A Heavy Metal Short Circuit

And now please welcome Pat Boone! You’re thinking ice-cream blazer, white bucks and “April Love,” but you’re getting leathers, applique tattoos and a studded dog collar. Well, it’s been a while since the crooner of the ‘50s was charming the bobby sox off young suburban girls as a wholesome alternative to Elvis Presley. But this? Boone’s appearance in a spoof of heavy metal haberdashery at the American Music Awards last month didn’t set back the clock, it set off alarms.

Over at the Trinity Broadcasting Network in Santa Ana, the phones sang out. Boone, who hosted a weekly show, “Gospel America,” for Trinity, certainly got the attention of the TV parish. A Times report noted that viewers of “Gospel America” had been puzzling for some time over Boone’s journey from pop gospel toward a sort of easy-listening version of heavy metal standards. And though the get-up was clearly a publicity stunt for Boone’s peculiar new album, “In a Metal Mood/No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Trinity President Paul Crouch and his executives declared Boone off the air until they get a satisfactory explanation of his rather rebel performance.

“It’s not the administrators’ objections,” Boone told The Times. “It’s all the donors, their support base, that are threatening them with never sending them another check if they continue to associate with that degenerate metal-head Pat Boone.” Well, the music goes round and round and it comes out here, Pat.

But wait a minute. When was the last time that Boone, who’s been off the pop charts for decades, was on America’s front pages? Did he merely misjudge his audience--or is Pat Boone a whole lot shrewder than we thought?