The Dreamer Deceiver: A True Story about the Trial of Judas Priest for Deadly Subliminal Messaging (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Ivan Solotaroff

In the summer of 1990, the heavy metal band Judas Priest stood trial in Nevada for hiding subliminal messages in its music that allegedly led to the deaths of two teenagers.

Including an interview with the author by imprint editor Alex Belth.

About The Stacks Reader Series
The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Curated by Alex Belth and brought to you by The Sager Group, with support from NeoText (www.NeoTextCorp.com).

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Feb 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781950154814

Ivan Solotaroff

Ivan Solotaroff wrote magazine features for three-plus decades until the internet largely superannuated the job description. A Senior Writer at several publications, he feels his best writing was for the Village Voice, though unfortunately at a rate one couldn't live on. He's the author of two books as well, No Success Like Failure, a collection of articles, and The Last Face You'll Ever See, on contemporary American executioners.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

"Well, the thing about writing a story is that there has to be a story. Dark stories, I found, are among the easiest to write well, as the choices you have to make tend toward that famously right direction of showing, not telling. A trick I learned from In Cold Blood, and it played out differently with each story, was to delay, downplay, overly foreshadow, or in some other way undercut the big reveal: the crime, tragedy, or whatever made the story dark. It forces the reader to put him or herself into play—his or her imagination, empathy, discernment, whatever."

Most of us pass an accident on the highway and we just can’t help but look, but then we keep driving and forget it as soon as we can. Ivan Solotaroff is the kind to linger, then go back and face the cold brutality head-on. Violence and madness do not repel him, they engage him—as does intelligence—which is clear in his riveting magazine portraits of Charles Manson, Bobby Fischer, and the deeply troubled, deeply funny street comedian Charlie Barnett. It’s also on display in The Dreamer Deceiver, an unflinching account of the bizarre 1990 trial of heavy metal band Judas Priest, which was accused of putting subliminal lyrics in its music that led to the death of two teenage boys. The whole affair became a media circus, and Solotaroff brings the requisite gonzo edge—as well as a needed dose of sympathy and compassion. Call it what it is—a tour de force of reporting in thirteen thousand words on a two-week deadline.

After the Judas Priest trial story appeared in the Village Voice, Solotaroff was a sought-after writer. Like Mark Jacobson before him, he wrote about Black culture for primarily white publications, including insightful profiles of James Brown, and city basketball legends such as Earl Manigault and Lloyd Daniels—Solotaroff himself played a ton of hoops as a kid on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just a few years after poet Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries described a similar white kid talent.

In the nineties, Solotaroff wrote about the dark underbelly of the civilized world in nuanced, disturbing meditations on cult figures such as David Koresh and Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. He also weighed in on the murder of Tupac Shakur and delivered a bizarre romp for Esquire about the con man to beat all con men in America’s Greatest Living Criminal Genius Sends His Regards.

Solotaroff, a child of the New York literary world, could also handle himself adroitly with more standard magazine assignments. He is a genius of sorts, Solotaroff writes of Alec Baldwin in a whip-smart 1994 portrait of the actor, not so much of IQ points as of instinct; he has an ability to assimilate the moment in all its complexity and throw it back at you, times two . . . It’s an actor’s gift, to be sure, but offstage it comes through with equal power. He’s one of those people with whom you feel you are where you should be, regardless of where that is.

Even in a celebrity profile, Solotaroff’s keen powers of observation and sly intelligence are on display; Baldwin has the deep intelligence and unrelenting fury that haunts many of Solotaroff’s subjects—the darkness visible in American life. Solotaroff, according to writer Luc Sante, is able to get at the spectacle of American ambition, as it exists today, at its most wistful, ludicrous, and tragic. All of those qualities are on full display in The Dreamer Deceiver—a picture of the garish American catastrophe without tears.

—Alex Belth

Alex Belth: You come from a literary family. Your father, Ted, was a writer and editor and part of the established literary and publishing scene in New York in the sixties and seventies. What was your mother’s connection to that world?

Ivan Solotaroff: My father met Philip Roth in grad school in Chicago, and wrote about him in the Times Literary Supplement. It got Commentary to offer him a job, which brought us to NYC in 1960, and began a literary career of half a century. My mother spent years merely translating, but of seven Solotaroff published writers, her translation of a novella by Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, (considered to be one of the masterpieces of his late fiction) is the only one ever to earn royalties. So much so, the publisher contacted me and my brother twenty-five years after she passed on and sent us checks for twenty-five thousand or so in unpaid royalties. We still split a thousand or so every year.

AB: Did you always imagine you would be a writer?

IS: My rebellion was to not become a writer, which I made good on for ten years as a chess-bum/poet. I began in self-defense after falling into crisis at thirty-one, with my first pieces about chess players. I never read magazines and made it up as I went along: When my father told me that he and some colleagues felt an early piece of mine was borderline New Journalism, I’d never heard of it. He said, Y’know, like Gay Talese. I’d never heard of him.

AB: Did your dad encourage you to write?

IS: On his deathbed my father told me, through gritted teeth, that I was the best of us. It was just easier for me. I never wanted