Pat Boone: the man who tried to kill rock and roll
History likes to paint rock and roll as the moment when the light came on for teenagers around the world. Everything seemed like it was in black and white, and while all stars were in monochrome when Elvis Presley and The Beatles made their debuts on television, they brought a certain amount of fire to their music that has been burning in their successors ever since. But while the storybooks talk about a linear line from the dawn of rock and roll to all the great bands that came afterwards, many people forget how much the genre was in danger, and it was all at the expense of Pat Boone.
To understand what we’re talking about here, let’s roll back the clock a little bit to the early 1960s. Before Beatlemania had swept through the country, what did people have to be proud of in rock at that point? There was the odd singer that would have a hit, but now that Elvis Presley was getting drafted, Buddy Holly had died, and Jerry Lee Lewis was being exposed as a scandalous individual, all rockers had to satiate everything was people like Frankie Avalon singing tunes like ‘Venus’.
And let’s not forget about people like Mitch Miller. Although Miller has been tucked into the background of the bygone era of Hollywood, hearing his songs around the same time felt like someone was trying to deliberately stomp out rock and roll, complete with tunes that felt like rejected show tunes that should have never gone anywhere, to begin with.
While Pat Boone may have been cut from the same cloth, it’s easy to cut him a little bit of slack. He was at the very least aware of what rock and roll was, but when he attempted to do the same as Elvis Presley and cover some of the best rock and roll tunes of all time, all of them sounded like rock and roll being interpreted by a youth pastor.
Despite the entire Boone family being extremely religious, I’m going to leave that alone throughout the course of this indictment. After all, it is about the music, and what Boone did to ‘Tutti Frutti’ is unacceptable. No one was going to eclipse what Little Richard did with the tune, but while Presley did give a valiant effort, this version is sung by someone who knows absolutely nothing about rock and roll. Even during his TV specials where he sang this, it’s easy to tell that this man claps on the offbeat without fail and has never heard a swinging rhythm in his life.
But the real egregious part about Boone is the fact that he doesn’t put enough heart into the music he’s playing. Oh, there’s no doubt that he has a lot of heartfelt emotions inside him, but it almost seems like he’s making fun of rock and roll half the time when he’s singing. He may not know it, but that comes back to what rock and roll was about in the first place when it started off as an antecedent of blues.
Much like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, the old guard of rock and roll was intended to be the perfect outlet for pain. Everyone from Little Richard to Howlin’ Wolf had all experienced pain, whether that be through unrequited love or being treated like a lesser citizen, and music was among the greatest ways for someone to unleash that kind of frustration in a way people could relate to it. The core identity behind all good rock and roll is based on trying to make sense of the harsh realities of life, and upon hearing Boone’s music, you’d swear that the only thing bad that ever happened to him was back in high school when he didn’t finish his Brussel sprouts at family dinner.
And the saga only continued as the years went by. His daughter, Debby Boone, managed to have a solo career with one of the most milquetoast ballads of all time, ‘You Light Up My Life’, and when Boone himself attempted to try his hand at metal music on In A Metal Mood, it’s safe to say that he either was in on the joke or had absolutely no self-awareness singing ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘Crazy Train’.
While Boone is far from the most dangerous individual ever to come onto the rock scene, it’s easy for anyone to see something not to like about his music. This is music for people who don’t seem to have any problems to speak of, and when every other rockstar had real issues to face when it came to everything from racism to sexism, it’s easy to point the finger at Boone as the symbol for everything wrong with music. “Pat Boone neutered rock and roll”, “Pat Boone is embarrassing to music”, “Pat Boone killed my dog”, and so on and so forth.
That’s not to say that Boone was untalented at what he did. He may not have understood that most rock fans were clowning on him behind his back, but it’s nice to see him be a good sport about being the discount, mom-approved version of rock and roll. It’s like he didn’t have his fans, either.
There were some fine pieces of his catalogue worth revisiting, and his voice definitely caters to something that evokes more emotion like Sinatra’s finest work. However, when listening to his take on rock and roll, it was like watching Rosemary Clooney trying her hand at singing like Grace Slick. Both singers are perfectly fine on their own, but when both styles are put together, it makes for a fairly pungent musical cocktail.
While there may be a silver lining in knowing that some people got exposed to rock and roll through Boone’s music, the greatest crime of his music would be for people to listen without knowing the full extent of the people who wrote tunes like ‘Tutti Frutti’. For anyone who actually likes that music, you keep on liking it and don’t let me take that away from you. That said, if this was the only outlet that anyone had for fun music back in the day, it was probably time to unlock that musical chastity belt.
