, after which he hung himself, followed Black Sabbath and Judas Priest (p.130). After some shorter additional testimonies, the Committee was adjourned after five hours of debate. 3. After the Hearings: Quiet Before the Storm Following the Hearing, on November 1 of 1985, the PMRC, and its ally the National Parents and Teachers Association, reached an agreement with the RIAA on the voluntary record label (Joint News Release, November 1, 1985; Coletti 1987:424; see Goodchild 1986:164-165; Gray 1989a:154-155; Kaufman 1986:233-237; Roldan 1987:240-242). The agreement stipulated that the printing of lyrics remained optional and, because of space limitations, cassettes were exempted, bearing only the imprint "see LP for lyrics". Since then, different record companies designed their own label containing the words "Parental Guidance - Explicit Lyrics" or some variation thereof. Frank Zappa designed his own label and first put it on his album "Frnk Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention", an allusion to the name of his former band The Mothers of Invention and his recent confrontations with the "Washington Wives". After the agreement, the PMRC, generally applauding the cooperation of the RIAA, agreed to attack only those products that did not comply to the RIAAs voluntary label. All three organizations decided to monitor and evaluate the policy for one year. On December 10, 1986, the PMRC held a press conference and denounced the RIAA for failing to comply with the joint agreement. The PMRC, by that time claiming to rely on 100,000 supporters, again sent letters of complaint to different record companies, stating that the labels were too small and that it would increase its efforts to control the release of records with explicit lyrics (Goodchild 1986:165). The activities of the PMRC and the record industrys response on the issue since then are not very clear. Some, usually smaller, companies have continued to refuse putting labels on records, and ...
