Pat Boone Faces the Music of His Angry Peers

Ornate, red-tufted chairs were arranged in the usual arc facing the studio audience and TV cameras. Colorful flowers tumbled across a large coffee table. A fire glowed warmly in the background. On “Praise the Lord,” flagship program of the Trinity Broadcasting Network in Tustin, everything awaited show time.

The resurrection of Pat Boone.

That came Tuesday, after Paul Crouch, founder-president of this vast Christian network, had promised viewers, “We’re going to put the devil under our feet tonight.”

Of course, the devil--that demon that ultra-conservative Christians love to hate and punch out. Yes, the devil would be getting his--”a couple of black eyes in Jesus’ name”--Crouch vowed later when aiming a friendly laser at Boone’s now-infamous cameo at the televised American Music Awards on Jan. 27.

Boone, 62, a gleaming pillar of the devout Christian crowd and a singer with the snowiest of images, had worn a bare-chested leather outfit, earrings, a studded dog collar, shades and fake tattoos, all in the mode of, yikes, hard-rock heavy metal.

Devil music.

Boone’s presentation of an award to the band Metallica had the amused Shrine Auditorium audience buzzing, as did the recipients naming him their leader. The gig and garb were a gag, Boone would explain later, a way to promote his new album, “In a Metal Mood/No More Mr. Nice Guy,” which appropriates the musical milieu of the unsaved and unsanctified to pitch the gospel. Surely the reborn community would get the joke and understand the intentions of its model citizen.

Unamused, though, were multitudes of devout Christians who responded with puzzlement and even outrage, feeling betrayed by Boone. They included Crouch, apparently. A month and thousands of protest calls later, he pulled Boone’s half-hour “Gospel America” program from TBN, which continually asks viewers for money. “You have to be sensitive to your supporters and your donors, and I don’t apologize about that,” Crouch said on TBN Tuesday.

So Boone was on the “Praise the Lord” talk show to explain himself not just to the high judges of the ultra-conservative wing of Christendom but also to the many TBN watchers whom Crouch said had threatened, “Get Pat Boone’s show off or I’ll never send you another dollar.”

Such tongues anyone can comprehend.

TBN may have found “Gospel America” unfit because of Boone’s fashion statement on the music awards telecast, but business is inevitably business. Balancing the entrepreneurial with the spiritual, it knew a star attraction when it saw one, with Crouch predicting at the start of Tuesday’s two-hour Boone-a-thon that it would draw one of TBN’s largest audiences. Not that anyone would learn the show’s Nielsens, however, for audience ratings for “Praise the Lord” are not measured in April, a TBN official said afterward.

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Boone’s appearance affirms again, nonetheless, how TBN has grown enormously, in part by adopting some of the star-marketing techniques of secular TV. And no wonder. The more viewers, the more souls potentially saved. The more souls on account, presumably the more donors for TBN.

And the more admirers, perhaps, even among the heathen set.

“If you tuned in thinking there’s gonna be a knock-down, drag-out brouhaha tonight, you’re gonna be disappointed,” said Crouch. He was right.

Damage-control spin surfaced, of course, this being such an embarrassing family spat. And so did the usual TBN paranoia, with Crouch condemning the media for their “misguided and weird twist” on the Boone backlash, accusing even conservative columnist Cal Thomas of “tacky” comments about TBN dropping Boone’s “Gospel America.”

What Tuesday’s viewers got mostly, though, was an utterly compelling discussion the likes of which rarely occurs on TV--one smarter, deeper and more thoughtful than those found on 99.9% of mainstream secular talk shows.

Joining host Crouch and Boone on the panel were actor Leon Isaac Kennedy, former heavy metal band member Jeff Fenholt and the Rev. Jack Hayford, pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys.

Almost defiantly, Boone wore a black shirt and tight black leather pants. But he also wore his trademark corny white bucks, a signal to TBN viewers that he required no demon-cleansing.

He said: “The perception is I’m a reject now. I’m an outcast.” He added later: “A lot of folks thought I sold out, copped out, jumped ship, who knows what? And they had a panic reaction, and even though I think they should have waited . . . I do understand why they acted the way they did.” He said he also understood TBN’s decision to zap “Gospel America.”

Yet Boone also recalled the “disdainful looks” he drew recently while wearing a leather outfit to pose with bikers in San Francisco as a promotion for his album. He said he told the bikers: “I’m just getting a little taste of what you must live with all the time. Because you have a tattoo, because you have a ponytail, because you ride on a motorcycle, because you got a black leather jacket, folks look at you like you’re some kind of zoo exhibit or something.”

Crouch acknowledged a “knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Christian community, because in our minds heavy metal was this absolutely demonic, backward-masking, right-out-of-the-pit-of-hell. . . . “ Further words now failed him.

“Sure, depraved, and I felt the same thing,” Boone agreed.

“It’s a lifestyle, though, more than just the music,” Fenholt added from personal experience. Now a TBN favorite, he used to perform in the bands Armageddon and Black Sabbath, and still dresses in black and wears his hair long.

After reading a letter from a protester noting “the power of symbols,” Crouch sighed deeply. “It wasn’t so much the record [music], Pat, it was the dress. It was the dog collar. I think what upsets the people most . . . is that dog collar is S&M; it stands for sexual perversion.”

Hayford, who is both Crouch’s and Boone’s pastor, suggested that response to the dog collar was actually “an anger toward all the people that symbol represents”--in other words, a “venting of an unrighteousness in ourselves.” It was a subtle but wise point, for this is a crowd that professes love even for sinners. Hayford cautioned against anger masked by righteousness.

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Meanwhile, Boone mentioned that he not only liked some Metallica music (including one of its songs in his new album) and found band members to be “nice guys,” but also that the group played a cut from his album as the crowd dispersed from its recent concert in Madison Square Garden. “I seem now to have communications with people that I never had before,” he said. “We have some common ground now.”

But Crouch wondered about the heavy metal in Boone’s album: “Can you take a demonic song and get it saved?” Boone said yes.

The audience, including a contingent of Christian bikers supportive of Boone, applauded. “My mind and my spirit are open,” said Crouch.

It remained to be seen just how open. A viewer poll during Tuesday’s program voted 500 to 50 for resuming Boone’s gospel show on TBN, and Crouch said that its resumption would be contemplated. As late as Thursday, though, TBN was not commenting on its future.

Tuesday’s “Praise the Lord” played portions of two videos with music from Boone’s album. It’s hard to say if any epiphanies took place. By the end of the program, though, Boone had been nudged into making a partial apology (“To whatever extent somebody was wounded, I am very sorry”) and the participants not only had opened a wider window of understanding but also had done it their way.

The devil under their feet.