Drol Si Elkniwllub!

It was probably about 6 o'clock, and though it wasn't too chilly out, the sun was long gone. Grinch and I had just left the Rathskeller and were on our way?well, to wherever we happened to end up next. That's the way things generally worked back in those days. n "Excuse me?" a young woman asked as we passed her on the sidewalk. We stopped. Though I couldn't see her too clearly, I could tell immediately that she was another one of those blonde, cornfed, wide-eyed types so common around Madison in the mid-80s.

"Well, what can I do for you?" Grinch asked with a thinly disguised leer. Few people recognized that leer until it was too late. Grinch could be sneaky that way. The young woman held out a small yellow flier.

"We're having a multimedia presentation tonight," she said. "It's about rock music, and it would be really great if you'd show up. I think you'd like it. It's free."

"Are you gonna be there?" Grinch asked with a dirty, dirty smile. The young woman smiled, half-sweetly, half-nervously, but said nothing. She quickly turned to look for more people to leaflet, and we continued on our way. Finally, a block later, we took a close look at what the flier was advertising.

I don't remember anymore exactly which ministry was behind it, but it was one of the funnier ones. Though they tried to disguise it by using an innocuous title, the "multimedia presentation" seemed at its heart to concern Satan's central role in the popular music industry?specifically his predilection for inserting subliminal, demonic, backwards messages into popular songs.

"I don't think we can afford to miss that," I said. Grinch agreed. It looked like we had something to do that night, after all. Only problem was that the show started in an hour, and we suddenly had plenty of preparations to make.

Well, not that many, really?we ran to my house and whipped together a little wooden cross, upon which I crucified a bendable Bullwinkle figure. (Don't ask me why I had one lying around. I just did, is all.) Then, using a magic marker, I scrawled a massive "666" on Grinch's wide, flat forehead.

It wasn't subtle, no, but it didn't take long for us to discover that "subtlety" was pretty futile?especially where we were headed.

We arrived at the 300-seat auditorium at about 6:50. In a godless hippie town like Madison, we had fully expected that the place would be mostly empty?and that those few people who did show up, like us, had shown up to heckle. Hell, we assumed that we'd probably know everyone there. That's why we were a little taken aback to find the place packed. Worse yet, it was clearly packed with true believers. You could tell just to look at them. Short hair, rosy cheeks, clean clothes, a lot of thick necks. Not only did we not know anyone in the crowd?we didn't want to know them. But there we were.

The entire football team seemed to be in attendance, as did several sorority houses. We had no idea.

"Wow," Grinch muttered, "talk about your Silent Majority."

I took a quick head count. The odds of our surviving the evening seemed to be running about 298-to-2.

"We're going to be killed," I said.

"Probably."

A moment later, I knew for sure we were going to be killed when we took the last two available seats, directly in front of five defensive linemen. I took hold of the Bullwinkle crucifix in my coat pocket and squeezed it as if it were a set of rosary beads. Somehow I knew he wouldn't help me.

The thing is, once Grinch and I set our minds to something, we went through with it, no matter how stupid, foolhardy or potentially life-threatening that thing may have been.

Our host for the evening was a tall, blond man in a suit. I'd put him in his early 30s?a man with the demeanor and the voice of a young Marjoe Gortner. Which, I suppose, only made sense.

He had a big, scary evening planned for us, he said. One in which he hoped to make it abundantly clear how very insidious that Satan character could be. The devil's greatest tool of destruction, we were told, was that rock and roll music, with its primitive sexual rhythms. Even more than the rhythms, though?more, still, even than the awful drug-spawned lyrics?were the secret messages he personally hides in the music itself, using his patented Backward Masking technology.

After zipping through a slightly less-than-scientific explanation as to how the brain absorbs and interprets backwards messages, he pulled out the tapes. That's what we were waiting for.

Using the sleight of hand (or voice, or ear) so effective and popular in these matters, he told the crowd exactly what they were supposed to be hearing before he played each cut. That way, instead of just hearing muddy, warped garbage, you actually thought you heard someone saying, y'know, "Satan is a really good guy, and I like him an awful lot. Plus I eat babies. Eating babies is cool."

He started with the Beatles ("turn me on, dead man"), then quickly worked his way through Styx ("Satan, move in our voices"), Queen ("it's fun to smoke marijuana") and Judas Priest ("oh, just go kill yourself, already"). Every one of them a clear message to America's young people to go out there and do bad things.

Even the name "Judas Priest" is blasphemous, he pointed out. Then he went after Kansas, for some reason. And he spent a full 20 minutes on "Stairway to Heaven," which is chock-full of Satanic messages.

The acoustics in the auditorium were not very good, so even after he told us exactly what we were supposed to be hearing, Grinch and I were having a hard time picking it out. In fact, sometimes we heard things that were completely different from what he was telling us to hear.

For the sake of fairness, we thought it best to share these new interpretations with him. Loudly.

"My skillet is on the handtruck!"

"You have a floor wax, I have the?something that sounds like Cincinnati!"

"Jerry, let go of that aardvark!"

We didn't mean to imply that these new messages weren't just as Satanic as the ones he was hearing. Just different, is all, and a little less obvious.

Apparently used to this sort of foolishness, he never hesitated or faltered, never commented on our differing interpretations?he just rolled right along with his lecture. When he was finished with the backward masking, he moved on to the subliminal messages buried in the imagery on album covers.

Some of them were obvious and hardly subliminal at all?Black Sabbath, Slayer, the Dead Kennedys' In God we Trust, Inc. He went after Rush, and Styx again, and Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy (not really sure what was wrong with that one, except that it had both the word "holy" and some naked butts on it). Blue Öyster Cult's logo, we were told, was "a broken cross formed by an upside-down question mark," signifying something or another. He went after Kansas again?he really hated that Kansas?and flashed a picture of Sid Vicious holding a beer bottle (from the back cover of Sid Sings) without ever explaining why. Early British punk band 999, he claimed, got their name by taking "666" and turning it upside down.

Turning things upside down, it seems, really pissed him off. God, too, I guess.

Then he made the same mistake the PMRC did, by citing album covers from a bunch of really obscure Satanic metal bands that no one had ever heard of. Neat artwork, though, I had to admit.

As it happened, all these images were being flashed onto the giant screen via a slide projector that was positioned maybe four rows behind me. It didn't take long to discover that if I held the Bullwinkle just a little bit above my head, its silhouette would appear quite clearly on the screen. The really funny thing about that is, given Bullwinkle's very large, distinctive antlers and nose?together with the makeshift cross?there was absolutely no mistaking what that shadow was.

Grinch and I were giggling like idiots when the lights came up again. That's when we heard one of the football players behind us hiss, "Get thee behind me, Satan."

At first I thought he was complaining because I was blocking his view, and I was almost set to apologize. Before I could, though, Grinch?the big, black Mark of the Beast bleeding across his forehead?snapped around in his chair, bared his teeth, glowered at the kid who was three times his size and growled.

The kid never said another word.

I figured he was just waiting, just biding his time. I knew there would be a crew following us out, or waiting for us once we got outside. They'd wait until the God man was finished talking before they stomped us into the ground.

When the two-hour show was finally over, we stayed in our seats just to get a sense of what we'd be up against. Everybody else gathered their things together and left. When the rest of the auditorium was empty, we shrugged. I slipped Bullwinkle back into my pocket (no telling when I'd need him again), and we headed for the door, expecting the worst, but ready for it.

Outside, though, it was clear nobody was waiting. We weren't going to be assaulted by a group of young men with unusually large necks. Nobody even tried to convince us of the folly of our ways, and the righteousness of the one true path.

The entire evening, it occurred to us, with the exception of that one meek comment, nobody had said a word. Everybody had kept their distance. Given the crowd, maybe they were all just the superstitious type. Maybe they just figured Grinch was out of his mind (they wouldn't have been far off). The one youngster who dared say anything at all seemed pretty convinced afterward that Grinch was the devil himself.

(I won't comment on that.)

Thinking back on it now, we had been pretty mild that night. A few comments, a growl, a shadow puppet. All we'd done, really, is amuse ourselves.

No, these Young Christian Club kids weren't interested in beating us up?they just wanted to scurry off afterward to go get drunk, get stoned and blast a little Zep out their windows at 3 in the fucking morning.