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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. This episode contains explicit language. You're listening to the smooth stylings of Patrick Charles Eugene Pat Boone, pop star of the 1950s, host of the Pat Boone Chevy showroom, maybe the whitest, squarest rock musician of all time.
In 1997, Pat Boone put out an album covering, among others, Judas Priest, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple. 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.
Frank Zappa and the mother at the first... You can find the whole thing on YouTube. In a metal mood, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I mean, all great songs that he's chosen. Impeccable. On the wire in the sky...
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? 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. Well, The Devil's Interval is the beginning of metal, basically. It's the flatted fifth. ♪
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 63. He's been a crooner. He's an evangelical Christian.
He's been a crooner for 40 years. He's best known for sporting like V-neck sweaters and khakis and top siders. Yeah. Or not even top siders, those shoes, those white bucks. Yeah. That's what he does. I like a nice white buck. You couldn't have imagined a less metal pedigree than Pat Boone? 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 that. Just like as far as committing to being a crooner, 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 Boone 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 Mr. Nice Guy. Part two, Taco Bell. It's very secure. This is like top secret. Top secret. Taco Bell is so important to my defense of Pat Boone that I traveled clear across the country to Irvine, California, to the international headquarters of Taco Bell,
and talk my way into their inner sanctum. Through double sets of security doors, all sorts of scanning of IDs. I feel like I'm in the CIA. Do you have to do retinal scanning? Exactly. For tacos. 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, the naked chicken chalupa. Have you had this?
I have not. Nobody was asking for this because it wasn't even, people didn't even comprehend this idea. That's really good. But it is one of those things you could never sit with consumers and they would say, you know what, I'd like you to make me this, right? Do we know the idea for this came from? I mean, it's a bananas idea. It's us. So,
That bananas idea came from Taco 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. Uh-huh. And I was really impressed because that song, the original version, there's a minute and 20 seconds of just kind of ominous roar.
like Middle Earth sounds. Holy Diver might be the quintessential metal song. Dave Hill considers it Ronnie James Dio's masterpiece. So, yeah, but even just the pure balls to be like, I'm going to make everyone wait a minute and 20 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 midnight sea. Oh, what's becoming of you?
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 Hedlum, my oldest friend in the world. We met 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 Industries production, which you should be listening to. Anyway, Bruce always had a bee 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 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 and 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 Boone? Now, why would I think, where is Pat Boone? 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.
did it. I mean, just by raw numbers alone, he was, Pat Boone was on the top 100 chart, the hot 100, I guess it's called, for I think 220 consecutive weeks. That record stood for, I think, close to 50 years. Like the only people who've been on longer were Lil Wayne and Drake. Lil Wayne, Drake, and Pat Boone. 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 10 or 20 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 14 years. You know, I had some people that weren't very nice, people who would back you against the wall in the corner and
You motherfucker. You know, this sort of, all that sort of stuff. So it would go a lot, 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 he, wait a second, has he never even made the ballot? No. He's never made it out of that ballot that comes out of the room? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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 1950s covering black R&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 chutzpah to really even bring it up because of that feeling that 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, that's why he never made the ballot. It was discussed, but never made the ballot. And 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 can see his spikes, but you know where he's at. See, right away, when Dio sings about the tiger, you're like, that's a scary tiger. Papoon, they're like, I'm not afraid of that tiger. Get over here, tiger. I mean, so what's he doing here with this song? I don't know. Immediately, you're like, hey, 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 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 Glen Bell of the Iowa Bells, a white guy who in the mid-1950s 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-1950s 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, 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 bases as we could.
We're listening to Laverne Baker, an early R&B legend, perform Tweedledee in 1955. It's still good. Yeah. That is good. All right. What's the other one? Georgia Gibbs.
which, by the way, if you do the search, comes up right underneath it. Georgia Gibbs, by the way, Georgia Gibbs' real name is Frida Lipschitz? Lipschitz? Something like that, yeah. Frida Lipschitz from, I'm assuming, Brooklyn? Several years after Laverne Baker does the black version of Tweedledee, Georgia slash Frida does the white version. Tweedle, Tweedle, Tweedle Dee I'm as happy as can be
Jiminy Crickets, Jiminy Jacks. You make my heart go clickety-clack. Tweedly, tweedly, tweedly-dee. 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's 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 Gibbs as her beneficiary because she said, if the plane goes down, her career is over, too. Ha ha ha ha ha!
Amazing. That is, okay, so, oh, we agreed, 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,
Well, in his early years, a lot of Elvis's songs were written by a man named Otis Blackwell. He's black. 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. Fantastic.
But he wrote Don't Be Cruel, All Shook Up, Paralyzed, Return to Sender. Here we are. Yeah, yeah. Great Balls of Fire. He wrote Great Balls of Fire? Yes, he did. Oh, my God. Guy's a 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 I can be found Sitting home all alone
If you can't call my rap, at least please tell the phone. Don't be too hard, 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. You know I can't wait for you.
Oh my god. Ugh.
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 bad it is every time I hear it. This is just Elvis. 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 1962. Is that Otis? Uh, that might be Elvis demoing. Yeah. The Otis demo? Yeah. Yeah.
That's Otis Blackwell. Did you guys think it was Elvis? Yeah. I think that's Elvis demoing the... Oh my god, that's Otis Blackwell. Wait, this is the 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 has completely... Yeah. He's completely stolen this guy'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. Because I feel like Chuck D is the reason Elvis is so hated. Yeah. In black and white. Because Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me because he's straight out a racist, a sucker, was simple and plain, motherfucking man, John Wayne. Elvis was a hero to most. Elvis was a hero to most. Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me. Shit to me.
I'm 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 1923. Grew up in the Depression. 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 burgers and fries altogether, and after a decade of stops and starts, he opened Taco Bell. Tacos, tostadas, frijoles, burritos, all for 19 cents each.
By the late 1960s, 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 carnitas? They don't have carnitas.
Don't spill the beans. Oh, yeah. Way, way, way off the menu. So if you peek in, this is our... When I was in the test kitchen at Taco Bell's headquarters, the question of carnitas came up. And they said that, for whatever reason, shredded meat doesn't work for them.
Or mole. If you were ripping off Mexican food, if you wanted to be Elvis of Mexican food, you would have mole. But there's no mole at Taco Bell. Our brand is Mexican-inspired, and it's just not familiar enough. And if it's not familiar enough, again, in 30 seconds, we can't make it familiar to you. This is Rene Pichotti. We just can't, as much as we'd love to. What's hard about mole sauce, for example? No.
Mole sauce. So first off, I think there's so many different types. And this is Liz Matthews, head chef. I think mole in general, especially a red mole, it's rich and earthy. And I don't think that's something that people are familiar with already. Another thing, where are the soft corn tortillas? Nothing is more quintessentially Mexican than the traditional soft corn tortilla. There are no soft corn tortillas 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 a corn tortilla that wasn't deep fried.
They had no idea what a soft, fresh corn tortilla 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 promotion. They want the variations and different, I don't know, 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.
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 chalupa. The inspiration came from Taco Bell's Heather Motteshaw, one of the food scientists 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? And I'm like, well, what are you talking about? And it was sort of like, well, you know, like chicken melanase.
But so in my mind, I'm thinking like literally like chicken Milanese pounded out, you know, chicken breast and that flavor profile thinking like, you're crazy, Heather. But what really comes out is, you know, she's probably onto something. 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? Absolutely. 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 big feat. 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. This is Heather of Naked Chicken Chalupa fame. So it wasn't until we then converted and started to call it a chalupa, which is our more premium taco, where consumers were like, oh, okay, I get it. But even here, they're making things up.
In Mexican cuisine, a chalupa is a deep-fried masa dough pancake shaped to resemble a flat fishing boat. That's why it's called a chalupa. Chalupas are Basque whaling boats, small, wide-bottomed, 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?
- It didn't have the shell, right? So it's the protein, so it's naked. - Oh, I see, oh, I see. Okay, all right. So I was wondering, like, where are you guys going with this? - We just call everything naked. - So what's interesting about this is that it's really conceptually a step outside of the traditional Mexican food. This is, we're no longer, this 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's soul. Taco Bell appropriated the taco, but not the taco's 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 latke in the shape of a taco filled with all kinds of delicious flavors. It's really spicy. Yeah, this spice is a little bit of a delay, so you might take a few bites, be like, it's not spicy, and then it's going to catch up to you. I have many questions about spice. By the way, Justin, do you want me to feed you? Justin. Justin Richmond.
From the Cultural Appropriations Summit. Elvis 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. Do you want us to cut things up for you? I'll just stash it, don't worry. You want me to hold the microphone? And now, I kind of have to take a foray into the Doritos Locos Taco. Taco Bell's 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 hardcore Taco Bell lovers. Did the lawyers have to get involved? There's like all this IP going on.
Between Frito-Lay and Taco Bell. And I think I can tell the story, but I mean, the story really is, it was a handshake. The CEO of Frito-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 happen. 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. It's probably on 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 Frutti. Let's do the two Tutti Fruttis. Yeah. So we'll start with Little Richard's Tutti Frutti. But the best Tutti Frutti...
Fact I learned recently was that it's originally Tutti Frutti Good Booty. Good Booty. So funny. Pat Boone comes along, the boy wonder. And should we do the live version of Handmaid's Day? Let's go the live version, just for fun. It's an old performance on Canadian television from the 1950s.
Pat Boone 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&B, and he made a smoothie out of Tutti Frutti. All right.
Here's a gal that I love best. Tutti, Tutti Frutti. He's completely on the beat. He doesn't go behind the beat. He's
That's really the difference. That's what all of them have done, by the way. All the white versions have simplified the beat. Like, the beat feels a little more dense, a little more complex in the black versions. In the white version, it's like, this is the one, two, three, four. You can't miss it. Pat Boone did not copy Tutti Frutti. He made a smoothie out of Tutti Frutti. 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 they would kill me crossing over. See, it would kill me crossing over. He would kill me because the white station would play him and they wouldn't play me. And so when you go in the record shop, you could find his, you couldn't find mine. But Little Richard says that later he changed his mind. But really, to be true, when I look back over, there was a blessing and a lesson because he opened doors for us. He made the white kids more aware of me.
Because they want my version. That's what he says. When I've been in, he says, look, I opened some doors. He opened a whole lot of doors. 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 here is 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... Because there was no room for it. Because he did it so well, there was no reason to go back and do the original. Yes. And 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 contest. He's John the Baptist, whereas Elvis pretends to be Jesus. Elvis says, I'm the risen Lord. Pat Boone'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. He's John the Baptist. And Taco Bell at the same time. Pat Boone, John the Baptist. His 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 and gentlemen, Pat Boone! In 1997, at the height of his metal period, Pat Boone went on the Easterseal telethon.
You're trying to tell me he doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame?
Let's make this happen, people. Let's get Pat Boone on the ballot. Info at rockhall.org. That's info at rockhall.org.
Then crank up a little inner metal mood on your phone. Order a naked chicken chalupa at the nearest Taco Bell. And ask yourself if the world isn't a better place with the right kind of cultural appropriation. No more Mr. P.E.E. No more Mr. Nice Guy. They say he's sick, he's obscene.
Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carleen Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jason Gambrell, 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 Gladwell. What? 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 loungy? Holy diver, you've been down to... See, now, you know, 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. Yeah, yeah. Oh, a diver, you've been down too long and that midnight sea. Oh, what's becoming of me? See, I've just gone taking it, you know, now we're at a coffee house. Yeah. On some strip mall. He's gone. So this is interesting. What he's done is not, it's not a trivial accomplishment. No.
No. There's a degree of difficulty in what he's done here. Oh, yeah. You can't walk in off the street and do Pat Boone. No, no. You'd be a fool. As much as you'd be a fool to think you could do Dio, you'd be maybe as much of a fool to think you could do Pat Boone.
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