I am Satan, walk with me.

Recently, I watched a highly over-rated movie, Mario Bava's "Black Sabbath" (1963), and it got me thinking. Not about totally unthrilling Italian thrillers but about the band Black Sabbath and its wild and always drunk frontman Ozzy Osbourne. The first band I saw perform in concert (though without Ozzy on vocals).

Did you know Ozzy Osbourne could be Satan incarnate? Has his public persona the past ten years convinced you otherwise? Don't be fooled. Ozzy is still very likely Satan.

Why do I think so?

Let's go back nearly twenty years, to a dreary, rainy night in the fall of 1991. I was in the 7th grade. My older brother and I were doing our homework, listening to a cassette tape of Sabbath's greatest hits album "We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'N' Roll" on our cheap stereo. Great homework music. Suddenly, a volley of thunder and lightning from outside and the cassette player made a whirring, crunchy noise. The cassette stopped. No more "N.I.B."...Silence. I pressed eject to find a mess of tape. "We Sold Our Soul" had been eaten alive.

After some careful manuevering, I reeled the tape back into place, put it in the player and pressed play. The music was now backwards, a backwards "Black Sabbath", the song directly on the other side of the cassette from "N.I.B." Slightly intrigued, we listened, and then, just a few seconds in, we listened to Ozzy backwards-sing "I am Satan, walk with me." My brother and I looked at each other. I rewound the tape and we listened again. Same thing, right there in the slow, beginning verse of the song. Scared and slightly shaking, we listened to it a few more times. Ozzy seemed to be speaking to us. "Hey," he said, "it's rainy and cold outside but come on out and take a walk with me. I am Satan. Stop pretending to do your homework, bring some beer if you can find some, and walk with me." We played the rest of the song but found nothing, only "I am Satan, walk with me." I put the tape in my backpack.

I didn't feel like taking a walk with Satan or Ozzy. Neither did my brother.

The next day I took my walkman and some headphones to school and showed off my discovery to anyone who cared to listen. Many did. Many were never quite the same again.

Try it yourself. These days you don't even have to have a tape to manually fold over to hear everything backwards (btw, I methodically folded over and checked the rest of "We Sold Our Soul" and found zilch. Though I must say Tony Iommi's guitar work did sound pretty awesome).

Try it. I dare you.

(note: I originally finished writing this, clicked "Publish Post", and found my entry to be mysteriously missing. I closed Internet Explorer, reopened it, went back and nothing had been saved...no drafts, no traces. Coincidence? Hmm. So I wrote it all over again, remembering very little of what I'd originally written. Fuck you, Ozzy.)