I'VE ALWAYS BELIEVED CENSORSHIP IS WRONG - especially when it comes music and books. When I was in my early 20s I moved in with a friend named Leslie, taking my records with me. Leslie was a Jehovah's Witness who owned several guns, including a .357 magnum. When I say I “moved in” with Leslie I mean I was crashing on his couch. I was between places (and jobs) and Leslie, who lived alone in a big house because his parents were always in Hungary or Florida or somewhere, welcomed the company. And I appreciated his generosity because it would have been hard living under a bridge with a record collection.
I didn’t own very many records back then, but as modest as my collection was it seemed to be getting even smaller while I was living at Leslie’s and I couldn’t figure out why. My copy of Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality - an original pressing - was one of the ones that went AWOL. One day I asked Lesley if he knew anything about the disappearing records and he admitted he’d been going through my collection and removing the records whose presence he believed would invite demons to move in with us and was burning them in the backyard when I wasn’t around.
"You fucking burned my records?" I said.
“I had to,” he insisted, with righteous Jehovah Witness conviction. “You can’t just throw them out. They have to be consumed by fire. That’s the only thing that will kill a demon.”
Anyway …
Me and my record collection soon parted ways with Leslie and I found another friend’s couch to crash on. I haven’t seen or spoken to Lesley in the almost 40 years since, and it took me that long to replace the copy of Master Of Reality that got sacrificed - purified? - in the flames. I have no idea what happened to Lesley or if his association with me in any way influenced him to start experiencing the joy of collecting records.
Or maybe he’s still as religious as he was back then when he believed - really, truly believed - the world as we knew it was going to end in 1984 with the triumphant return of Jesus, so much so that he bought a car he couldn’t afford because he was convinced he wouldn’t have to finish making the payments on it.
The point is this. Don't cripple your kids with censorship. Or religion.
I'VE ALWAYS BELIEVED CENSORSHIP IS WRONG - especially when it comes music and books. When I was in my early 20s I moved in with a friend named Leslie, taking my records with me. Leslie was a Jehovah's Witness who owned several guns, including a .357 magnum. When I say I “moved in” with Leslie I mean I was crashing on his couch. I was between places (and jobs) and Leslie, who lived alone in a big house because his parents were always in Hungary or Florida or somewhere, welcomed the company. And I appreciated his generosity because it would have been hard living under a bridge with a record collection.
I didn’t own very many records back then, but as modest as my collection was it seemed to be getting even smaller while I was living at Leslie’s and I couldn’t figure out why. My copy of Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality - an original pressing - was one of the ones that went AWOL. One day I asked Lesley if he knew anything about the disappearing records and he admitted he’d been going through my collection and removing the records whose presence he believed would invite demons to move in with us and was burning them in the backyard when I wasn’t around.
"You fucking burned my records?" I said.
“I had to,” he insisted, with righteous Jehovah Witness conviction. “You can’t just throw them out. They have to be consumed by fire. That’s the only thing that will kill a demon.”
Anyway …
Me and my record collection soon parted ways with Leslie and I found another friend’s couch to crash on. I haven’t seen or spoken to Lesley in the almost 40 years since, and it took me that long to replace the copy of Master Of Reality that got sacrificed - purified? - in the flames. I have no idea what happened to Lesley or if his association with me in any way influenced him to start experiencing the joy of collecting records.
Or maybe he’s still as religious as he was back then when he believed - really, truly believed - the world as we knew it was going to end in 1984 with the triumphant return of Jesus, so much so that he bought a car he couldn’t afford because he was convinced he wouldn’t have to finish making the payments on it.
The point is this. Don't cripple your kids with censorship. Or religion.
In late July and August, 1966, the Beatles found themselves in a uncomfortable pickle. The teen magazine, Datebook, published segments of an interview with John Lennon in which he predicted Christianity would disappear and that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
This didn't go over well in the bible belt American South. On Sunday, July 31, a disc jockey in Birmingham, Alabama, kicked off a drive to ban The Beatles from the airways, saying his radio station would no longer play records by the group
By early August, a bunch of religious nutjobs started hoisting Ban The Beatles signs everywhere and even established pickup points where so-called Beatles Trash (including records, photos and other memorabilia that would have been worth a lot of money today) could be dropped off to be set aflame or otherwise destroyed.
The Daily Gleaner, of Birmingham, published the following notice: "Hundreds of Beatles records are to be pulverized in a giant municipal tree-grinding machine here because of what Beatle John Lennon said about Christ, a disc jockey revealed today. After going through the Beatle-grinder borrowed from Birmingham City Council, all that will be left of the records will be fine dust. A box full of the dust will be presented to the British pop stars when they arrive in Memphis, Tennessee, not far from here, for a concert August 19, said local disc jockey Rex Roach."
Lennon was forced to apologize, which he did at a Beatles press conference during the band's final tour in August. But I don't think he really meant it.
