1 – Making a Deal with the Devil: The Musicians Who Sold Their Souls to Satan

Wendy Lynn Staats • November 2, 2014

Across the ages, musicians have purportedly made a deal with the devil to be able to more masterfully compose and/or play their instruments. Today’s episode explores this idea, and Mike and Wendy discuss what things they consider worthy of a deal with the devil.

Mike and Wendy then dip into famous cases of making a deal with the Devil. Musicians like Giuseppe Tartini who was born in 1692, his work is still popular, particularly his work, “The Devil’s Trill”, which was said to be inspired by a dream that he had that he was the Devil’s servant. It has been covered by Itzhak Perlman and a version by Vanessa Mae has over ten million hits on YouTube.

Niccolo Paganini is probably the first great example of legendary musicians who make a pact with Lucifer. He was said to be able to do supernatural things like sight-read music incredibly. His solos were notoriously difficult to play and his effect on audiences was said to be hypnotic and supernatural, like he was possessing the crowd.

The most famous American story of making a deal with the Devil is Robert Johnson, who died of poisoning at 27 years old and wrote the immortal blues classic, “Crossroads”. The Crossroads is a place in Mississippi that blues aficionados come to visit, that it is rumored where Johnson met the devil to sign the contract for his soul. They made a movie about it in the 80s called Crossroads starring The Karate Kid himself, Ralph Macchio. Johnson also wrote other songs like “Me and The Devil” and had a superstitious and dark vein in his music.

Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin also had rumors of Satan worship. Jimmy Page is a known occultist and bought Aleister Crowley’s house in Scotland (We’ll cover Crowley extensively sometime because he figures into the lives of Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, he’s in a Top Ten UK single in the 1970’s, and he’s even on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, he was an emblem of the rock n’ roll generation and we’ll get into him when the time comes!) They coveredRobert Johnson’s “Travelin’ Riverside Blues” and their were rumors that Led Zeppelin signed a pact in their own blood.

Speak of the devil, the Church of Satan was founded by a musician. Anton LaVey was an organist that would often entertain by playing Jazz and Pop standards. Modern Satanists aren’t really occultists as much as they just use the imagery in their marketing, like Marilyn Manson’s shocking Christians in the late 90s or Mötley Crüe’s crossdressing Satanism in the early 80s (before they went with the biker look, there were pentagrams all over their albums, Shout At The Devil and Theatre of Pain ).