8 / 10
PREVIEW
8
By the time Pat Boone recorded
The Fat Man
, he’d already had ten Top 20 hits, two
of them reaching #1. But his days as an out-and-out rocker seemed over. His most
recent hit, the ballad
Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love)
- a strings-and-harp-dominated
movie theme – reached #5 and was about as far from rock ‘n’ roll as you could get. Its
flip side,
Chains Of Love
, was a revival of a Joe Turner blues song, but it was a slow-
dance number. Pat was no longer a guy covering up-tempo rhythm & blues songs.
So why at that point did someone decide to have him revive Fats Domino’s first
(1950) record, a song that didn’t cross over into the pop charts in the first place? And
why have slim Pat Boone sing
“They call me the fat man?”
True, Pat’s first #1 hit had
been his cover of Fats’s
Ain’t It A Shame
. Nevertheless, the motivation for this record is
hard to fathom.
Although Pat showed on
Two Hearts
(on Volume 3 of this collection) that with the
right guidance he could sing rock ‘n’ roll, he’s not up to it this time. He sounds altogether
out of place.
But that doesn’t matter. The band had listened hard to Fats’s original and they do a
brilliant job of recreating its sound – a basic kind of early rock ‘n’ roll that hadn’t been
heard in years, outside the homes of people who owned Fats’s record. Ignore Pat and
listen to them. Opportunities to rock like this must have been rare on recording sessions
directed by Billy Vaughn, and the musicians seized this one. This is not a ‘cover record’,
it’s an
homage
.