Pat Boone "In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy"
Stupid Pop Star Tricks: Pat Boone’s “In a Metal Mood…”

Pat Boone's metal album was head-scratching but harmless fun. That doesn’t make it any less strange.

Aging pop stars will do strange things to stay relevant. From CeeLo Green uploading a fake video of a phone blowing up in his face to Katy Perry live streaming for four days straight, antics that are forced, in bad taste, or just plain bizarre are fair game as long as they generate headlines. Taking on a new musical identity is the most tried-and-true attention grab and has the lowest threshold for success. When it doesn’t work, it can become a clown car crash. For an example, look no further than Pat Boone’s thoroughly misguided 1997 album “In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy.”

If you’re under 60, you might not know who Pat Boone is. He was one of America’s first pop stars whose career began in the mid-50s with a string of chart-topping covers of African-American pop hits in a thoroughly neutered fashion. His sanitized and sexless 1956 cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruitti” charted higher than the original. His staunch Christianity and conservative views kept him rooted in the 50s as the rest of the world moved on, and his star began to peter out in the decades that followed. He focused primarily on Christian and country music until the late 90s when he decided to change lanes…by releasing an album of big band covers of heavy metal and hard rock songs.

In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy was a bold move. It was also bizarre, goofy, cringe-worthy, tonally weird, and more than a bit of a tire fire. Boone takes swings at the likes of Van Halen, Metallica, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, and Guns N’ Roses and misses again and again. The album’s musicianship is not to blame, but even the obvious skill behind a mambo-fied arrangement of “Panama” cannot hide the inherent silliness behind the whole endeavor; the operation was successful, but the patient still died. Iconic guitar riffs are recast as multi-layered horn lines that barely follow the original melody as song after song is forced into a swing jazz style that doesn’t fit. Even a ballad like Nazareth’s “Love Hurts,” which would normally be closer to Boone’s wheelhouse, is a listless miss. Boone’s voice sounds fine throughout, but he croons rather than belts. Growls and yelps are non-existent. Boone sounds as if he’s not entirely sure why he’s doing this. The listener isn’t sure, either.

It is possible to perform rock songs in a lounge style and have it work (see: Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine), but it requires a commitment to the bit that Boone simply does not have. It’s too prim to be parody, too staid to be satire, and too milquetoast to be memorable. To make matters even sillier, the 62-year-old Boone borrowed Rob Halford’s fashion sense (Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” kicks off the record) for an appearance at the 1997 American Music Awards, sporting a leather vest sans shirt, fake tattoos, wraparound sunglasses, and a studded dog collar around his neck. It was not a good look.

So why did Pat Boone take the swing? He was doing what he had done at the beginning of his career – trying to introduce songs and artists to a different audience. While his early hit covers are pale imitations of the originals, he did make kids in the 50s look up the likes of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In contemporary interviews, he said that was his intention with “In A Metal Mood.” The difference this time was that the songs he was covering were already huge hits with wide audiences across ages and cultures, and his fanbase was unlikely to be converted. Boone himself referred to the album and his new image as a joke in an appearance on “The Tonight Show” and seemed to be having fun with it all. The album remains a novelty amongst rock fans but is not something that most fans will likely play more than once. Ultimately, it was a bit of head-scratching but harmless fun. That doesn’t make it any less strange. We can laugh with Pat Boone and laugh at him, too. He’s probably laughing as well.

Author

  • Adam Carlson

    Adam is just a dude based in Brooklyn who enjoys thinking about music in all forms. He enjoys cooking, board games, baseball, and arranging songs for ukulele that shouldn't be played on ukulele in an extremely amateurish way. Adam is shown here at age 13 on his way to a bar mitzvah.

    View all posts
Posted in , ,

Related Posts