10 Weird Backwards Messages In Rock Songs

Ever since the dawn of backmasking, people have been itching to mess with their audience by putting in little bits and pieces in reverse. If anything, the whole practice of backwards music at the dawn of the '60s took off just for how disorienting everything was, since it sounded like someone speaking to you in an otherworldly dialect. If you asked the people who started it, the Beatles actually stumbled upon the backmasking trick almost by accident.

When the band were cutting the single Rain, they had already decided to go down the psychedelic rabbit hole, until John Lennon came back home with one of his cassettes. Having been getting stoned for the past few hours prior to getting home, Lennon accidentally put the reel to his cassette on backwards when he listened back to the take, which made him absolutely ecstatic.

Originally, the idea was for the band to play the entire song in reverse, until they realized that doing so would take too long to actually make happen. What you're hearing on the final recording is the coda where you can hear everyone singing the chorus in reverse. This would actually turn out to be the first of many backwards techniques that the Beatles used, eventually using tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows and going so far as to record a guitar solo backwards for the song I'm Only Sleeping. If it wasn't clear by now, the Fabs were a much different band than the mop tops we got used to. The next few years were going to be different, and this was a sign for fans to buckle up.