In a Metal Mood

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: This episode contains explicit language.

00:00:25
Speaker 3: You're listening to the smooth stylings of Patrick Charles Eugene pat Boone, pop star of the nineteen fifties, host of the Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, maybe the whitest, squarest rock musician of all time. In nineteen ninety seven, Pat Boone put out an album covering, among others, Judas Priest, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple.

00:00:52
Speaker 4: Well, we all came down.

00:00:54
Speaker 5: To the true.

00:00:56
Speaker 1: On the lad.

00:00:58
Speaker 3: On the front of the album, Pat Boone looks out maniacally, or at least as maniacally as he can, wearing only a black leather vest.

00:01:09
Speaker 1: Exam, I am the mother.

00:01:13
Speaker 6: Place.

00:01:14
Speaker 3: You can find the whole thing on YouTube. In a metal mood, no more.

00:01:17
Speaker 7: Mister nice guy, I mean all great songs that he was chosen and peckahol.

00:01:28
Speaker 3: Fires, Pat Boone performed an act of cultural appropriation, outrageous cultural appropriation. A square white guy, a middle aged crooner, walked in and shamelessly appropriated the heavy metal cannon. Here's my question, what should we make of that fact? How should we feel about? In a metal mood? Yes, so, I asked my friend Dave Hill. Dave is a metal aficionado lead guitarist for Valley Lodge and Witch Taint, maybe the most metal band name ever. If you root around the internet, you can find some videos we've done together over the years, which have literally hundreds of likes. We go to the same coffee shop, say hello to Dave.

00:02:25
Speaker 5: Well.

00:02:25
Speaker 7: The Devil's Interval is the beginning of metal. Basically, it's the flat at fifth.

00:02:39
Speaker 3: I assigned Dave in a metal mood as homework. Listen to it, break it down, report back to me. That's how this whole thing began. At the time he puts this out, he's sixty three. He's been a krooner. He's an evangelical Christian. He's been a crooner for forty years. He's best known for sporting like v Nex sweaters and khakis and topsiders yeah, or not even top upsiders. Those shoes, those those white box Yeah, that's what he does.

00:03:13
Speaker 1: I like a nice white can you.

00:03:15
Speaker 3: You couldn't have imagined a less metal pedigree than Pat.

00:03:19
Speaker 7: Boonth No, he's pretty not metal, but it depends how you define metal.

00:03:25
Speaker 1: I mean.

00:03:27
Speaker 7: Musically, no, but very metal in many other ways.

00:03:31
Speaker 3: Tell me what you mean by just like.

00:03:33
Speaker 7: As far as like committing to being a crooner? Pretty metal?

00:03:39
Speaker 3: Did you catch that, Pat Boone? Pretty Metal? My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the official launch of my campaign to get Boon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We're climbing aboard the Pat Boone train. Why because if there is ever a cultural figure who has been misunderstood and overlooked who fits the literal definition of the Revisionist History mandate, it is Pat Boone. You think I'm joking, I'm so not joking. What follows is an argument in two parts. Part one, Pat Boone no longer mister nice guy. Part two, Taco Bell.

00:04:54
Speaker 6: It's very secure.

00:04:56
Speaker 8: Got a wait for this top secret.

00:05:00
Speaker 3: Taco Bell is so important to my defense of Pat Boon that I traveled clear across the country to Irvine, California, to the INTERN national headquarters of Taco Bell and talk my way into their inner sanctum through double sets of security doors, all sorts of scanning of ideas. I feel like I'm in the CIA retinal scan exactly. They sit me down. They ply me with one delicious bit of fast food after another, including most memorably one of Taco Bell's top selling concoctions. Then ny could chicken chilloupa. I have not.

00:05:41
Speaker 9: Nobody was asking for this because it wasn't even people don't even comprehend this idea.

00:05:46
Speaker 1: That's really what.

00:05:47
Speaker 6: It's really good.

00:05:49
Speaker 9: Yeah, but it is.

00:05:49
Speaker 8: One of those things you could never sit with consumers and they would say, you know what I would like, I'd like you to make me this right?

00:05:55
Speaker 3: Where do we know where?

00:05:57
Speaker 7: So?

00:05:57
Speaker 3: Do we know the idea where this came from? I mean it's the Banana's idea. That Banana's idea came from Talk Bell. Oh and it was good. Hold that thought. We're coming back to Taco Bell, but first, Dave Hill and I have some work to do.

00:06:27
Speaker 7: I skipped right ahead to Holy Diver by Dio, and I was really impressed with it because that song, the original version, there's a minute in twenty seconds of just kind of ominous like Middle Earth sounds.

00:06:57
Speaker 3: Holy Diver might be the quintessential metal song. Dave Hill considers it Ronnie James Dio's masterpiece.

00:07:30
Speaker 10: Dive You've been.

00:07:31
Speaker 7: Down Young in the Middes, so yeah, but even just the pure balls to be like, I'm gonna make everyone wait a minute and twenty seconds before I even smack you around with one of the greatest metal songs of all time. And then I was like, well, Pat Boone doesn't have the balls to commit to that, but sure enough he did. He did so right there, Huge fan.

00:08:14
Speaker 3: Track number eight on in a metal mood, right after Pat Boone's cover of Enter Sandman by Metallica.

00:08:22
Speaker 10: Holy Diver, You've been down too long in the mid and I see, Oh, let's become of me.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: By the time you can see his strikes. But you know where he's me.

00:08:35
Speaker 3: Oh, don't you know what I mean?

00:08:39
Speaker 1: You gotta get away.

00:08:41
Speaker 3: Epic, simply epic. This concern with Pat Boone's legacy did not start with me or Dave Hill. It started with another friend of mine, Bruce Hedlin, my oldest friend in the world, and that on the first day of first grade. Bruce, the producer Rick Rubin, and I are now partners on the Broken Record Music podcast, another epic Pushkin Industry's production, which you should be listening to anyway. Bruce always had a b in his bonnet about Pat Boone.

00:09:25
Speaker 4: I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which I'd never been to, and I went downstairs where it all kind of starts, and you see these you see exhibits like the precursors to rock and roll, and then you walk into what is probably the biggest part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the most famous part, which is the Elvis section, how Elvis basically founded rock and roll. And I was kind of amazed. I went through it. I looked at all these exhibits. All I could think of was, where is Pat Boon? Now? Why would I be Why would I think? Where is Pat Boone?

00:09:59
Speaker 9: Well?

00:09:59
Speaker 4: Pat Boone had an amazing career before Elvis, and in fact, Pat Boone did a lot of the things Elvis did before Elvis did it. I mean, just by raw numbers alone, he was Pat Boone was on the top one hundred charge the hot one hundred. I guess it's called for I think two hundred and twenty consecutive weeks. That record stood for I think close to fifty years. I think the only people who've been on longer were Lil Wayne and Drake. Lil Wayne Drake.

00:10:34
Speaker 1: And Pat Poot and Pat Pat. That's your that's our top three.

00:10:37
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:10:41
Speaker 3: The nominating Committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is made up of rock music insiders, serious music people. They meet every September and have a day long debate about the ten or twenty names that should be on the ballot for the upcoming year. The whole thing is secret, intense. There's lobbying, campaigning. I asked Terry Stewart about the process. He ran the Hall of Fame for fourteen years.

00:11:03
Speaker 5: You know, I had some people that weren't very nice. People would back you against the wall in the corner and motherfucker. You know, there's sort of all that sort of stuff. So it would go a lot, it would go it could go dark, but you know it's I understand that it meant a lot to these artists, and I try to explain that there was a very methodical process.

00:11:21
Speaker 3: So then I asked him did things ever get dark over Pat Boone?

00:11:25
Speaker 5: There wasn't a lot of discussion about Pat Boone.

00:11:28
Speaker 3: Has he never even made the ballot? No, he's never made it out of that ballot that comes out of the room.

00:11:33
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:11:35
Speaker 3: Now, if you know anything about popular music, you'll know why Pat Boone is persona non grata in Cleveland. It's because he made his name during the nineteen fifties covering black R and B songs. A handsome young white guy just graduated from Columbia University, and his record company has him doing these whitewashed versions of songs by people like Little Richard and Fats Domino. For music officionados, the idea of Pat Boone as a serious musician is offensive.

00:12:05
Speaker 5: But it took a lot of hutz futter really even bring it up, because of that feeling that you know, he had stolen this music. The majority of the people involved always felt fairly strongly that it wasn't appropriate to have Pat Boone in the Hall of Fame. But that's the way it all. X Y's he never made the ballot. It was discussed, but never made the ballot. And that's that's just the nature of the beast.

00:12:34
Speaker 3: In other words, Pat Boone's album in a Metal Mood is not some weird one off. It's what he does. He wanders into someone else's world and he takes their music, and that does not pass the smell test at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But are they right. That's what Dave Hill and I were trying to figure out, which is why we sat in the studio together deconstructing Pat Boone's cover of Holy Diver.

00:13:02
Speaker 1: You can see his fights.

00:13:03
Speaker 7: There's no reason see right away when deals things about the tiger, You're like, that's a scary tiger, Pat Boone. They're like, I'm not afraid of that tiger. Get over here, tighter.

00:13:15
Speaker 3: I mean, so, what's he doing here with this song?

00:13:19
Speaker 7: I don't know, like I immediately or like you hear and you're like, hey, did you Has anyone seen the guy with the chicken skewers? I wanted to get some of those, do you know what I mean? Like it's it's like it's sort of an early cocktail party, corporate fundraiser scenario.

00:13:38
Speaker 3: Pat Boone is the poster child for cultural appropriation. Now, why does this make me think of taco bell? Because taco bell is the same thing for food. The bell in taco bell is not some reference to the classic bell towers in Spanish colonial architecture Elle Campanario. No, the bell in Taco Bell refers to Glen Bell of the Iowa Bells, a white guy who in the mid nineteen fifties, decided to open a fast food restaurant in San Bernardino, California, Glen Bell's Tacos Taco Bell. It became a chain. Whenever he opened a new restaurant, Glen Bell would hire a mariachi band. On the cover of his biography, Taco Titan, Glen Bell of the Iowa Bells is wearing a sombrero. Glen Bell is Pat Boone, two white guys in the mid nineteen fifties appropriating someone else's culture. So if we have a Pat Boone problem, we should also have a Taco Bell problem, which I'm not happy about, by the way, because I love Taco Bell. That was my moral quandary. Okay, So Laverne, We're going to start with Laverne Baker. I'm sitting around my dining room table with Bruce Jacob Smith, my producer, and Justin Richmond, the producer of Broken Record. We decided to convene a cultural appropriation summit to figure out who is the appropriate appropriator. Bruce o'was from rural southwestern Ontario. Jacob a half Jewish, half Catholic millennial from Long Island. Justin, a mixed race hipster from Long Beach, California and me Jamaica, Canada, England whatever. I felt we needed to cover as many bases as we could. We're listening to Laverne Baker, an early R and B legend, perform Tweedledee in nineteen fifty five.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: Lady, all right, what's the other one?

00:16:02
Speaker 3: Georgia Gibbs, which, by the way, if you do the search, comes up right underneath it she Gibs. By the way, Georgia gives his real name is FRIEDA.

00:16:13
Speaker 4: Lipshitz, something like that Lipschitz.

00:16:15
Speaker 3: From I'm assuming. Several years after, Laverne Baker does the black version of Tweedledee, Georgia slash Frieda does the white version.

00:16:24
Speaker 6: Tweet tweet D happy asking Ben is it's Jim many Jack? You make my heart? Don't clay class.

00:16:42
Speaker 7: Tweet tweet D.

00:16:44
Speaker 3: All right, what's to compare those two versions?

00:16:48
Speaker 4: Do I like the first one better? Yes? Are they almost identical?

00:16:53
Speaker 8: Yes?

00:16:53
Speaker 4: Did she lift the arrangements? Yeah?

00:16:55
Speaker 1: Of course second was not so bad. Actually I can't you know, no, but.

00:16:59
Speaker 4: It's precisely like the first one.

00:17:01
Speaker 7: It is.

00:17:02
Speaker 4: Laverne Baker actually famously had to take out flight insurance once she was on tour, and she named Georgia Gibbs as her beneficiary because she said, if the plane goes down, her career is over.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: Too amazing.

00:17:19
Speaker 3: That is okay, so oh we agreed though. That is if you want a definition of cultural appropriation, that's it. Next we turn to Elvis. Everyone loves Elvis, right. Remember the last episode of season three of Revisionist History where I put Elvis on the couch and everything ended in tears. I love Elvis well. In his early years, a lot of Elvis' songs were written by a man named Otis Blackwell.

00:17:45
Speaker 4: He is black He was a songwriter. He wrote probably his most famous song is Fever, which was a Peggy Lee song later Madonna song. But he wrote don't be cruel. All shook up, paralyzed, returned to sender.

00:17:56
Speaker 3: Here we are, Yeah, yeah, great ball's a fire he wrote, Yes, wrote great balls fla he did, yeh, yep, Oh my god, guys genius. Otis Blackwell writes the songs, then records a demo, gives the demo to Elvis. Ready, this is Elvis doing his version of don't be cruel.

00:18:13
Speaker 7: You know I can't be sitting all alone if you can't come.

00:18:22
Speaker 3: Please, please tell the phone, don't be cruel.

00:18:27
Speaker 1: Hard It's true.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: Okay, that's Elvis. Now, this is Blackwell doing his version, the version that came first. He's performing it on an old episode of Late Night with David Letterman.

00:18:43
Speaker 5: Alone.

00:18:56
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's the same song. As we're listening, Justin puts his head in his hands. I'm sorry, that's brutal.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: I forget how I forget how bad it is A This is just Elvis Well.

00:19:12
Speaker 3: This is the king of rock and roll, the singer with his own vast, dedicated room at the Hall of Fame. Now imagine how Otis Blackwell or any of the other black songwriters of that era felt about what Elvis did. They'd been asked to write a song for someone much more famous than they were. Fine. What hurts is when a so called genius takes the song that you wrote and that came out of your cultural community and doesn't change a lick of it. One Broken Heart for Sale, a hit song written by Otis Blackwell for Elvis in nineteen sixty two.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: Excud is that Otis It's done might be Elvis demo in and the Otis demo.

00:20:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's Otis Blackwell. Did you guys think it was Elvis?

00:20:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's Elvis Demoinda, Oh my god, that's Alas black Wait.

00:20:21
Speaker 3: This is a perfect illustration of what we're talking about. We're listening to a song on YouTube that's supposed to be by Otis Blackwell, and we have no idea whether it's Otis Blackwell or Elvis, because Elvis is completely Yeah, he's completely stolen the sky's sound. Maybe this is why not everyone out there likes Elvis as much as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does. People like Justin a purist on some level. He feels like it's his music that's being violated here. And immediately Justin brings up Public Enemy and their frontman, Chuck D.

00:20:53
Speaker 10: Because I feel like Chuck D is the reason Elvis is so hated.

00:20:56
Speaker 1: Yeah in black because.

00:20:58
Speaker 10: Elvis was a here at the most, but it never meant shit to me because he strayed our racist to Suckle was simple and playing motherfucker men, John Wayne.

00:21:03
Speaker 1: Elvis wasn't here. Elvis was here the most, but he never meant shit. I'm proud most of my heroes don a peeral, no stamp.

00:21:25
Speaker 3: Oh hell, this let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to eat some more. Taco Bell Glen Bell was born in nineteen twenty three grew up in the Depression. It was a hobo for a while, riding the rails, living by his wits. During the war he was a steward for a Marine Corps general, and when the war was over, he came back to San Bernardino, California and decided to open a hamburger stand. At first, tacos were just something that he added to the menu. He'd eaten them in the Mexican restaurants of southern California and thought they were the perfect fast food, easy to make and eat, super cheap. Then he added refried beans. Then he dropped the burghers and fries altogether, and after a decade of stops and starts, he opened Taco Bell Tacos, tostadas, Frijulaz burritos, all for nineteen cents each. By the late nineteen sixties, Taco Bells are everywhere with a standardized look, slumpstone brick which looks a bit like adobe red clay tiles on the roof Bell Tower, Mexican food in a building straight out of Mexico. Taco Bell is as bad as Elvis, except have you ever been to a Taco Bell? Where are the carnadas? They don't have carnadas, don't spill the beer. Oh yeah yeah, way way way off the menu. So you pekin, this is our. When I was in the test kitchen at Taco Bell's headquarters, the question of carnadas came up, and they said that, for whatever reason, shredded me meat doesn't work for them. Or Molay. If you were ripping off Mexican food, if you wanted to be Elvis of Mexican food, you would have Molay. But there's no mole at Taco Bells.

00:23:20
Speaker 11: Or ras Basket Inspired and it's just not familiar enough. And if it's not familiar enough, again in thirty seconds, we can't make it familiar to you.

00:23:28
Speaker 3: This is Renee Peshati.

00:23:30
Speaker 11: We just can't, as much as we'd love to.

00:23:32
Speaker 3: What's hard about moley sauce, for example?

00:23:35
Speaker 6: Mole sauce, So first off, I think there's so many different.

00:23:40
Speaker 3: Types, and this is Liz Matthews, head chef.

00:23:42
Speaker 8: I think Molay in general, especially a red moley, it's rich and earthy, and I don't think that's something that people are familiar with.

00:23:51
Speaker 3: Are ready another thing. We're the soft corn tortillas. Nothing is more quintessentially Mexican than the traditional soft corn tortilla. There are no soft corn toutias at Taco Bell. They tried it once Mexican street tacos.

00:24:07
Speaker 11: What happened we had we We're getting a lot of calls from customers that they got a taco but the shell was raw, the shell was uncooked. They had no reference for a cornth or tilla that wasn't deep fried, like, they had no idea what a soft fresh.

00:24:25
Speaker 3: Corn or tia was all about. It was a crisis.

00:24:29
Speaker 11: These were calls from Indiana. I mean, I just remember they started streaming in. I'm like, oh my god. People are worried that we're serving them uncooked food. There was no reference for it whatsoever.

00:24:39
Speaker 3: Now, the Taco Bell guys weren't upset by that reaction. Their attitude isn't, oh, our customers have to get more sophisticated. No, to them, it's just a reminder that they aren't in the business of making real Mexican food. That's not why people go to Taco Bell.

00:24:55
Speaker 2: I don't think people want to see authentic for they.

00:24:58
Speaker 6: Want the variations and different. I don't know that that's just not us. That's not who we are. We're inspired by it, but that's not what we're driven by.

00:25:09
Speaker 3: Taco Bell is an interpretation of Mexican food, a riff on Mexican food for people who don't necessarily think of themselves as people who eat Mexican food. That's a very different game, and a harder game, by the way, because you have to find the familiar part of the unfamiliar and somehow make it seem new. If you were the Elvis of Mexican food, you wouldn't need a test kitchen, would you. If you're stealing something, why would you need to test it? You test what you invent. Case in point, the naked chicken chiloopa. The inspiration came from Taco Bell's Heather Motorshaw, one of the foods signed tots I was meeting with.

00:25:50
Speaker 9: I remember Heather said something like, Steve, what do you think if we made you know, a taco shell out of chicken something? And I'm like, well, what are you talking about? It was sort of like, well, you know, like chicken milonaise. So in my mind I'm thinking like literally like chicken milonaise, pound it out, you know, chicken breast and that flavor profile, thinking like you're Heather, But what really comes out is, you know, she's probably onto something.

00:26:12
Speaker 3: We probably they ended up with a white meat chicken breast, deep fried in batter, molded into the shape of a taco and filled with lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and avocado ranch sauce. Did you have difficulty kind of convincing people?

00:26:28
Speaker 2: We couldn't even describe it to each other at first, So how do you actually get that message across to consumers so they're like, oh, I want to go in and try that. I mean, that was a pretty a pretty big feat.

00:26:39
Speaker 12: But that was part of the conundrum because we originally were talking about this as a Crispy Chicken taco, and when you called it a Crispy Chicken taco, people were expecting a taco shell, regular taco shell with a piece of crispy chicken inside.

00:26:57
Speaker 3: This is Heather of naked chicken chilupa fame.

00:27:00
Speaker 12: So it wasn't until we then converted and started to call it a chiloopa, which is on more premium taco where consumers like, oh, Okay, I got it.

00:27:09
Speaker 3: But even here they're making things up. In Mexican cuisine, a chiloopa is a deep fried masa dough pancake shaped to resemble a flat fishing boat. That's why it's called a chiloopa. Chiluopas are basque whaling boats, small, wide bottom, shallow sided. But in the Taco Bell universe, a chiloopa is not a shallow boat anymore. It's a taco, a high sided boat. And it's naked. You're calling it a naked what's the meaning of the word naked in that context?

00:27:41
Speaker 6: It didn't it didn't have the shell, So it's.

00:27:45
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:27:47
Speaker 3: So I was wondering, like, where are you guys going with this? So what's interesting about this is that it's it's really conceptually a step outside of the traditional Mexican food. This is this is We're no longer it looks like a taco. It's not a taco. It's something else. This is not the same as Elvis and Otis Blackwell? Is it? Elvis appropriated the song Don't Be Cruel and also everything else otis Blackwell style vocal tics. Elvis stole the song Soul Taco Bell appropriated the taco, but not the tacos soul. They turned it into something that is about as far from a taco as humanly possible. By the way, I haven't even mentioned the craziest thing in the Taco Bell lab. It's for the Indian market, but they cooked one up for us. It's an Indian spiced potato latka in the shape of a taco, filled with all kinds of delicious flavors.

00:28:52
Speaker 9: Y spicy, it's yeah, this spice is a little bit of a delay, so you might take a few bikes bites. It's not spicy, and then it's.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: I want to talk.

00:29:01
Speaker 3: I have many questions about spice.

00:29:02
Speaker 9: Yeah, Bluey, Justin and I.

00:29:04
Speaker 3: You do you want me to feed you? Justin Justin Richmond from the Cultural a Creation Summit. Alvis doesn't mean shit to me. I brought him along as my soundtech, but he was holding microphones with both hands so he couldn't eat, and all this food was passing right under his nose, and we were getting concerned about his state of mind, especially the Taco Bell people. This was their professional responsibility and they felt they were failing him.

00:29:31
Speaker 6: So you want us to cut things up for you, so you want me to hold the microphones in India?

00:29:39
Speaker 3: And now I kind of have to take a foray into the Dorritos locus Taco Taco Bell's taco where the shell is made out of a dorrito, which turns out to be this fantastically complicated engineering feet because you have to simultaneously please the universe of hardcore Dorito's fans and the universe of hard core Taco Bell lovers. Did the lawyers have to get involved? There's like all this ip going on between and Taco Bell, and I.

00:30:08
Speaker 2: Think I can tell story, but I mean the story really is.

00:30:11
Speaker 6: There was a handshake.

00:30:13
Speaker 3: The CEO of Frido Le and the CEO of Taco Bell worked it out one on one. Taco Bell, born of San Bernardino meets Doritos inspired by authentic Mexican tortilla chips, but actually created in its current form as you may know, at a restaurant in Disneyland.

00:30:32
Speaker 8: They did a handshake because they knew if we got everybody involved, we would.

00:30:37
Speaker 6: Never get this idea out the door. And knew we had this magical thing, and we knew that that would not happen.

00:30:42
Speaker 3: It was like a summit, did they like meet in some secret location.

00:30:46
Speaker 6: All the lawyers were like, what did you guys do?

00:30:48
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, probably got a golf course. Let's be honest.

00:30:51
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe.

00:30:56
Speaker 3: Taco Bell is not Elvis. Elvis could never have pulled off the Doritos Locos Taco. I can't go on without one more moment from our cultural appropriation summit when we finally got to the matter at hand, what's the best Pat.

00:31:28
Speaker 4: Boon touty fruity?

00:31:31
Speaker 3: Just do the two touty fruity. So we'll start with Little Richard's tooty fruity. But the best tooty fruity fact I learned recently was that it's originally tooty fruity. Good booty boy Blah, Pat Boom comes along the boy wonder and should we should we do the lot?

00:31:56
Speaker 1: We have a lot.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: It's a live version of him. Let's go the live version just for fun. It's an old performance on Canadian television from the nineteen fifties. Pat Boom looks like he flew in straight from a boy Scout jamboree. The video begins with a title card, so the caption like pouring cream into coffee.

00:32:15
Speaker 1: Oh, this is so good.

00:32:16
Speaker 3: Pat Boon lightened and sweetened R and B, and he made a smoothie out of tooty fruity.

00:32:26
Speaker 7: Calf. All right, here's the gal that I love.

00:32:42
Speaker 3: Here's a gal that I love best, which fruity completely.

00:32:49
Speaker 4: He doesn't he doesn't go behind the men.

00:32:53
Speaker 1: That's that's really the that's what all of them have done.

00:32:55
Speaker 10: By the way, all the white versions have simplified the beat, like the beat is feels a little more dense, a little more complex in the black versions and the white version. It's like this is the one, two three four that you can't miss it.

00:33:07
Speaker 3: You know, Pat Boon not copy Touty Fruity. He made a smoothiet of Touty Fruity. Years later, Little Richard did an interview with the music journalist Joe Smith. He wasn't happy what he would do.

00:33:20
Speaker 4: He would take over the pop stations and it would kill me costing over.

00:33:23
Speaker 10: And see, it would kill me costing overcause he would kill me because the white station will play him.

00:33:28
Speaker 12: He wouldn't blame me. And so when you go in the record stop, you could find his, you can find mine.

00:33:32
Speaker 3: But Little Richard says that later he changed his mind.

00:33:36
Speaker 8: But really be true.

00:33:37
Speaker 5: When I look back over, it was a blessing and a lesson because he opened doors for us. He made the white kids more aware of me, and because they won't my version of it. That's what he says, I've been He says I opened some doors.

00:33:50
Speaker 4: He opened a whole out of doors.

00:33:52
Speaker 1: Yes, and oh he's a beautiful person.

00:33:54
Speaker 3: When it works, cultural appropriation serves as the basis for something new, but it also widens the audience for the real thing. It's the way the original, authentic idea moves into the mainstream. That's what my friend Bruce has been trying to tell us.

00:34:11
Speaker 4: The contrast chairs with Elvis. I'm not blaming Elvis directly, but he did a version of hound Dog. Big Mama Thornton didn't then crash the pop charts afterwards with her version of hound.

00:34:26
Speaker 3: Dog or because there was no room for it, because he'd already he did it so well, there was no reason to go back and do the original.

00:34:32
Speaker 4: Yes, And that's what I th That's essentially the distinction I'm making, which is, you know, if if Elvis Presley is the Columbus, you know Pat Boone is the guy who landed in the New World and then went back to Europe and said we should make friends with these guys. They've got great tobacco. He didn't show up and saying I'm taking over the content.

00:34:52
Speaker 3: He's John the Baptist, whereas Elvis pretends to be Jesus. Alvis says I'm the risen Lord. Pat Boon's not pretending to be the risen Lord. He's like, I'm just the guy preparing the way for the risen Lord.

00:35:05
Speaker 4: He is John the Baptist, John the Baptist and Taco Bell same time.

00:35:10
Speaker 3: Pat Boone, John the Baptist.

00:35:12
Speaker 4: Is handsome, wholesome. He's really handsome.

00:35:15
Speaker 1: He's a wholesome.

00:35:15
Speaker 4: He's a really nice guy. There he is running to his mark right now.

00:35:18
Speaker 3: I think he's a nice guy, Ladies.

00:35:20
Speaker 7: And gentleman, Pat Boone.

00:35:25
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety seven, at the height of his metal period, Pat Boone went on the Easter Seal telephone.

00:35:34
Speaker 1: I got a bad reputation. You want and I don't know why.

00:35:41
Speaker 3: I rushed my hair, I rushed my teeth.

00:35:43
Speaker 1: I go to church.

00:35:45
Speaker 10: I'm a really.

00:35:46
Speaker 3: Sweet, nice guy. You're trying to tell me he doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame. I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing till they got a Let's make this happen, people, Let's get Pat Boone on the ballot. Info at rockhall dot org. That's info at rockhall dot org. Then crank up a little in a metal mood on your phone, order a naked chicken jaloopa at the nearest Taco Bell, and ask yourself if the world is in a better place with the right kind of cultural appropriation.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: Lou waw, mister nice guy, they say, day you would see.

00:36:38
Speaker 3: Revisionist History is produced by Mila Bell and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carlene Migliori, Head Fein, Maggie Taylor, Maya Knigg, Jason Gambrel, and Jacob Weisberg. Oh and Justin Richmond, who turned down Taco Bell in the service of his duty, and Bruce Hadlam, the brains behind this particular operation. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Godlong, what I'm coming back to Pat Boone? So he takes an absolutely iconic song.

00:37:35
Speaker 1: And he does this.

00:37:38
Speaker 3: Jazz lounge. Yeah, can you give us a can you try a little bit of a jazz loungee?

00:37:44
Speaker 1: Holy dive?

00:37:45
Speaker 7: You've been down to see now?

00:37:47
Speaker 8: You know?

00:37:48
Speaker 7: Where as I attempt to do it, I'm also showing you what's great about Pat Boone because I can't emulate just the swagger and you know that you can tell you like, he's got a bit of a tan.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: You can hear it in his voice.

00:38:02
Speaker 7: Yeah, you've been down too long in the men not see. Oh, come in with me and see I've just got taken it, you know.

00:38:14
Speaker 13: Now we're at a coffeehouse on some sp fun So what this is interesting, what he's done is not it's not a trivial accomplishment.

00:38:26
Speaker 3: No, there's some there, there's a there's a degree of difficulty in what he's done here. Oh yeah, no, one can. You can't walk in off the street and do Pat Boon.

00:38:34
Speaker 7: No, No, you'd be a fool. You know, as as much as you'd be a fool to think you could do a d o, you'd be as as maybe as much a fool to think you can do Pat phone