while they smoked marijuana and split a dozen beers. Violent fantasies were nothing new to either of them. Vance had choked his mother on one occasion and hit her with a hammer on another; Belknap had stolen money and a van and exposed himself to women; both talked of leaving their hometown of Sparks, Nev. (pop. 41,000), to become mercenaries. This time, however, the youths hit a new low. They grabbed a shotgun and hurried to a nearby church playground, where Belknap tucked the barrels under his chin and blew his head away. Vance imitated his friend but survived, literally defaced. Three years later, he apparently overdosed on drugs prescribed because of the injury and died.
Just after the gruesome 1985 shooting, Vance used hand gestures to tell the police that he mutilated himself because "life sucks." Yet within a couple of months he started making a claim he persisted in for the rest of his days: that he and his friend were driven by the lyrics of Judas Priest. "All of a sudden," he said, "we got a suicide message, and we got tired of life." Last week his family and Belknap's mother brought that eerie charge to trial in Reno. Four of the five members of Judas Priest, who perform in metal mesh and studded leather, sat at the defendants' table dressed in business suits and heard themselves accused of murderous "mind control." Said guitarist Glenn Tipton in an interview: "We were shocked. Nothing in the album says, 'Go do this, go do that.' "
The case does not involve the overt messages of the songs, which state judge Jerry Carr Whitehead has ruled are protected by the First Amendment. At issue, instead, is the alleged use by the band and its corporate producer, CBS Records, of secretly encoded subliminal messages that are received only by the unconscious mind. Visual subliminal images -- for example, flashing the word buy at speeds too great to be observed by the conscious mind -- have been tested in video advertising for decades, although researchers debate whether they have any proven persuasive effect. The notion that auditory images of this type could shape listeners' behavior is even more in dispute. But Whitehead has held that if such messages were employed -- which the band and CBS deny -- they could not qualify for First Amendment protection because they do not openly exchange information. Instead, the judge reasoned, they reach a listener without his knowledge and invade his privacy.