Who, in God s name, would have thought that Pat Boone would end up being one of the most controversial pop singers in the United States in 1997? That s 35 years after his last hit, Speedy Gonzales . And forty years after one of rock n roll s founding fathers, DJ Alan Freed, refused to play Boone s vanilla cover versions of rock and doo-wop tunes on his legendary New York radio show, claiming such recordings were cancelling out the chance of air-time for the original, mostly black, artists.
Because he has been widely perceived as the unacceptable face of rock n roll , Pat Boone has effectively been written out of rock history this despite the fact that he recorded 60 hit singles between 1955-59 and, as of 1990, he had more charted singles than the Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John.
But now Pat Boone is back in the news as a result of what he himself undoubtedly regards as his first true rock album, since Pat in 1957.
Back then the tracks that filled this sanitised-but-still-credible-white-boy stab at rock n roll were mostly R n B classics like Flip, Flop and Fly, Pledging My Love . Money Honey , Tomorrow Night and Honey Hush. On his latest album, Pat Boone In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy he s graduated to heavy metal standards such as Smoke On The Water , Panama , Enter Sandman , The Wind Cries Mary and Stairway to Heaven .
Yeah, you read that right. Pat Boone sings Hendrix. And Led Zeppelin. And it is the mere fact that Boone has dared to stray anywhere near the sinful if not Satanic site of heavy metal music which has set the fires of controversy flaming in his homeland of America. Indeed, Boone s appearance at a Music Awards show, earlier this year, where he arrived dressed in leather, pierced, ear-ringed and wearing (fake) tattoos opened the floodgate to so many complaints that his television series has been dropped from at least two major Christian networks.
On the plus side, No More Mr. Nice Guy is Pat Boone s first chart entry since the early 1960 s and has, apparently, been selling to a predominately hip audience. Making the story even more surreal, the sixty two year old singer will soon be setting out on an alternative tour of American colleges where, again, apparently, his album has become required listening. Though it is debatable whether this is simply as the height of ridicule or a shot in the arm for a disappearing musical genre. Or because the album is what another critic described as an instant, postmodern kitsch classic .
But before we talk about what is bound to turn out to be one of the weirdest comebacks of 1997, let s don our white bucks and step back to the days of the birth of rock n roll, with one of its pioneers, Pat Boone, who rarely, if ever, has been asked to give an in-depth interview, until approached by Hot Press.
In the sleeve notes of his 1957 album, Pat, Boone wrote: I believe rock and roll has taken its place beside jazz, Dixieland and plain old low-down blues as an important original form of American music. So how would Pat respond if we kick off by saying that most of his critics could probably reply to this quote by snarling, it sure has despite a chicken-livered, cultural colonialist like Boone!
This charge of cultural colonialism, or whatever, is revisionist history because people who actually lived through the era, like I did, know that rhythm n blues, at the time, was in another universe, removed from pop music, Pat Boone replies. Then this thing which we were starting, called rock n roll, came along and it was, basically, R n B, with mainly but not all white artists doing cover versions of rhythm n blues songs and introducing them to a vast audience who didn t know anything about R n B. An audience which was not going to hear the original records because the music was too raw, too alien, too strange for white radio. Now, some people say that this whole exclusion of R n B from mainstream radio was racist but I don t think it was. I think that before we came along, with those vanilla versions of these songs, there was this general feeling that the original music was just too much for white audiences. And you ve got to remember that it was only around the time I started recording, that anyone really began to notice that white people were even interested in what they used to call race music . That s exactly what happened in relation to Randy Wood, the founder of Dot Records and myself. It was Randy who introduced me to things like Two Hearts, Two Kisses , at the start of it all.
But is this charge of cultural colonialism really just revisionist? After all, Alan Freed did refuse to play your records.
In the late fifties, yes, but not at the beginning, counters Boone. Because I very well remember the day I was driving in my car, in Manhattan, and I heard Alan Freed playing my record of Ain t That A Shame and the kids in the car next to me were jumping up and down singing along at the top of their voices! And I wanted to say, hey, that s me! because this was the first real high I ever got in the music business the realisation that Alan Freed was actually playing my record! And when he made that decision, later, not to play me, it didn t really hurt because he was one of the leaders of that unilateral decision to insist that the original recordings should be played, which I understood. But that was a couple of years after the cover versions originally became hits and it wasn t just Pat Boone s records they stopped playing. It was also records by Elvis, Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers, a lot of artists.
True. Yet let s hop back a beat here. When Pat says that rhythm n blues, in its original form, was too raw, alien and strange for white sensibilities does he mean this also includes himself. After all, it has been claimed that he didn t even realise that R n B, and later rock, was rooted in the language of the streets, that he pointed out to Randy Wood that the phrase Ain t That A Shame was grammatically incorrect and asked, couldn t I sing, instead, Isn t That A Shame ! He has also admitted that when Wood first played the Charms original version of Two Hearts, Two Kisses over the phone, it struck him as being so fast that he thought the gramophone was running at the wrong speed! Worst of all, when our Pat was supposed to sing that seminal clarion call of rock n roll, awopbopaloobopalopbamboom, in Little Richard s Tutti Frutti he got it wrong, singing, awopbopaloobopalopbopbop. At least until the final line of the song, which definitely is not how it is sung by his close friend, the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis. So, come clean, Mr Boone, when it comes to the all-important question of tuning into the essence or rock n roll could anything be more ungrammatical or stupid than this?
I don t think I got that wrong, did I? asks Boone, incredulously. I do say bamboom on the last time round because, if you listen to Little Richard s version, he changed it at the end. So, whatever about Elvis version, I did it like Little Richard had originally written it. As in, Bamboom at the end! And, anyway, a lot of people at the time thought what he and I were singing at the end of the song was patboone ! And the reason I wanted to change Ain t That A shame was simply because I was majoring in speech and English at Columbia university at the time and was afraid that the original title might upset my tutors! But, sure, I did think Two Hearts, Two Kisses was too fast and, yes definitely, that music was alien to me when I first heard it. It was totally out of my kin, out of my awareness of music. But what I actually did, in the beginning, was lock myself in a hotel room in Chicago with the original version of Two Hearts, Two Kisses and listen to it over and over again until I felt comfortable with it, felt I could get it right. Same with Ain t That A Shame . In other words, it was a learning experience for me, on a musical and cultural level. In fact, in every way.
Fair enough. But did Pat also listen to Sinatra s version of Two Hearts, Two Kisses which he, too, recorded around the same time in an attempt to break into the burgeoning market for rock n roll?
Yes, but his version came out just after mine Boone responds. In fact, I remember very well that we were in that studio in Chicago and made that record when I was barely twenty years old. And we came out thinking, hey, we just may have a hit . But, to my dismay, we discovered that Sinatra had done it, Doris Day did, the Ames Brothers, a group called the Lancers and about two or three other established artists. They d all jumped on that song! Whereas here I am, a total unknown! And the only reason I had the top ten hit with that song was because Randy Wood sent me to twenty major cities in eighteen days, doing promo, going into radio stations, television stations and major department stores talking to record buyers and so on. He went to about twenty other cities and in those eighteen days we covered the country. Of course, Frank Sinatra and Doris Day weren t going to do that. So I wound up with the hit.
But surely another factor in all this is that Boone was as fresh as a case of adolescent acne, barely out of his teens, whereas singers like Sinatra and Day were nearer forty than thirty and could hardly be seen, by newly-defined teenagers, as champions of any form of new music like rock n roll.
That is totally true Joe and here s something else. When I did that promotion tour, trying to get people to play my version of Two Hearts . . . rather than the other versions, a lot of the DJ s, or programme directors, thought that the promotions man was trying to pull one over on them! Especially when he would introduce me as Pat Boone! Because they were sure that Pat Boone was black! Now, I know that may sound odd to a lot of people but the same thing happened in relation to Elvis and later, people like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, even Tom Jones. But the thing is that Elvis, Tom, the Beatles, all of us, started out covering R n B, not just me.
Nonetheless, Pat Boone is the one pop singer who gets the most flak for this fact, as in being quite unceremoniously written out of rock histories.
Right, but I really do believe that has more to do with my lifestyle, he responds. There is a general aversion to even the notion that somebody like Pat Boone could sing rock n roll and be taken seriously. But then it was the same back in the 50 s, probably because I was a young married guy, studying at university, raising a few kids and telling everyone that my basic background, and education had that Christian base.
As such, how could Pat Boone even begin to set the needle of his 78 RPM gramophone machine on records like Little Richard s Long Tall Sally which, apparently, was about a gender-bending queen ? Or Tutti Frutti which it s said is about gay sex? Okay, our Pat (rick) sang Tutti frutti, aw rooti but did he know that the original lyric was Tutti Frutti, good booty and that booty is the word blacks preferred in place of ass ? Furthermore, is Patrick Boone aware that the lyric was also originally, Good booty, if it don t fit/Don t squeeze it? which is positively filthy, right?
No, I didn t know those things Boone laughs, loudly, on hearing the question. I was naive, uniformed in relation to both of those songs. And those terms! But I did, nevertheless, change a few phrases in Tutti Frutti
As in, not letting pretty little Suzie do things to him?
Right! he says. So, yeah, I changed boy you don t know what she do to me to pretty little Suzie is the girl for me because those original lines felt a little racy, raunchy to me. And, of course, the kids didn t care, which proved my point; that they weren t listening as much to the lyrics as they were to the feel of the music.
But knowing, now, that Tutti Frutti is about gay sex, can Pat Boone still sing the song, in concert?
Yeah, because to me, those songs are not about those things. Not in my intention, or to my knowledge. And I don t think that anybody today, other than a few inside industry people, have any idea that maybe that s what these songs were about. I m not even sure that they were, though I have heard that they are. The same applies to a song like Stairway to Heaven . A lot of people believe that because Jimmy Page declared himself to be a warlock, that Stairway to Heaven must be about witchcraft. I went over that lyric myself, syllable-by-syllable and found nothing that even hinted it could remotely be about that. Except some folks standing light in the woods which could, possibly, be stretched to indicate some kind of coven meeting in the woods. But it doesn t say that. So, for me, Stairway to Heaven is just beautiful poetry; a haunting and lilting song. And I do it as a very respectful jazz waltz.
A Led Zeppelin song seen as a respectful jazz waltz sung by Pat Boone? Robert Plant, eat your heart out. Jimmy Page, go back to that coven of witches in the woods and ask them what went wrong ? But more of this later; for the moment, let s stick with the 50s. Doesn t the desexualising of the ever-insatiable Suzie in Tutti Frutti feed right into the suggestion that, by cutting the sex out of rock n roll, Patrick Boone was neutralising the beast to a ridiculous and unnatural degree? Indeed, wasn t Boone s public persona almost totally asexual, which surely is a derogation of early rock? What people tend to forget is that rock n roll wasn t just about sex, it was about a whole range of feelings we all were having at the time, he counters. And I ll tell you, I certainly didn t consider myself to be asexual back then! Because I was having more kids than any rock n roll star at the time! In fact, I was more sexually active than anybody knew! When I graduated from Columbia, at 23, I already had four children and a lot of people thought that was my major, that having kids was what I was getting my degree for! And not only that, but what I was getting straight A s for! But although I obviously was just as sexually alive as anybody, I really did come from a very strict Church background and my conscience was very highly developed, so I really didn t want to project that sexuality through the music.
Does Pat Boone ever regret the fact that he downplayed this aspect?
Professionally, I regret the fact that I became so stereotyped. Though, I don t know what I might have done differently, apart from maybe manage a few more Elvis growls in a few of the songs!, he jokes. But I really wasn t consciously trying to project any particular image in those days. A lot of it was just intuitive, me trying my best to be true to who I am. Apart from sexually, perhaps.
What about the legendary claim that Pat Boone refused, on religious grounds to place his lips against the ruby-red lips of Shirley Jones in the movie State Fair? Indeed, Tom Doherty, in his book, Teenagers and Teenpics, claims that Boone presented his handlers with one maddening problem by refusing to kiss a woman on screen and that the scripts of Bernardine and April Love had to manoeuvre their way around the roadblock presented by Boone s eccentricity, making for a strange hollowness in both films.
That s what makes me upset, because these people are assuming all this stuff, Pat muses. Bernardine, for example, was based on a Broadway play and I didn t change one word. I did it the way it was written. I didn t know enough to change one word. But where this whole story started was that, although there was no kiss in the script of April Love, when it came to the actual scene, at the end of a musical number on a Ferris wheel, the director Henry Levins, said, Pat, when the scene ends, lean over and kiss Shirley. And I took him to one side and said, Henry, this is not in the script. I haven t even discussed doing kissing scenes with my wife. And, you know, I m still a very young kid, 21, whatever. Can we do this tomorrow so I can at least alert her to the fact that tomorrow I may spend part of the day kissing our friend Shirley Jones? I wasn t saying I won t do it , but I just felt, naively, perhaps, that as a young husband and father of kids, I needed to at least let my wife know about this. So I talked to my wife and, ironically, the analogy she gave me was, don t think too much about it, but imagine how you would feel if I spent the afternoon kissing Rock Hudson? (laughs) Rock Hudson was her screen idol and I understood why, because I never believed the rumours about him.
So, anyway, the next day I came into the studio, all Listerined, ready to kiss Shirley Jones, with my wife s permission! Instead I was ushered into the office of Buddy Adler, who was the President of Twentieth Century Fox, and he was livid because somehow, overnight, the word got out that I had supposedly refused to kiss Shirley, as you said, on religious grounds . The story was in the trade papers that morning, in headlines. Then it went right around the world. But the whole thing was a fabrication. Yet, when I saw that I was supposed to have refused for religious reasons, I said to Buddy, I now don t see how I can do the kissing scene because if I do it will look like I ve relinquished a religious principle over-night, even though the story is untrue . He said, I ve already released another story, saying that after consultation with the director of the film you ve changed your mind and will kiss Shirley . I said, I can t do that .
And I asked could I explain things to the Press, and did, but the true story never did make it into the history books. And I ve been stuck with that ever since, even though I kissed a number of leading ladies in other films, including Ann Margret and Debbie Reynolds. I later did a number of love scenes but they just weren t the kind to set the screen afire, I guess!
More shamefully than this, in Journey To The Centre of the Earth, Pat Boone did a nude scene!
With a dog! he recalls, laughing. But no one ever writes about that! Yet by that stage I was obviously so harmless that I could do a nude scene and it went unnoticed!
Pat Boone did, however, refuse to appear with Marilyn Monroe in a movie, apparently because there was no moral retribution for the main character in the film.
Yes I did refuse to do that movie with Marilyn Monroe, he confirms. It was based on a William Inge play and eventually made, as Celebration, I think, with Joanne Woodward and Richard Beamer. 20th had wanted me to play with Marilyn and, of course, I d have loved to act with Marilyn Monroe, but when I read the script it was really the forerunner of Summer of 42, in which a teenage kid has a bittersweet adulterous affair with an older woman. But the script just suggested that this kid would get over it and she ll go back to her life as an over-the-hill dancer, and nobody was hurt. But I feel that people are hurt in those situations, so I didn t do the film. And when I told Buddy Adler why I couldn t he just said, Oh, you re living in the Middle Ages .
The element of redemption was always what I d look for in a script. I d play Judas in the story of Christ because there is a moral to that tale. But I didn t want to be part of a movie that has people do the wrong thing and nobody gets hurt. That, to me, was sending out the wrong message. I know that taking that position has limited my career, because such an attitude has been out of fashion since, at least, the 1960 s. But, as I said to you earlier, I have to be true to who I am. When I look back on my life I want to feel that my whole career did more good than harm. And even though I made plenty of mistakes, overall, I did try to make the fallout from my career a healthy one. Because I know that if someone has stardom there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions who will imitate you and that this is a huge responsibility. I couldn t possibly live with the idea that my career had been a negative influence on millions of young people. And I m willing to pay the price for, hopefully, at least trying to lean in the other direction. At least as much as I could.
This brings us back to Elvis, who also tried to be a positive influence throughout his career, never revealing, for example, the fact that he became a drug addict in his later years. Pat often refers to Elvis as his buddy , but if he was Presley s friend, long-time, or otherwise, why didn t he try to help save the man s life at the end? Particularly, as a Christian, if he knew what was happening to the King in relation to drugs?
I didn t know what was happening to Elvis, Boone responds. But I did know him from the beginning right up to the end. And we often joked about how similar we were, two boys from Tennessee, lower middle-income families, basic Christian upbringing. As you probably know, he supported me in one of my shows back around 1955 and, as I ve said so often, I really was taken aback by how shy he was. I wished him well before the show, and he just stood there, looking down at his shoes, mumbling in a way that made no sense to me at all, so I just left it at that. And I thought this guy is so shy he can t even be a performer, much less a star . But then when I saw him on stage I saw a totally different person altogether, a real dynamic guy.
Later, when we met again, I asked him why he was so shy at that first meeting and he said you were a star! I said, A star? I had two hit records! And he said, yeah, but you were on the charts and I wasn t, so I didn t know how to talk to you! But he got over that pretty quick. And we did stay in touch over the years. He d come to my house in Bel Air, drive up in his Rolls, with the sunglasses, his collar turned up, all that. And my daughters would jump up out of the pool, shouting, daddy, it s Elvis and they d get him drenching wet. I d say, girls, stop that and he d say, no, I love this! and I could tell he wanted a family.
Pat Boone s voice grows noticeably more emotional as he talks about Elvis.
The last time I saw him was in Memphis Airport and he said, where are you going? and I said Orlando. He said, Orlando, that s the wrong way, man and looked at his band and said but then, you were always headed the wrong way! I said, depends on where you re coming from. This was about a month before he died and I ve played that meeting over and over again: you re headed the wrong way , well, it depends on where you re coming from. And I wish to God I d said, hey, Elvis, let s talk, how are things between you and Jesus right now? But how was I to know? How were any of us to know he was just a month away from dying? But when I saw him that time he did have a paunch bigger than I ever saw on him and I hit him and said what s this? You keeping your money in there? He said, I been eating too good ; dismissed it that way.
But he had this white, chalky stuff around his lips. I thought that was Malox, because although he had a plane of his own he still was afraid to fly. Already that day, he d let two planes go without him. But he had to catch this one because he was opening the next night in Vegas. So all I really noticed was the paunch although I had heard rumours about him pulling into places like McDonalds, and, apparently, being high on something. But even if I did hear these things about him being involved with recreational drugs, I was very unaware of the extent of the whole thing until that story broke after he died. As a lot of us were. When I saw him, I just thought he d let himself go and he said I ll sweat this off in Vegas which I think he tried to do. I really didn t think anymore about it, until it was too late.
Does Pat Boone agree with Ricky Skaggs, who once suggested that Elvis was a failed human being because he ignored the call of the Lord ?
That s way too severe, he responds. I wouldn t go that far at all because, interestingly, even in terms of the Grammies he won in his lifetime, Elvis got only three and they were all for his gospel stuff. And, today, though a lot of his other stuff gets played a lot, those are the songs I consider to be the most moving. I also now believe they are more genuine than I used to think they were. Tony Brown, who is a big producer in Nashville now, told me that when he played piano for Elvis they d sing until dawn and those sessions would be almost exclusively gospel. That was his Church. He had this craving for gospel music. And one time when I was with him in his dressing room, in Las Vegas, he said he wanted to talk to me privately. Then he said, look, you know Oral Roberts (evangelist, born in Oklahoma in 1918), I d like to talk to him, you know him. Could you get word to him, say I d like to have a private chat with him? I said, look, your name is Elvis Presley, you can just get on the phone and they ll put you straight through! He said, no, I wouldn t feel right about that. You know him, I don t. So I did call Oral and, soon after that, he flew out to Lake Tahoe and spent almost a whole day with Elvis. So, in the end, I knew Elvis had this craving for contact, spiritual enrichment, identity. But, in the beginning the singing of the hymns clashed so much with his lifestyle that I just couldn t believe them. Particularly when he was single.
Boone pauses.
I remember going to his house in Bel Air once and saw what it was like for a woman to have a date with Elvis. It involved his sending one of his guys to some actress s house to bring her over. He didn t go get her himself, bring her flowers, romance her, any of that. It was simply that his guy would pick her up in the limo, bring her over and what she d find was like a stag party. At least that s what was going on the night I was there. Then she comes in, Elvis says hello and after a while he and she would disappear to another part of the house. After a while they d come out and have something to eat and he d have one of the guys take her home. That was her date with Elvis. So I really thought that, given this context, singing something like Peace In The Valley or Just A Closer Walk With Thee was not quite credible.
But does Pat Boone expect us to believe that he himself is sincere when he sings gospel songs, given the fact that he has admitted he broke the holy vows of marriage at least eight times?
I would hope so, because this is humanity. Even the apostle Peter, who travelled with Jesus Christ for three solid years, denied him with oaths and curses when Christ died. And on his resurrection He told the women, go tell Peter that I am back though he had already told Peter that he would not be strong enough to resist his own weakness. We all live in that battleground. And even though I was very conscientious at the beginning of my career, sometimes to a ludicrous degree, when it came to, say, changing lyrics that were, let s face it, relatively harmless, into something even more innocuous I still think that God honoured my conscience. He knew I was really trying to live a good life not only for my wife and kids but in relation to my fans. As I said earlier, I really was more conscious than any other entertainer about the influence I might have on kids. To me, that was a sacred trust. I wanted to set a good example.
I know that was totally out of step with how most entertainers felt then, feel now. Not only do most feel they have no obligation to set a good example, they believe it is much more profitable, commercially, to be the bad guy, break rules, see how much they can get away with. They think that makes them bigger stars. But these entertainers seem not have any sense of the negative fallout this can have on their fans. Look at the Rolling Stones. When they got so into drugs that they were at the brink of death what they did was went to Switzerland and had their blood changed and went through costly treatment to save their lives. Well, young people in the ghettos in Harlem can t afford to do that. Kids in the hallways of schools, who got into the whole drug culture, not just because of the Rolling Stones, but because that is a dominant ethos in rock, are now dead. And many of the entertainers are dead. Many metal artists are gone, like Hendrix.
One wonders if Pat Boone ever took drugs or drink to excess? It has been suggested that, apart from his infidelities, one reason his marriage to Shirley (daughter of country singer Red Foley) nearly became a Hollywood statistic is because, at one point, he did begin to lead a Hollywood lifestyle .
That is what happened but I never got into drugs, though there was some drinking, he conedes. But I ve never been drunk in my life! I did get woozy once doing a movie scene! Because I was doing a scene in which, as a spoiled kid, I was infatuated with Debbie Reynolds. She was playing a playboy who, as some kind of divine retribution for his sins, died and came back in the body of a woman! It was called Goodbye Charlie and I was the young kid who takes Debbie down to the wine cellar in his mother s mansion, proposes marriage and gives her champagne. In all the rehearsals Mr. Minelli had me open a fresh bottle of champagne and I got comfortably sloshed! And that was the only time I was ever really more than one sheet in the wind. I drank enough and enjoyed having a drink, but when I said I got into the Hollywood lifestyle I meant that I was having affairs and dalliances and that kind of stuff. But I never got into drugs, never wanted to alter my consciousness in that way.
Pat Boone has claimed that the reason he was unfaithful to his wife was that when she wasn t warming to him sexually he considered it a form of rejection, which led him to seek solace in beds of other women. (In fact, Shirley was suffering from a cyst). Many would see this as possibly the single weakest, most transparent and outrageous excuse for infidelity.
I accept that, but this was literally true and it went on for several months, he responds. And even before that, having had four kids so fast, and losing two, through miscarriages, I understood, to a degree, why the whole exercise had lost some of its appeal to Shirley. Because it meant not only pain, but probably having another child, whereas we already had more kids than we could manage. And I know that sex, to certain women, loses a lot of its appeal after they ve had lots of kids, but it doesn t to the guy. Plus, of course, I was in a business where it was all very stimulating so I knew there were all kinds of people around me that found me attractive, whereas here at home, my wife didn t seem to, anymore. So when I didn t understand why the least little overture to Shirley prompted this nausea, I did turn elsewhere. I did feel okay, if I m not wanted at home, I will go somewhere else, where I am .
But at the time we had no idea that Shirley s response was physically based. We thought it was psychosomatic, the result of some form of revulsion she was feeling. And, of course, Shirley didn t want to go to a doctor because she was afraid of finding that something might be wrong. So, we were at an impasse and that tipped the scales. It is a pitiful excuse, I know, and I say it with shame. But the truth is that even the least little bit of excitation caused pain and nausea. And anyone who has had, or knows someone who suffers from cysts, will know what I m saying is true about the condition. Those who don t, on the other hand, will probably say that this is just a cop-out. I understand that, totally. And I did feel horrible after all that. But, eventually, when it almost wrecked my marriage and home as I deserved that it should I straightened up. But those are very human, fallible foibles.
Leonard Cohen once said of Pat Boone (in his novel The Favourite Game): Pat is doing all my poems for me. He s got lines to a million people. It s all I wanted to say.
I would hope that s exactly what many of my songs did, even though we all were more naive then than we are now, Boone comments. Let s not forget that the 1950s, in general, was a time of turmoil, a time when we were trying to cope with change, a very hormonal time in terms of the first stirrings of what we now see as the sexual revolution. And there was the shadow of the H bomb hanging over us; a lot of fear, pessimism. There also was the unveiling of a lot of hypocrisy, drugs were beginning to be a factor in peoples lives and in the middle of all this you had us, the adolescents of that society, caught up in the fumbling and the gropings of growing up. But there still was a hope that things could retain their innocence and I think some of the pop songs of that time captured that feeling to perfection. Certainly, a lot of my songs, like Twixt Twelve and Twenty stemmed from the dichotomy of trying to grow up, be responsible while, at the same time, yielding to the irresponsibilities of youth, inasmuch as one could. There really was, in my case, the attempt to hold onto innocence, which comes across in other songs like April Love. And an album like Hymns We Love obviously worked along these lines, on another level.
All of which begs the question how did Pat Boone get from there to here, from songs of innocence and wonder in 1957 to covers of Deep Purple and Led Zep in 1997?
The whole thing started when Dave Siebels and our band were sitting between planes, in England, around 1987 and one of the guys suggested we should record something together, Boone explains. So I said what kind of record could we do that I haven t done ten times already and what record company would want it? Dave suggested a heavy metal album and we just laughed at the absurdity of the idea, till, somehow, the whole thing just took hold of us. Dave then made me a tape of some metal classics and I found myself listening to things like Deep Purple s Smoke on the Water for the first time and to Jimi Hendrix. I finally realised there are some great songs here, this is music I ve missed out on all these years. The thing just took off from there, then MCA, who have all the old Dot recordings in their vaults, got on board. But what was really great was that there was such a buzz around the recording session that people like Richie Blackmore came along, Ronnie James Dio, Dweezil Zappa. It really was the best time I ve ever had in a studio. And that party thing has continued, with the general response to the album being great.
Even so, isn t it true that as a result of recording such songs, Pat Boone has been disowned by many of his Christian fans?
There has been a lot of panic, a knee jerk reaction, he says. But not so much to the album or the American Music Awards appearance because I don t think many of those people saw that show or heard the album moreso the news reports with guys saying things like, Pat Boone created a real sensation when he arrived in leathers, tattoos and declared, No More Mr. Nice Guy . A lot of those religious folk had no idea that No More Mr. Nice Guy is the title of an Alice Cooper hit. They thought I was making a personal declaration of a total change in my life. So that although I did this album, in a way, with humour, they see the whole thing as totally serious.
Boone reveals that what we saw on that controversial Music Awards show was only half of what we were supposed to see. Clearly picking up on Alice Cooper s one line joke: Come Halloween, I dress up as Pat Boone and scare all my friends the show s producer, Dick Clark, apparently suggested that, yeah, you guessed it, Alice come out as Boone and Boone come out as Alice Cooper.
But Alice backed out at the last minute, says Boone. Yet I still took great delight in shocking Dick Clark because he really thought, at the end of the day, that I d come around the corner in a tuxedo! He was more surprised than anybody! But I had no idea that people across the nation, or around the world, would see all this as a total change in my whole persona or approach to music. But Dick did ask me on to present that Rock/Metal Award because he believed that the album was going to be a hit, particularly with young people, and he was right! I really thought I was doing it more for the parents who had missed out on these songs, for whatever reasons, but it s the college kids who have taken to this album.
Whether it s heavy metal or, as some critics say, rusty metal, in cuts such as Love Hurts and even Enter Sandman , Pat Boone is still passing on the kind of moral advice he once stitched in texts such as Twixt Twelve and Twenty both the single and the book of the same name, which he published in the late 1950s. Enter Sandman also has the kind of biblical subtext that surely would appeal to even his die-hard fans.
That s why I keep saying, listen to the music. Most of the people who have rejected this album, me, because of all this, haven t, as I say, heard the album, he reflects. I m also welcoming currently being ostracised by the Christian community, because, maybe in the minds of all these people I now am the reject, the outcast. But, on the other hand, I m getting great support in all this from bikers, metal-heads, folks that I didn t think I had anything in common with. All of a sudden, I m being welcomed into ranks of society that had no use for me before. And it s great. Because, as I say, I now see that I was, before this, too stiff, too judgmental, too humourless. Yet now that I m taking brickbats for joining the party, musically, I find I m being judged like I used to judge such people. Yet it feels right, feels good, and I hope I can share that with the Christian community, open up their eyes.
We ve got to look for things to commend in people we disagree with, as well as things to condemn. So I found things to commend in Alice Cooper, Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, Deep Purple and Metallica. And I don t mean that in any patronising way, I mean, I enjoy it, genuinely. And I find that because these guys see that I m sincere about this, many are coming out in support of me. Metallica, in Madison Square Gardens the other night, played my album as people were filing out of a sell-out concert! And they ve become friends of mine. And Meatloaf, Motely Crue, Alice Cooper. It really is an eye-opening experience for me. And an enlightening experience.
So how will Pat Boone follow No More Mr Nice Guy ? With Pat Boone Sings U2 as a kind of update on his Elvis album, Pat Boone Sings Guess Who?
If I could find a dozen songs of theirs that I could do, of course I would! he laughs, and gleefully saying he sure will accept a tape of U2 s songs from this reporter. Oh, I d love that, Joe, because I have been a real fan of theirs for years. Not just musically but because at least in their early days, I really felt we were kindred spirits. In that they were trying to use their music and their fame and their huge influence in a positive way, which, I must say again, is always what I tried to do, more than anything else. You must use the position of influence you ve been given to do some good. In the end, that really is more important than whether or not you are regarded as a legitimate rock star, right? It certainly is, as far as I m concerned. But as for me singing U2? Yeah, I d like Bono and Boono to get together some time! Maybe we will, during their upcoming tour. I certainly hope so. n