In a Metal Mood

Deep Purple. Well we all came down to montro. 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 exact. I and the mother. You can find the whole thing on YouTube. In a metal mood, no more, mister nice guy, I mean all great songs, said He's chosen impeccable fire. Pat Boon 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? So I asked my friend Dave Hill, Dave is a metal efficionado lead guitarist for Valley Lodge and

which 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. Well. The Devil's Interval is the beginning of mental Basically, it's the flatted fibrine. 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 crooner. 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 upsiders. Those shoes, those those white box Yeah, that's what he does. I like a nice white can you. You couldn't have imagined a less metal pedigree than pat. No, he's pretty not metal, but it depends how you define metal. I mean musically, no, but very metal in many other ways.

Tell me what you mean by just like as far as like committing to being a coroner? Pretty metal? 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 Pat Boon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We're climbing aboard the Pat

Boon 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 Boon. You think I'm joking, I'm so not joking. What follows is an argument in two parts. Part one, Pat Boon no longer mister nice guy. Part two, Taco Bell. It's

very secure, top secret. 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 exactly. Taco 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 they could chicken cholloopa. So I have not nobody was asking for this because it wasn't even people don't even comprehend this idea. That's really good good, Yeah, but it is one of those things I could never sit with consumers and they would say, you know what I would like, I'd like you to make me this right where do we know where? So do we know the idea for this came from? I mean it's the Banana's idea. That Banana's idea came

from Talk Go 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. I skipped right ahead to Holy Diver by Dio, and I was really impressed with it because that that song, the original version, there's a minute in twenty seconds of just kind of ominous like Middle Earth sounds. Holy Diver might be the quintessential metal song. Dave Hill considers it Ronnie James Dio's masterpiece Dive You've been down too in the middle.

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 track number eight on in a metal mood, right after Pat Boone's cover of Enter Sandman by Metallica. Holy Diver, You've been down too long

in the midden, night Seed. What's becomeing of Me? By the Tiger? You can see it strikes with your no rest me who don't you know what I mean? Gotta get away? Epic, simply epic. Guns. This concern with Pat Boone's legacy did not start with me or Dave Hill. It started with another friend of mine, Bruce Hedlum, my oldest friend in the world, 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 to be in his bonnet about Pat Boone. 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 is where is Pat Boom? Now? Why would I be why would I

think where is Pat Boon? Well? 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 chart, the hot one hundred. I guess it's called four I think two hundred and twenty consecutive weeks. That record stood for I think close to fifty years. Like the only people who've been on longer were Little Wayne and Drake. Little Wayne

Drake and that's your that's our top three. Yeah. 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. You know,

I had some people that weren't very nice. People would back you against the wall in a corner and you motherfucker, you know the 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. So then I asked him, did things ever get dark over Pat Boone? There wasn't a lot of discussion about Pat Boone?

Has we say it? Has he never even made the ballot. No, he's never made it out of that ballot that comes out of the room. Yeah. Now, if you know anything about popular music, you'll know why Pat Boone is perissana on 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 aficionados, the idea of Pat Boone as a serious musician is offensive. But it took a lot of hutzpooter really even bring it up because of that feeling that, um,

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 at all. That's why he never made the ballot. It was discussed, but never made the ballot. And that's that's just the nature of the beast. 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. You could see 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 get over here, tighter. I mean, so, what's he doing here with this song? I don't know. Like immediately you're like you're here 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. 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 El Campanario. No. The bell in Taco Bell refers to Glenn 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 Boon 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 gonna 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 a wasp 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 basses as we could. We're listening to Laverne Baker, an early R and B legend, performed Tweedledee in nineteen fifty five. Happy, all right, what's the other one? Georgia Gibbs, which, by the way, and if you do the search comes up right underneath it. She gives the way Georgia gives. His real name is Frieda lipshits something

like that from I'm assuming Brook. Several years after, Laverne Baker does the black version of tweetled Georgia slash Frieda does the white version tweet happily asking be jeminy Jack, you make my heart, don't clay clash tweet tweet tweet All right? What's the compare those two versions? Do I like the first one better? Yes? Are they almost identical? Yes? Did she lift the arrangements? Yeah? Of course. Second one was not so bad. Actually I can't you know, no,

but it's precisely like the first one. It is. Laverne Baker actually famously had to take out flight insurance once she was on tour, and she named Georgia Gives as her beneficiary because she said, if the plane goes down, her career is over too amazing. 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 or 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's songs were written by a man named Otis Blackwell. He was black, He was a songwriter. He wrote probably his most famous song is Fever, which was a Peggy Lee song, later Madonna's song. But he wrote don't be cruel. All shook up, paralyzed,

returned to Sander. Here we are, yeah yeah, great balls of fire he wrote, wrote great balls of fights? Did yeah 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. You know what can be sit alone? If you can't come around, police, please tell la, but don't be cruel. True heart, it's true. 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. Are you working? You can't? 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. I forget how I forget? How about it is a time I heard him? This is just Elvis Well. 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.

Is that obis done? Might be Elvis demo in and the Otis demo? Yeah, that's Otis Blackwell. Did you guys think it was Elvis? Yeah? I think that's Elvis demo indo. Oh my god, that's a wait. This perfect illustration of what we're talking about. We're listening to a song on YouTube that's supposed to be by Altis Blackwell, and we have no idea whether it's Oltis Blackwell or Elvis, because Elvis has completely yeah, he's completely stolen the sky 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 front man, Chuck D. Because I feel like Chuck D is the reason Elvis is so hated. Yeah in black because Elvis was a hero the most, but he never meant it to me

because he straight out a racist. The suckle was simple and playing motherfucking man John Way, Elvis wasn't hear the Elvis was heard the most but never mentioned the proud Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp. Oh Elvis, Let's take a break and when we come back, we're going to eat some more. Taco Bell Glenn 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 a perfect fast food, easy to make an eat,

super cheap. Then he added refried beans. Then he dropped the burghers and fries all together, and after a decade of stops and starts, he opened Taco bell Tacos, tostadas, frijoles, burritos, all for nineteen cents each. By the late nineteen sixties, taco bells are everywhere with a standardized look, slump stone 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 carnatas? They don't have carnatas don't spill the bell Yeah, way way way off the menu. So if you're peekin, this is our. When I was in the test kitchen at Taco Bell's headquarters, the question of carnadis came up and they said that for whatever reason, shredded meat doesn't work for them. Or molea. If you were ripping off Mexican food, if you wanted to be Elvis

of Mexican food, you would have molae. But there's no moleae at Taco Bells or Razbasca inspired and it's just not familiar enough. And it's not familiar enough. Again in thirty seconds, we can't make it familiar to you. Yeah, this is Rene Pischati. We just we just can't. As much as we loved what's hard about mole sauce, for example, mole sauce. So first off, I think there's so many

different types. And this is Liz Matthew's head chef. I think mole in general, especially a red molee, it's rich and earthy, and I don't think that's something that people are familiar with already. Another thing, we're the soft contotias. Nothing is more quintessentially in Mexican than the traditional soft countotilla. There are no soft corntutias at Taco Bell. They tried

it once Mexican street tacos. What happened. We were 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 corint or tia that wasn't deep fried, like, they had no idea what a soft fresh count or tia was all about. It was a crisis. 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. 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. I don't think people want to see authentic from Yeah, they want the variations and different I don't know that that's just not us, That's not who we are. Yeah,

we're inspired by it, but we're not. That's not what we're driven by. 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 motor Shaw, one of the food signists I was meeting with. 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? And it was sort of like, well,

you know, like chicken milonnaise. But so in my mind, I'm thinking like literally like chicken milonnaise, pound it out, you know, chicken brass in that flavor profile, thinking like you're crazy heather, But what really comes out is, you know, she's probably onto something. 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? 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 at a pretty big feat But that was part of the conundrum because we originally we're talking about this as a Crispy Chicken taco, and when you called it a Crispy Chicken taco, people are expecting a taco shell, regular taco shell with a piece of crispy chicken inside. This is

heather of naked chicken chaloopa fame. So it wasn't until we then converted and started to call it a choloopa, which is our more premium taco, were consumers like, oh, okay, I gat it. But even here they're making things up. In Mexican cuisine, a chalupa is a deep fried masa dough pancake shape to resemble a flat fishing boat. That's why it's called a chalupa. Chalupa's are basque whaling boats, small, wide bottom, shallow sided. But in the Taco Bell universe,

a chalupa 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? But it didn't, it didn't have the shell, it didn't write, so it's okay. 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? Elvas appropriated the song Don't Be Cruel and also everything else otis Blackwell style vocal ticks. 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 spice potato latka in the shape of a taco, filled with all kinds of delicious flavors. Yeah, spicy, Yeah, this this spice is a little bit of a delay, so you might take a few bikes bites, be like it's not spicy, and then it's want to talk. I have many questions. Good spice? Yeah, Justin? You do want me to feature Justin? Justin Richmond from the Cultural Oropriation Summit. Alvis doesn't mean shit to me. I brought him along

as my sound tech. 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. So you want us to cut things up for you, So you want me to hold the microphone?

And now I kind of have to take a foray into the Doritos Locos Taco Taco bells taco where the shell is made out of a dorito, which turns out to be this fantastically complicated engineering feat because you have to simultaneously please the universe of hardcore Doritos fans and the universe of hardcoret Taco Bell lovers. Did the lawyers have to get involved? It's like all this ip going on between Taco Bell and I think I can tell the story, but I mean the story really is. There

was a handshake. Yeah, the CEO of Frido Lay 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. They did a handshake because they knew if we got everybody involved, we would never get this idea out the door. And we knew we had this magical thing, and we knew that that would not have It was like a summit.

Did they like meet in some secret location. All the lawyers were like, what did you guys do? I mean, yeah, probably got a golf course. Let's be honest, maybe 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 Boone tutti fruitie? Let's do the two tutti fruities. Yeah,

so we'll start with Little Richard's tutti fruti. But the best tutti fruttie fact I learned recently was that it's originally twotty fruity, good booty booty asshole wa bab bloom blam bum. Pat Boon comes along the boy wonder and should we should we do the lot? We have a lot. 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 Boon 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. Oh, this is so good. Pat Boone lightened and sweetened R and B. And he made a smoothie out of tooty fruity about all right, here's the gal that I love. Here's a gal that I love best, which I tuti which Fruity's completely he doesn't go, he doesn't go behind me even that. That's really the thing. That's what all of them have done. By the way, all the white versions have simplified the beat like the

beat is. It 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. You know, Pat Boond not copy Tutti Fruitie. He made a smoothie out of Tutti Fruitie. Years later, Little Richard did an interview with the music journalist Joe Smith. He wasn't happy what he would do. He would take over the pop stations and it would kill me, costing over and see, it would kill me

casting over. He would kill me because the white station would clean him and he wouldn't lame me. And so when you go in the record stop, you can find he is, you can find mine. But Little Richard says that later he changed his mind. But really be true, when I look back over, it was a blessing. Ella Lesson because he opened doors for us. He made the white kids more aware of me because they will want my version. That's what he says. I opened some doors, he opened a whole out of doors, and oh he's

a beautiful person. 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. 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 Dog or 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. Yes,

And that's what I think. That's essentially the distinction I'm making, which is, you know, if if Elvis Presley is the Columbus, you know, Pat Boon 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 con He's John the Baptist, whereas Alvis 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. He is John the Baptist, John the Baptist and Taco Bell same time. Pat Boone, John the Baptist is handsome, wholesome. He's really handsome. He's a wholesome. He's a really nice guy. There he is running to his mark right now. I think he's a nice guy, ladies, a gentleman Pat Boone. In nineteen ninety seven, at the height of his metal period, Pat

Boone went on the Easter Seal telephone. I got a bad reputation, and I don't know why I brushed my hair. I'll brushed my teeth. I go to church. I'm a really 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 until 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 Chloopa at the nearest Taco Bell, and ask yourself if the world is in a better place with the right kind of cultural appropriation, mister nic. Provisionist History is produced by Meila Bell and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking

by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carlin Mgliori, headed Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jason Gambrell, and Jacob Weisberg. Oh and Justin Richmond, who turned down Taco Bell in the service of his duty, and Bruce Hadlum the brains behind this particular operation. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gogo. Yeah what I So? I'm coming back to Pat Boone. So he takes an absolutely iconic song and he does this

jazz lounge? Yeah, can you give us a Can you try a little bit of a jazz lounge? E hola diver, you've been down to see now? You know, 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 like he's got a bit of a tan. You can hear it in his voice. Yeahla diver, you've been down too long and the mint see oh what's comeing of me? And to

see I've just got taken it? You know. Now we're at a coffee house on some se fun So what this is interesting? What he's done is not. It's not a trivial accomplishment. No, there's some there's 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 Patpoon. No, No, you'd be a fool, you know, as as much as you'd be a fool to think you could do Ado, you'd be as as maybe as much a fool to think you can do patpoone.