Ep 20 | Pat Boone | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Pat, I don't, I have been so excited to talk to you because

you have spanned so many decades.

You've seen it all.

You've been there.

You've worked with and and been around

legends your whole life.

You're 22 years old.

It's in the 1950s.

You have your own ABC television show.

The youngest ever to have his own musical variety.

Right.

And that's when there were only three channels.

Yeah, three channels.

Right.

And

here you are in 1955.

And your opening act is Elvis Presley.

Yeah.

Nobody knew him.

So it's not that he was already a big star,

but he was on his way.

But you had more number one hits in the 50s than he did.

Yeah, one more.

One more.

One more.

Still one more.

Still one more.

You are,

they believe, the most recorded voice of all time.

That is in terms of the number of records

songs.

I mean, the most, I mean, of course, you know, many have been played more times.

That's the

catch in it, is that I have recorded more songs, over 2,000 songs in many genres.

Like six different genres that you've.

At least at least, yeah, six different.

That you've charted on.

Charted.

I actually had chart records in jazz, pop, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, movie themes,

patriotic.

How many movies were you in?

I've lost count, but about 15, 16.

I haven't been counting them, so I don't know.

I might miss one or two.

I'm always forgetting something that I did do.

You're in one of my favorite childhood movies, Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I loved that.

And you are a man of deep, deep, profound faith.

Yep.

Yep.

So

I want to try

to just kind of...

go over as much as possible.

All that stuff doesn't really come together logically, does it?

It doesn't.

it does i think i think it's why you spanned and lasted and are as whole as you are i mean what before we went on we were in the dressing room

and

you know you talked about um

kissing shirley and your wife and you teared up and yeah your

love affair with that one woman we just had our 65th wedding anniversary we've begun our 66th

And

she was my high school sweetheart.

Same old story.

We were holding hands at 16, married at 19.

When I graduated from Columbia University, Magna Cum Laude, we had four kids already.

At 23, and I was in the cover of TV Guide in my cap and gown because of the T V show.

And I'd made like four movies and had six number one hit records, and all of this was happening at once.

And somehow we found time to have four children at 23 and graduated magna cum laude at the same time.

So it's been that kind of

life

of being so occupied and in so many directions

for my own good, really.

But really, never, seemingly,

never

misplacing a foot

in a bad way.

The trouble you would get into is Shirley Jones.

You wouldn't,

right?

You wouldn't kiss her.

It's not that you wouldn't kiss her in the movie.

Just that day, you said, I can't kiss you for the movie until I go home and tell my wife and say, can I kiss Shirley Jones?

It wasn't in the script, and the first movie had no kisses.

And I was 21 or two.

And Henry Levin, the director, said, now we get to the end of this music scene, and you lean in and tentatively kiss Shirley.

And I said, on the mouth?

I said he said yes

I said wait a minute Henry I haven't asked my wife Shirley

about how she feels about me doing kissing scenes in the movie I know this sounds terribly naive

but I wasn't planning to make movies I all of a sudden I was but

we hadn't even discussed it and we were having these babies and we had a serious marriage going and I didn't want to disrupt it by coming home.

By the way, I spent half the day kissing our friend Shirley Jones.

So he put it off for later in the movie, and it never happened.

But the word got out in the Hollywood Reporter, the Daily Variety,

the media that Pat Boone had refused to kiss his leading lady and they assumed for religious reasons.

And it wasn't.

I just wanted to stay married, that's all.

So was that...

Were you unusual then, too?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, certainly by Hollywood standards.

I never.

I mean, even back then,

oh, yeah.

I mean, goodness.

You know, Ingrid Bergman was they barred from movies for a while because she had an affair with

the director.

I forget his name right now.

Rossellini?

Yeah, Rossellini.

But then, of course, now

you make the front pages in a much bigger box office if you're having an affair.

And back then, no,

even by the time I happened on the scene,

it was unthinkable that a guy going to make movies might not kiss his leading lady.

Well, it wasn't my decision then, as you said, it was just in that one moment, took me by surprise.

And Shirley, I did talk to her that night.

I said, honey, they want me to kiss Shirley Jones.

And she said, look, I'm ahead of you.

This is Shirley for you.

She said, I've been thinking about it, and I know if you're going to make movies, there's going to be kissing scenes.

I just want you to promise me one thing.

I said, anything, what?

You won't enjoy it.

I said, okay, I promise I won't enjoy it.

And even when I kissed Ann Margaret and Debbie Reynolds and Diane Baker and some of the and Barbara Eden and some of the others I did kiss,

I didn't enjoy it.

And then at least I don't remember enjoying it.

You won't remember this, but we met on your heavy metal tour.

Oh, yeah.

And

I remember you came walking in and you had the lollipop and the chains and the jacket, the leather jacket and everything.

And tattoos.

Yeah.

And people,

here you had been this clean-cut guy for your whole life.

April love, no kiss.

And you lost.

You lost jobs.

Oh, yeah.

Because

kicked right off Christian television instantly.

It went hit the news the next day.

The furor

about my appearance with Alice Cooper on the American Music Awards, giving the award for hard rock, heavy metal.

And me,

he introduced me as the future of heavy metal.

So,

and Metallica, I had done their song Enter Sandman, and they were bowing to me as they came up to receive the award from Cooper and me for hard rock, heavy metal.

And they were bowing to me as their new lead singer, which Hetfield even he was just joking about.

But who is the lead singer?

But

Christian television, you know, TBN, CBN, it looked to them as if I had just sold out and gone over to the dark side and was lost.

How could you have been working with people?

They know you

and them think that.

Oh, I'll tell you.

I'll tell you how.

Because I had notified them in advance that I had done an album of heavy metal classics, but don't worry, I've gone over every lyric, including Stairway to Heaven, which, you know,

Page of, what's his first name of Jimmy Page, was supposedly into witchcraft, and he was,

but I didn't hear any witchcraft

words in Stairway to Heaven.

There was a lot of oblique

references to hedgerows and stairways, but they didn't say anything about drugs.

And so I've gone over the lyrics with a fine-tooth comb, nothing to worry about.

These are okay songs.

They knew, but

they were deluged the next day with telegrams and letters from viewers saying to Paul Crouch at TBN, if Pat Boone comes back on TBN again, I'll never give you another dime.

He's gone over to the dark side.

He's lost.

And so it was that, it was that reaction from the donors

that made them have to take, until a couple of months later, I went on TBN with about 70 Christian bikers who were more hogs and motorcycles out in front of the TBN studios than ever in their history and never were again, even.

But we talked about how quick we had been to, and I myself, I said, look, I got a little of what's coming to me.

for judging people by their appearance.

I had no use for my fellow singers who were into heavy metal and all the screaming and cacophony and I didn't care for the songs or the lifestyle.

I never looked into it.

And I had no regard for them.

But then I met some like Dave Mustaine of Megadeth and Alice Cooper and these guys.

And they read the Bible and they have many Bible references and the heavy metal songs about dancing

too close to the fire.

and

doom is coming and you better be ready.

And so I found out that they were good guys and good musicians, and they were even Ozzy Osborne.

You lived next door.

I lived next to him, and his song Crazy Train, I found to be very valid social commentary.

Because he was talking about how hard it is for young people to tell what's true from false.

hypocrisy, double standards, and we're going off the rail on a crazy train.

And I did what he he considered such a good version of his record, his song, that when he went on the air with the Osborns family show on TV, the first thing you hear is my version of his song.

Crazy, hey, that's how it goes.

And

they liked my version, they played my version as their theme song, not his version.

What did that, what is that, what does that teach you

about how

eager we are to judge one another?

It was a big lesson.

That's what I'm saying.

It was because I went with the j I you know, people, music critics didn't get it.

They thought I was trying to be a heavy metal rocker.

I wasn't.

I was trying to do songs I found to have quality and doing them with big band jazz, really good music arrangements, which all the original musicians loved.

In fact, all the rock groups, Scorpion and Poison and all of them, wanting me to do their songs and treat them with respect as I had these others.

But MCA, they thought my record was a total fluke.

They were happy to get away with it.

It went to number three in the hard rock chart.

It sold out instantly.

But they didn't want to follow it up.

I wanted to.

But

I went up to several, I bought a Harley.

and the Heritage Springer, top of the line, and I had ridden smaller motorcycles.

My wife Shirley had, too.

She was better at it than me.

But I bought a Harley, and then I went to a couple of love rides promoting the album.

And up in San Francisco,

I brought a jacket

and the choker and dark glasses to wear to the love ride, but not on the plane.

So people had seen me walk through the airport in San Francisco and, oh, Pat Boone, I go in the men's room and I change to the jacket and I walk out and they're shunning me now just the appearance

and I realized that's how quick we are to judge people by their appearance and and I the Bible says judge not that you be not judged for with the judgment you judge you will be judged so mom I put on that apparel I was off Christian television.

Ministers and others who jumped to the conclusion I was deceiving some kind of yeah,

and I

realized I had learned a valuable lesson that I

was being judged as I had judged and now I, you know, I became really good friends with a lot of those guys including Alice Cooper, I don't call him Alice now,

it's Coop, and he is the son of a minister and he has a foundation called the Solid Rock Foundation and he has been about building inner city afternoon places for kids to go do something productive, including record.

So, I mean, he and I, you know, we're Christian brothers, but

I had no use for him until I recorded his No More Mr.

Nice Guy.

All right, let me let's go back for a second.

Do you even remember Elvis opening for you?

Was that a big deal?

Oh,

sure, it was.

It was a lot bigger deal than I realized at the time because he wasn't widely known.

But

when I went to Cleveland, I had,

and this is something people just can't believe, and I didn't believe it either until the cold stats were staring me in the face.

But from March of 55, I made my first record, which was a cover of Two Hearts, Two Kisses.

a rhythm and blue song by the charms on the Dewtone label.

One heart not enough, baby.

Two hearts will make you feel crazy.

One kiss will make you feel so nice.

Two kisses take you to paradise.

Two hearts, two kisses make one love.

Okay, million seller.

Next record, you made

me cry.

Ain't that a shame, Fats Domino.

Third record, Crazy Little Mama Come Knock, Knock, Knock.

And I had three records by

October when Elvis

came up to Cleveland from Shreveport.

He was appearing on the Louisiana Hayride and was considered at that moment a rockabilly singer.

That is, he was doing country songs, but with kind of a rock flavor and approach.

Because rock and roll

only was, that phrase was coming into play now.

Yeah.

Did you know Alan Freed?

Did you ever work with him?

I met Alan, and yes, he played my record of Ain't That a Shame.

In fact,

he wasn't playing the original records yet.

He played my record of Ain't That a Shame, but later he started asking his listeners, you want me to play the original record or the cover record?

And more and more they were wanting to hear the original records.

But my record of Ain't That a Shame is what he played.

And so

I was coming up so fast that when I transferred from North Texas State to Columbia University right then, that year, 55.

And in October 22nd, I went to Cleveland to appear on a SOCOP with the nation's number one DJ, Bill Randall.

He picked me up at the airport himself, and he said,

I now transferred to Columbia.

He says, got a kid coming up from Shreveport tonight we want to hear.

And he'll go on ahead of you tonight.

And I said, well, who is it?

And he said, oh, you never heard of him, an odd name, Elvis Presley.

I said, I heard his record on a jukebox in Dallas, Bill.

He said, hillbilly, Blue Moon of Kentucky.

You think it's going to go over tonight?

Isn't this rock and roll time?

He grinned.

He said, well, we'll see.

So that night,

backstage in the Brooklyn High School.

I don't know why it was called Brooklyn in Cleveland.

But 3,000 kids were dancing and Bill playing the records.

And I'm back there.

And Elvis walked backstage with two or three of his buddies, Lamar Fike, I think, and I forget who.

And,

you know, his collar turned up and his hair slicked back and, you know,

kind of twitchy, nervous.

And I said, hi, Elvis, I'm Pat Boone.

Nice to meet you.

And he didn't shake hands.

He just,

nobody taught him how to

at that point to shake hands.

And I said, Bill Randall seems to think maybe some good things ahead for you.

I don't know about that, but I hope so.

And he just leaned against the wall, and the guys gathered around around him again.

I could tell he was uncomfortable.

And so then Bill Randall introduced him as a young fella coming up, and you don't know him, but let's give a nice welcome to Elvis Presley.

And he came out, and he said, Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining.

And

they liked him, the way he looked.

He looked like the bad boy that the girls are not supposed to.

to mess with,

but they liked, but didn't care for the song.

But he did it, and they gave him a polite response.

And then he says, thank you very much.

I'd like to do the other side of that record for you.

And it was, that's all right, Mama.

That's all right with me.

And they loved that, and they wanted more of it.

And he wasn't swiveling his hips or anything.

He was twitchy.

He was kinetic.

He was nervous, and it came out when he sang.

And they liked him.

They wanted more, but he didn't have anything else.

And then I came on with my three hits currently and got all the screams that night.

And then I had two more, three more hits that year.

So, between March of 55 and February of 56, when he hit with Heartbreak Hotel, now this doesn't seem, but anybody can check it out.

I had six million-selling singles, two of them number ones, in that 11-month period before Elvis hit.

So,

he created an avalanche, but I was able to match him record for record during the whole last half of the 50s.

So, when you're when that happens to you, let me just talk to you as

a

performer, as a guy who is

a star and a young star.

Yeah, very young.

Elvis comes on the scene.

You, in 56, you get the ABC show?

Yeah, it's that 57, I think.

57?

Okay, so you get the ABC show.

You may be wrong, 56.

It's in the

57.

And ABC is the...

the network of Disney.

And so you're coming on the scene.

You've got these hits.

You have money.

You have television.

You have fame.

You have people screaming at you.

When you see Elvis start coming up,

did that play with your mind at all?

Yes, because

he was the rebel.

I know we had a lot of the same fans.

They've all let me know in the past, and I kind of knew it then because we were both hot.

I mean,

I would, my record would be number one, and he would knock me out of the number one slot.

My next record would knock him out.

We were seesawing up and down the charts together.

Who did you, wait, hang on just a sec.

Who did you knock out?

When you started coming up, who was the big one?

Well, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher still was singing, Nat King Cole, Frank, Vic Damone.

Frank wasn't having number one records at that point.

He was Frank Sinatra, and he was doing albums, but he wasn't having hit singles.

Okay, all right.

But it was the kids' time.

It was rock and roll time.

Right, right, right.

So we were the hot newcomers.

Right.

But I knew that he was exciting.

I mean, he was a bachelor, and, you know,

he was sort of the bad guy.

He was,

there was a moment in front of the press on TV.

Well, they said, they asked him about two years into it, he said, when are you going to get married and have kids like Pat Boone?

And he kind of gave it that kind of a little lopsided grin.

He said, well, why should I get married when I can,

why should I buy a cow and I can get milk through the fence?

Oh, my gosh.

And of course that sent shockwaves all over the place.

Ministers,

legislators,

teachers, parents.

But the kids, I mean, they loved him.

And they loved Little Richard, whose records I was covering, and Fats Domino.

Did you know those guys?

Yeah, met them all, and we were friends.

We appeared on shows together.

So Elvis was the bad guy, and I realized he was eventually, he was...

Pepper.

I was salt, he was pepper,

and people seemed to like some of both seasonings, you know.

We were competitors but friendly.

We visited each other in homes in Bel Air.

We were both renting.

We played touch football on Sundays, sometimes he had his buddies, I had mine, and we would just play

actually not touch football, it was flag football.

So you tackled somebody by taking the towel out of their belt.

But we also blocked.

And Red West, his stuntman friend, told me once, he said, Elvis, back during that time, he says, you know, that boom hits hard.

Well, I'm blocking.

I mean,

that's what we're supposed to do.

I mean, he wasn't into karate yet.

And so we had that kind of friendly competitor, but we were competition, but we were two boys from Tennessee.

And

he was from Memphis, me, Nashville, and we were both seesawing up and down the charts.

Who did you, let's say in the 50s for a second, did you see anyone like Jerry Lee Lewis

Elvis that you saw and you immediately knew?

Holy cow, that's huge.

Yeah, Jerry Lee, for one.

And if it wasn't for his trip

to England with his cousin.

Right.

It would have, he would have made it, right?

Well, he did.

He made it undeniably because his records, a whole lot of shaken and

great balls of fire.

Those records are such classic records.

Of course, you know, they did a Broadway show

about

the four in the Sun Studio.

They did a Broadway show.

It was Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis,

and Jerry Lee.

And they'd all recorded at Sun Studios.

And Elvis...

on the tape I have at home says, you guys heard Boone's new record?

And they said, no, what is it?

Oh, it's a good song, man.

He said,

but the writer, Charlie Singleton, sent demos to me at Graceland and to Boon, and he got it, and he's already recorded it, and it's a big hit.

And

they said, well, what's it sound like?

And Elvis had his guitar, and this is on the tape I have.

I don't know if it's in the Broadway show.

But he started saying, don't forbid me to hold you tight, darling.

Don't forbid me to hold you tight.

Let me hold you in my loving arms.

Now, I had him because I love low notes, and I could hit the low notes in that song.

And it went to number one, boom, in a hurry.

And that was the one Chris Isaacs can't believe that I did in one hour after I heard it in the studio, and it was a finished recording, was Don't Forbid Me.

And it just because for me, it was such a kick to sing it.

and to have the low notes.

But Elvis,

I tell my audiences when I sing it, if I I tell any of this story, I sure am glad I got it first

because he would have had a very big hit with it, too.

Johnny Cash.

Did you know him before his conversion?

Yeah.

And after?

So tell me about Johnny Cash when you first meet him and your thoughts.

Well, I met him on a plane.

We were flying from west.

East.

I guess he was flying to Nashville from California.

And we stopped, you know, back then

the trans

continental flights weren't always direct.

I mean, straight through.

I think we stopped in Oklahoma City or something, and he got off.

But he, I knew who he was.

I had heard some of the country records, but I also knew that he was getting a reputation of having some

drinking or drugs or whatever.

And he looked very haggard.

He got off the plane, and they were trying to hold the plane for him to get back, but he never came back to get back on the plane so i divined from that he he did have some some problems but

um

later when after he'd had his conversion experience and was really an outspoken christian i did his tv show with him and i forget what i think it was will the circle be unbroken or I saw the light or some good song that we sang together and

we were singing together as Christian brothers.

And he was a very courageous guy.

He came to see me.

He and his wife, June, they were being booked into Las Vegas.

And his Christian friends would say, you shouldn't appear out there in Las Vegas.

You know, that's Sin City.

Why are you going there?

And he knew that I had appeared there and was appearing there and had some records there, actually, of attendance.

And he wanted to see what was my rationale about it.

And I said, look,

wherever you appear, you're going to do your show, aren't you?

You're going to do whatever the songs are you normally.

Yeah.

And I said, the people that are coming to see you are the same people that see you in your concerts or in state fairs or wherever you appear, wherever I appear.

I've learned that,

that

I don't have to be part of everything else going on there.

And the people who come there don't have to be either.

They're looking for just good entertainment.

And if I can give them good family style entertainment, I'll do it.

So, you just go in and you just sing whatever you sing,

including your gospel songs, and they'll love it.

And he did, and they did.

So, I mean, we were two guys trying to work it out how to make it work to be Christians and still be successful as entertainers.

And it's not easy.

Yeah.

The 1960s come,

and the invasion, the British invasion happens.

And this is the first first real bump in your career, right?

Yeah.

Big one.

The Beatles.

Yeah.

Big one.

Big.

Because now the whole room has changed.

The whole world has changed.

Or did it very drastically for a recording artist?

Right.

Because I was making a lot of my money was from record sales, of course.

Even then, right then, when they first hit, and I had heard them for the first time in England, I heard a song of theirs called,

If There's Anything That You Want

Would Love From Me to You, one of their very first records.

I thought, I'd like to sing that.

And I got a copy of their record and brought it home and tried to get Randy Wood of Dart Records to let me record.

He said, No, it's already been out on a label called VJ.

And the head of that company was also named Randy Wood.

I mean, it was weird, but their record had been released and nothing had happened.

And so he said, but you know, they're just English.

They're just an English group.

They're not going to be big.

And

so when they hit so big

and my record sales fell like everybody else's,

I

got in touch with Brian Epstein,

their manager, and got the contract.

I had a guy paint court portraits of the Beatles, oil portraits of each one separately, and then a group portrait.

And he was a businessman, and not the painter.

I had a painter to do that from Holland, but the businessman, a friend of mine, went to Sears and we packaged Beetle pictures.

And I had the license to sell Beetle pictures.

And I made more money selling Beetle pictures for a year or two than I was making from my own record sales.

Unbelievable.

And then.

You know who you remind me of?

I'm sure you know Art Linkletter.

Oh, yeah.

So Art Linkletter, my favorite story is Walt Disney took him to an orange grove and said, This is what I'm going to build.

You should invest, Art.

And Art was like, He said later, I didn't have the courage to say, I think you're out of your mind.

This is going to be a disaster.

When Walt opened the park, he asked Art and a friend, Ronald Reagan, to do the broadcast.

Art said, Because Walt had no more money left, he said, I'll do it for free.

Just give me the receipts for the Kodak counters.

I want the license for films.

Yes, I'd forgotten that.

So he had that license

through the 70s,

which had to be worth so many millions.

Millions.

Art was so sharp.

Well,

I was very proud of this business thing that I did.

And then

that was the reason for my meeting them eventually when they came to the Thomas Mack and did their first concert tour after the Sullivan show.

And because I had brought 30 people from all over the country,

because if you bought those pictures, they had tags on them, numbered tags, and you put your name and address and send them to us or something, or I forget how we collected, but then we brought 30 people out of a literal drawing, and they attended the concert.

And I've got pictures of me, Shirley, and our four daughters on the front row there.

And their concert, which was...

I'd had loud screams and a lot of noise in my concerts too, and Elvis as well.

Nothing like this, though, because it was one solid scream from the time they came on stage until they you could you could hardly tell what they were singing.

If it softened just a little bit so you could tell what the new song was, then it's picked up again.

What was that?

And we met afterwards.

We met between shows and they let me know that they were fully aware of those pictures and Paul said, I like these.

They said, you make us look very good.

And they'd sent out for camera stores to bring them cameras and they were buying cameras and John John Lennon and George and the others were saying, Yeah, those pictures, we like those.

Said, Brian has got our names on a lot of stuff we don't like, is crap.

But we like those pictures.

I visited the cave eventually, their place where they made their first success.

And those paintings are on display at the cave

that I had made of them.

Wow.

And so we

had that kind of a friendship, a relationship.

What did you,

when you were watching this, because you're a performer, you're watching this, and you had to turn around to look at the crowd a few times because it's a wall of screams.

Oh, yeah.

What was going through your head?

What were you thinking?

What was it?

What did they have?

You had to say to yourself, what is happening here?

What did you think was happening?

I guess I knew, Glenn, that

they had struck a chord.

I didn't know how huge it was going to continue to be, that

they would become more famous than Jesus, as John said,

eventually.

But I knew they'd struck a chord, that

they were the real thing.

I mean, they were performing live.

They sounded just like they did on record.

That they were very inventive and creative.

And they were so young that the kids could identify instantly with them.

I mean, by now, I was

I was ten years into my career.

They knew who I was.

In fact, they told me that they had bought some of my records, and this is what Bono of U2 told me, that people like that, that they I didn't it occurred to me that when they were kids,

Elvis and I were the big ones.

Yeah.

And they wanted to be like us.

Eventually they became bigger than than me, at least.

When I met Bono, it was after they got the Beautiful day

record of the year and we're coming into the MCA after party.

And we hadn't met yet, I didn't think.

But

he comes up to about here on me, Bono, and I'm coming in behind him.

I said, I think it's time Buno met Bono.

He turned around and he said,

hello.

He said, but he said, we met before.

He and Edge.

Yeah, you don't remember.

We know you don't remember.

We were just getting started as a group in England.

You were on tour,

and you were introduced to us, and we looked up to you.

And

I think they call themselves the Journeymen.

I'm not sure.

They were thought of as a Catholic rock group in the beginning.

I like Bono.

Oh, yeah, me too.

Nice, smart, solid,

solid citizen.

He's walked some planks out there.

I mean, he's done things for

poor people in countries and gone to meet with presidents and Congress.

I mean, he's really been a statesman.

And he's not your typical guy who's doing that just for the presentation.

No, no.

Let me stop here in the 60s before we finish the 60s.

You had Project Prayer.

This is the year I was born.

I hate to tell you that.

1964.

It was at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

And

you were helping lead this movement to flood Congress with letters in support of school prayer.

It was you, among others, Walter Brennan,

Gloria Swanson, Dale Evans, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Mary Pickford, Jane Russell, Ginger Rogers.

You also,

in the early 70s, hosted Bible studies with Doris Day, Glenn Ford, Jajagor, Priscilla Presley.

Mickey Cohen.

I mean

holy gangster.

Wow.

Yeah,

because

I always, you know, I was going to be a school teacher, I thought.

Shirley and I, when we married at 19, I decided this is what I was going to do.

Just mentioning Shirley right now.

But she thought she was marrying a school teacher preacher.

Because that's, And there was a little

headline in the Nashville, Tennessee, because we were both known in Nashville for singing.

She was the daughter of Red Foley, the great country singer, Hall of Fame.

Can you stop for just a second?

Yeah.

I love how much you love your wife.

Oh,

if you knew her.

Well, everybody loves Mama Shirley, we call her.

But, you know, we were childhood sweethearts and

high school sweethearts.

And we committed the headline in the Nashville paper, a little squib, we have it.

Singers wed devote lives to God.

This was our goal.

And I thought she was so happy because she had had enough of show business and country music.

Her dad read fully traveling all the time and a lot of drinking and stuff going on.

And now she's going to be married to a school teacher with a sedate, calm life,

and two or three kids in a picket fence and

regular schedule and so on.

Literally.

Do they go off the rails?

No.

How do they go off the rails?

Well, I won the Ted Mac Amateur Hour while I was still in high school.

Well, I just graduated from high school, but it was the forerunner of American Idol.

Ted Mac's Amateur Hour was on Saturday nights, big show

on network television.

And I entered a contest in Nashville.

The first prize was a trip to New York and an audition with Ted Mack.

No guarantee I'd get on.

But I went to New York and the audition and I sang, I believe for every drop of rain that falls.

It was a big hit for Frankie Lane, but a song of faith.

And

the voters, I mean, the winners were declared by votes, cards and letters that flowed in from Saturday to Thursday.

And I didn't expect to win.

I was just thrilled I actually got on the show to justify having won the contest in Nashville.

And I went right from that show,

which was live, into the country where I was singing, leading singing in congregational

gospel meetings in the country.

It was the summertime.

And I was in a place called Beardstown, Tennessee.

It was so far out in the country, they didn't have phones.

Now,

this was, what, 53 or something?

no, 52.

And I was having lunch with the preacher and the family that was feeding us, and a car came rattling up in the driveway, scattering pigs and chickens.

And a guy stomps up on the porch and knocks on the screen door and says, Is there a guy named Boone in there?

And said, Yeah, he's having his second or third round of food in here.

Come get him.

They took me to a house a few miles away where a woman had

setup in her home.

I forget what, what am I trying to say?

Receiving calls.

And you can make calls and receive calls there.

And it was Oscar Schoonmacher.

It was like a switchboard.

Yeah, switchboard, that was it.

And

Oscar Schoonmacher was calling me from New York.

Where are you?

And I told him I'm in this Beardstown, Tennessee.

He said, well, you've got to get you back here.

You've won our show.

You're on Saturday night again.

So that's when the Nashville, Tennessean took a picture of me packing to go back to New York.

And I won the second week and the third week.

The cards and letters kept coming in.

And surely say anything at this point like, oh, dear God, no.

Well, we weren't married yet.

Okay.

So, and and it was all just a fluky thing.

And we married after that by winning three times.

I qualified for a showdown with other three-time winners if and when it would happen.

It hardly ever happened.

There are a lot of big stars who appeared on Ted Mac's show and didn't win,

but they went on to big careers.

But I, Shirley and I married at 19.

I moved to Denton, Texas to go to North Texas State, big music school.

But I'm on my way to being a teacher-preacher.

And

I get the call from New York: hey, we've got all enough three-time winners to have

to have a showdown, and we want you to come back.

So I went from Denton back to New York, sang, did well,

I thought, and I had to wait now for the next Saturday, so I'm staying in New York to see until Thursday, staying at a seedy little hotel.

But Arthur Godfrey had a big talent show on Monday nights.

And so while I'm there, I go over to CBS on my own and ask if I get auditioned to be on the Arthur Godfrey show.

And a woman took me in a cold studio

with an engineer and said, Sing me something.

I had no music, so I sang, I believe for every drop of rain that falls.

The same song of faith I had won the Ted Mac show with.

She said, Nice.

Can you come back in three weeks?

I said, Oh, no, I'm sorry.

I didn't tell her I was waiting to hear if I'd won the Ted Mac show.

And I said, No, my wife and I are expecting our first child, and I have to get home.

Oh, well, then we'll put you on tonight.

Tonight?

Wow.

And I had to have a talent scout.

I had to call a friend who could come and present me on Arthur Godfrey's show against two other contestants.

I sang, I believe forever.

That song of faith, and won the Arthur Godfrey Show that night, was on his show the next few mornings.

That led to the

record contract because around Nashville, Tennessee at the time, a local boy,

Ted Mac show, Arthur Godfrey Show, this was all to me just a crazy fluke.

I mean, I was not headed, I wasn't thinking of having a career singing.

I mean, that was too iffy.

I had to have a job.

We were already expecting our first baby, you know.

Well,

by the time I had the fourth child, and on the cover of TV Guide, you know, I had movie contracts, record contracts,

all of that.

And it happened so fast, it was a blur.

Things have changed so much from them.

The people, I don't think, have an idea of

that kind of fame.

Three networks, the entire country knew who you were at that time.

I did a command performance for the Queen while I was still in college.

Crazy.

Go to the Palladium, and the Queen is sitting up in the royal box, and I'm there singing, you made me cry when you said goodbye, ain't that a shame?

And my rock and roll songs.

And we were told that

if you don't get much applause, it's because the queen didn't applaud.

They watch her, and if she likes something, then they'll all applaud.

And if she's complacent about it, then don't be too concerned.

But I got nice applause, and I'll never forget leaving the theater that night.

I had rented a tux.

I'd never worn a tux, but this is a command performance.

Tux.

I didn't know that if you have a tuxedo, you don't put a white handkerchief in it.

So

I thought I was supposed to have a white handkerchief.

I'm in the Dorchester Hotel, and I got some toilet tissue.

Oh, my gosh.

And I did the

style at the time was if you wore a white handkerchief, have it embossed your initials.

So I got a pawpoint pen and put PB on it all the way up here.

And I'm wearing it in the command performance.

Now I'm leaving the theater, the palladium, and the Bobbies are trying to help us entertainers get out to the cars.

They're waiting for us.

And the crowd's out there screaming.

And some fan reached over Bobby's arm and grabbed this handkerchief and ran running up the hall screaming, I got it, I got it.

And I thought she thought I was either the cheapest guy in the world or I had embossed toilet paper.

Oh, that is so funny uh but that but those things are happening so fast so let me go back to the british invasion they were at least still wearing ties and suits and then the 1960s just goes nuts yeah it just goes nuts

what did you think was

what did you think was happening then what what What was your take on,

you know, the king movement was was

one thing then you had Martin Luther then you had Malcolm X but then you had this hippie Woodstock thing that was directly in your and already drug related right and drinking related and

and people's lives being ruined and see the to get back to one of the earlier questions about

about my perspective.

My perspective on my whole career and why I was involved in all these other things, it didn't seem like logical things for an entertainer to be doing, the project prayer and many other Christian outreaches and all that, was because

when Shirley and I got married, and

the foundation of our life,

the way we wanted to live our lives, was to be used by God.

When I was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, I told the audience, and again, it was a tearful night for me because it was in Nashville, and I talked about the attic that I took over from my brother.

My brother and I used to sleep in the same bed a year apart,

almost one year to the day.

We were both born on June 1st, but a year apart.

And I let him have the bed downstairs, and I took the attic, and that was my backplace.

But I remembered praying up there as a kid in high school that God would use my life somehow for his purposes.

I didn't know how that would be, but I just wanted to feel that my life was useful in some way to other people and not just spent on myself.

So that was my goal and now to be honored with

Gospel Music Hall of Fame there in Nashville took me back to that attic prayer time.

But that was

That was the way we were looking at our lives, our purposes.

So whatever happened to me in entertainment,

I looked for ways to try to make it have some significance other than just

fame or money or whatever.

I think that's what has kept you on the even keel.

I found when I left New York,

because I didn't expect any kind of anything.

And all of a sudden, boom, I'm kind of like you, just real quick, just woof.

And you'd had the biggest show in Fox, yeah.

Yeah, and it was just bizarre how fast everything happened.

And I I knew it wasn't me.

And

the last.

That was the sense I had, see, all along.

Yeah.

And

the last night before I was going to go in and tell Roger Ailes that I was leaving,

I had gone to Spider-Man, and they invited me backstage, and I was with Bono, and we were talking about.

They were struggling with the second half.

And my wife looks at me as we're walking back, and she says, if they ask you anything about the show, just say you liked it, please.

And I'm like, no, but I could help.

I know.

So they asked.

And my wife looked at me like, oh, dear God.

And so for, you know, 30 minutes, backstage, hanging out with, you know, these titans.

Sure.

And I get back to the apartment and it's.

floor to ceiling glass.

I grew up wanting to live in New York City.

I'm right in the city.

I mean, for the first time, I was with cool kids.

Yeah.

And I said,

how can this be God's plan?

Look at where we're at right now.

How can this be God's plan to go in and give it up?

And my wife sounds a lot like Shirley.

She said, I'm going to bed.

And I heard Pat as clear as a bell.

If you don't leave now, you won't leave with your soul.

And

in pondering that for a few days after,

I think that's where people, that's where fame and fortune destroy you because it's a nice ride.

But when it starts to go away,

it plays on you so much that you'll do anything to hold it because you want it.

How did you avoid that?

You'll sell out.

You'll make whatever.

And you'll make little teeny compromises and before you know, you're way off.

I see this.

Well,

I've had moments like the one you just described, and a pivotal one would take too long to probably tell you now, but

where

a minister said to me, are you willing to die to your career if this is what God wants?

And it was a moment of prayer up on Mull Holland.

He and I took a walk together.

Harold Bradeson was his name.

And I said, I didn't want to, I never wanted that question to be asked.

I sure didn't want to have to answer it.

But he's asked it, are you willing to die to your career if this is what God wants?

And I said, well, Harold,

I have to be honest, if I know my own heart, I am.

I don't know if I know my own heart, though, when the time comes and the decisions have to be made.

And maybe the little decisions don't seem like big ones, but maybe.

But if I know my own heart, if I know he wants me to give it up, he says, praise God, brother.

He's going to let you know your own heart.

And within days, I was put in a position where I felt like, I mean, I had already recorded an album for a record company owned by Bill Cosby.

They put a lot of money into it.

And they were going to advertise it,

forgive me, but they were going to advertise it with ads and billboard.

Pat Boone sings his ass off on this record.

And I thought, well, I didn't make that up.

That's their doing.

I'll just act like I didn't know it, that they were going to say that.

And then, but this same minister came to my house the next day and said, brother, I don't know if you know what this means, but God just told me to tell you, and it was scripture, be not unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Do you know what that means?

I said, no, I don't know what that.

No, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm just about to sing my ass off.

For Roy Silver, Ed Barski, and the company that owned Tetragrammaton Records, oddly enough, Tetragrammaton is a Greek word for the name of God.

Wow.

But why they called it that, I've never known.

But it was obviously I was going to be recording a five-year contract with unbelievers.

And I had to make the decision.

I was about to go sign the contract.

I called and postponed signing the contract because now I've been confronted.

Are you willing to die to your career?

And so

I went back up on Mulholland and

I got out of bed.

It was midnight.

Shirley said, What are you doing?

I said, I got to go

pray.

And I went up on Mulholland in a misty rain

and asking God,

I've already recorded this album.

I mean, I've already given my word.

If I'm going to commit my life even more to you, does a Christian back out of a contract and out of a

deal he's already made?

I honestly didn't know how to do it.

But I felt there was like a hand on my face and the impression, just tell them your story.

Just tell them what's happened to you.

So the next day, to my manager's great apoplexy, we sat there and I told Barski and Silver and the others about what I'd made a new commitment.

I might be an embarrassment to them going forward

and that I couldn't go along with that ad campaign.

And I liked the album.

It was a good album, Jon Stewart's July, You're a Woman, I had recorded.

It was a chart hit later.

But they listened to my story, and I thought they were going to say, well, you know, then we don't want you if

you're going to be Mr.

Religious Joe again.

Yeah.

And

but instead, they said, this is really interesting.

Joe,

Silver said,

you know, let's just don't have a contract.

Let's put the record out.

We'll scrap that ad campaign.

You can do whatever you want with i mean you can have the say-so about

about our advertising but let's put the record out and if it's a hit it's a hit and if you want to stay with us you stay with us if you don't or if we don't want you we'll just we'll just walk away and my manager was saying but you got to have a contract and royce said well why we trust pat even more now

and so we'll just operate on a handshake And we never had a contract, and I went out, and again, I got a little teary because standing by the parking meter with my manager, I said, you know,

God has just let me know my own heart.

And he's given me the opportunity to put it on the altar, walk away, whatever the consequences, but given it back to me.

But the capper is that six months later, Tetragrammaton went into bankruptcy.

If I had signed that contract, I'd have been tied down for five years.

My contract, I'd have been on a shelf.

So it was not just me.

right you know so those moments and there have been others and with you and to I'm sure where we we get some guidance and we we have to make decisions that

we hope are the right decisions even if they cost us

I um

before

and I've never talked about this before I tell you fantastic story

Before that night that that happened to me, it was about a week before

I had had this feeling for a while that I needed to talk to Billy Graham.

You know, Billy Graham's not taking my call.

Oh, he would have, of course.

And so I'm standing in the hallway and

I said, I just have to talk to Billy Graham.

And that afternoon, Billy Graham calls me out of the blue.

Doesn't know I've been trying to call him.

Really?

And he said,

can you come down to the house this weekend?

Spend an hour with me.

I just want to chat with you.

And I'm like, all right, God.

Get down there.

And

he says, what's happening with you?

And

I said, well,

I'm thinking about leaving Fox.

And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That can't be right.

And I said, I've been praying on it, Billy.

I said, but I just, I don't know, kind of like, I don't

know.

It's insane.

And

he said,

tell me how you know that's from Christ.

And he sat there and he held my hand and

we spoke and we both just wept.

You know him.

Yeah, yeah, very well.

What a great man.

Oh, yeah.

What a great man.

The real thing.

And

his whole countenance on this issue changed, and he said,

that sounds exactly like the Lord.

And

it gave me such strength because

he said to me,

I have tried my whole life to do right.

And then he welled up

in tears and he said,

and I haven't always gotten it right.

He said,

but I've tried.

Oh, yeah.

And he said,

and I know the Lord knows that.

Yeah.

And then he just changed and his eyes became so bright.

And he said, and I don't fear death.

Yeah.

I just don't know.

It's such a great,

such a testimony builder of

you're going to have really tough decisions and, you know, seek his advice, the Lord's advice.

and then do it.

And even if you get it wrong, you were trying.

Yes, I've made mistakes and blunders

that from a business standpoint and professional standpoint were just unwise and maybe they

not what God expected of me, but I was thinking it might be.

So I would try to do what I thought was right.

And later I thought, boy, that was really stupid.

You could have gone ahead and done whatever that was, a role.

in a movie or something.

I've said in the past, I would play Judas

in the story story of Christ because I know how the story ends.

And

I would play the bad guy if I had to and try to do a good job, try to make him a human being.

Because

Judas went out and hung himself when he realized what he had done

right away.

So it is a great story, human, really a human story.

to try to combine

our knowledge and our hope to do what's right with the demands of a secular world that doesn't know him and thinks we're nuts.

You know,

all the other performers have made fun of me, and I repeat the jokes, you know, in my shows.

You know, Dean Martin used to say every show he did for a while, all right, Pap Boone is so religious.

I shook hands with that boy the other day.

My whole right side sobered up.

And Phil Harris with Andy Williams on the Andy Williams show stopped in the middle of the show.

It was not part of the script.

He said, Boone, come on now, level with me, pal.

You drink, don't you?

I said, no.

You don't drink nothing, never?

I said, no.

He said to Andy, he says, can you imagine waking up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you on a field all day long?

And then he says, come on, he says,

he said, Pat, he said, we love you.

I said, we kid you, but we love you.

And he said, if I ever had a son, I'd want him to be just like Pat Boone till he's about three years old.

And so they kid me, but I just tell the jokes on myself

because I know they're funny.

Was it about 1975?

I don't remember when your daughter had

late.

One of the biggest hits of the 70s.

Yeah.

You light up.

Of all time.

It's one of the biggest to this day, one of the biggest, like it was number one, like 13 weeks.

There's one, I think two records matched it.

Dinah Shore's Button and Bows, Buttons and Bows from a Bob Hope film, I think, and The Mills Brothers' Glow Worm.

Wow.

There were two records that were number one

as long as Debbie Boone's record of You Light Up My Life.

And the great story, this is a terrific sh my favorite show biz recording industry story.

She was still living at home.

She was 20.

She and our family had performed together because that was my strategy to keep my four pretty teenage girls in sight at all times.

Yes.

I know that.

I've got my girls all living by me, too.

Yeah.

And so Debbie was still at home.

And Mike Kirb, a guy named Joe Brooks, had written this song, You Light Up My Life for a Movie.

He was the top jingle writer in New York and making a fortune.

and his mistress, Live-In Girlfriend,

had recorded the song already for a movie about them.

It was a real kind of an ego trip thing about them, but the song was beautiful.

But she was holding him up.

You would not sign a beginner contract for Warner Brothers because she was singing in New York.

She hadn't had any hit records, but she was a professional singer, so her agent didn't want her to sign a beginner contract.

She was holding everything up.

Mike Kerb had Debbie come in, first played it for us, you like it?

Oh, it's beautiful

to see if we could put her voice on the record so they could put the record out because the woman was holding them up.

And so Debbie, on the way into

New York with Shirley, had her face to the window and she was singing, you light up my life, you give me hope to carry on.

And she said, I could sing this to the Lord.

Shirley says, we'll do.

So they go in this cavernous studio in New York.

Joe Brooks, very cynical guy,

and just him and an engineer and the tape they had recorded already.

And they had a blank portion of the tape.

And he said, well, let's just hear you sing this song, Debbie.

So they already had all the instrumentation.

All done.

The record was finished.

The other girl finished.

But they had the tape there.

So they just

softened or deadened one of the tracks and let her sing.

And she just closed her eyes, sat on a stool and sang, You Light Up My Life.

And Joe got goosebumps.

Everybody did.

And he started trying to get her to make some changes in what she was doing, and it was making Debbie nervous.

So Shirley said, excuse me, Joe, can I take Shirley in, I just want to calm her down a little bit because she's a little nervous.

Went in the bathroom, he said the most messy bathroom she ever saw, but in a recording studio.

And so

she said, you just go out there and pray and do it your way.

Went back, the next take was it.

It instantly, they just took the other girl's voice off.

They didn't redo the music.

They just put Debbie's voice on, took the other girls off.

And the record became

one of the biggest records of all time.

And people get goosebumps when they hear her sing it and did all along.

And

they just get a feeling because, and I know what it is, it's a spirit.

Yeah, it's the spirit in which she sang it.

She sang it in front of Barbara Streisand,

and her record matched her record of

Paul Williams' song, Not Easy Being Green, I think it was.

One of those songs.

No, no, it was the song she wrote.

That wasn't it, it was the song she wrote.

I can't think of it.

But and then on the Grammys and the Oscars.

But funny thing,

the Grammy, she tied with Hotel California.

And Hotel California, the Eagles,

is about hell.

On their album cover,

on the inside is a picture of Anton LeVay

on purpose

on the balcony of a hotel in Palm Springs.

that represented Hotel California, but the lyrics say you go in and you never come out.

You can have anything you want, but

you'll be sorry.

And that song, and You Light Up My Life

was tied for record of the year.

Interesting.

Hotel California about hell and her song to the Lord, you light up my life.

So I've lived in this kind of,

I don't know, tug-of-war, it seems like.

Although I've loved it,

but

it's been walking a tightrope sometimes.

I just have to tell you this because he's my friend.

I have a friend, Jeremy, and he

I walked into his house.

He lives in Sherman Oaks.

And I walked into his house.

And I said,

this is like walking into somebody's house from the mid-1970s that was a superstar and nothing's changed.

He said, right?

He said, I bought it because it was Debbie Boone's house that she bought with You Light Up My Life, and we can't change anything.

Oh, that's great.

It's a lovely home.

Yeah, it is.

He hasn't changed a thing, and they won't.

And they won't.

Well, good, because it was beautiful.

And they did it.

Let's talk a little bit about

the talent of today.

Let's talk about...

Do you know Michael Bouble?

Oh, no, I haven't met him.

I know who he is, of course.

Great admirer of his abilities.

Yeah.

Who is out there that you say,

wow,

a lasting talent, a lasting voice?

Well, you just named him, and he is

really good.

I mean, he's just got a great native talent.

Have you ever seen him in concert?

No, I've just seen him on television.

You need to see him in concert.

I think he's the and I've seen Michael Jackson and everybody else.

Yeah.

I think he's the best performer on stage I've ever seen.

Well, I agree with that stage performer as well as vocal because

he throws himself physically into it, but in his own way.

He's not imitating anybody.

He sang on the

voice Voice the other night, and he sang a song,

a love ballad,

and

he sang it very slow.

Now, I thought he may have been thinking about Tony Bennett when he sang, The Shadow of Your

Smile.

Tony Bennett sang it so slow, you had to check the speed on your play,

but it worked.

Was it My Funny Valentine?

No, no, it was

a love song.

But I thought, no, no, Michael,

you don't need to stretch that one out because you know what you're going to say.

And so, but I mean, that was just a judgment he made I didn't agree with, but his vocal ability is just unmatched, I think, right now.

Yeah.

Because he can sing most anything he wants and sing it well.

I don't, I

other singers around, I'd have to wrap my brain.

Have you met somebody that was a

mid-charter, if you will, that you thought

if this person would just straighten up their life, have you met anybody who could have been huge, that was just

burned out?

Well, some of my good friends, I mean, Glenn Campbell, you know, he went through

a period, yeah, went through a rough period.

I mean, not before he had the Alzheimer's.

I mean, he got involved with drugs and was messing up his life.

That's too bad.

And there are others I don't want to.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I have.

In fact, that's why I didn't want to be planning on being a singer.

I had early in the going, when I was touring for my first record, I went into some grill some night, one night, with a promotion guy for my record to get something to eat.

And up behind the bar was a guy who'd had one record, and it had been a hit record of sorts, but he was building his life around that one record, and he's up there singing behind the bar.

And I thought, boy,

I can't bank on this.

And when young people have asked me over the many years

about how can I get to be

a star, how can I have the success you've had?

And I said, I can only tell you how I did it.

I made God my agent.

Right.

Because the agents, you know, they can open doors for you.

In the case of God, he gave you whatever ability you have.

And he can open doors and create opportunities.

And he can help you make the most of them when the time comes.

And by the way, like all good agents, he'll expect a tenth.

I remember I got an agent and he said I charged 10%.

I called him about three weeks into our deal and I said, you know, I pay God 10%.

I pay you 10%.

Yeah.

I am crystal clear on what God has done for me.

Yeah, yeah.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're charging the same

rate.

That's another thing I've been scrupulous about, you know,

tithing, because when I was making $50 a week in Fort Worth, doing two TV shows, and I was in school at North Texas on my way to being a teacher,

and doing two TV shows locally on WBAP,

Channel 5, and

a radio show.

Only did it about three weeks.

It was the lowest rating in the history of radio.

It was called Organ Moods.

Ooh, that sounds like a college student reading poetry while a guy droned away on the organ

on Sunday nights late.

And people gave their radios away.

They didn't ever want to come across that by accident again.

But two TV shows, driving from Denton to Fort Worth and back, $50,

what was it, $5.50 taken out withholding.

So I got $4,450, and that was Shirley and I live in on that.

And I tithed it in church, but within a year, I was making more money than I knew what to do with.

And have continued, of course, all this time because

I don't know if I have a similar story,

but I think I've learned a better story on tithing, and that is

I just trust him.

You know, it's not like I'm going to get anything out.

I might not get out what I'm thinking I'm going to get out of it.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

But I just, I just

know it's going to be okay.

Whatever happens, it's going to be okay.

I'd like to know what happened to that woman with the two mites.

You know, she just, she wasn't doing it for show.

Right.

She wasn't expecting anybody to see it, and she'd have been maybe embarrassed.

Yeah.

But she put her little two mites in the collection plate, and Jesus said, see that?

These wealthy guys, they give a lot more.

Yeah.

They do it for show.

But we'll be talking about her for as long as

there's a world to talk about that woman and her two mites.

So, you know, God sees it, and he knows it, and he knows our heart while we're doing it.

And I think we can tithe to other people and their needs as well as to, you know, spiritual programs.

So let me

take one, one, let me take you one more place because it is the center of who you are.

It's God.

Things are changing quickly.

And

boy, are they.

It would not surprise me if, you know, I pop on TV tonight or

my iPhone and it just says,

oh, Jesus came back.

I mean, it's like things are happening and changing so fast, so dramatically.

Right.

And you won't have to read about it.

Yeah, I know.

No, we'll see it.

But one of the things that

I'm fascinated by is

this

lack of connectiveness to God in some way.

And you're seeing the suicide rates go up.

You're seeing all these stats go up because people don't have meaning in their life.

It's what gives us, at least for me, it gives me meaning.

And religion on the wane.

But

you lived through it in the 70s.

After the 60s,

there was this Jesus movement.

Yeah, in the 70s.

Right.

And it was, you know, God is dead in the 60s.

Yeah.

And this Jesus revival.

And it wasn't a church thing.

It was a Jesus revival.

It was in the streets and the beaches and the rivers.

We had 300 baptisms in our swimming pool, but people were going to the oceans and the rivers because the kids were saying, wow, they'd read about what happened on the day of Pentecost.

3,000 were added to the church on the day that the quote church began.

And

they were baptized immediately.

So they looked around.

Well, and many churches in Southern California don't baptize at all.

And if they do, it may be a sprinkle.

But somehow, on that first day of Pentecost, 3,000 were baptized.

So in the 70s,

there were lots of baptisms in the oceans, rivers.

And do you think that there is

a revival, if you will, that's coming, that's more.

It feels to me that man, and I have to be really careful of this, but man is responsible for religion.

God is responsible for the principles.

Yeah.

And man screws up the principles, you know, sometimes with doctrine or greed or whatever.

And there seems to be this disconnect with the stuff that man has created and a beginning of this bubbling up of, I want to do something good.

I want to do something meaningful.

All of the principles.

Do you see that?

Do you see that at all?

Or is it a little darker in your view?

No, no, I do.

I think we are being forced into

a time of choosing.

I think that as the things get worse and worse,

and I just, I read through the Bible every year, and this this the day I was reading in Revelation now I'm up to the yeah I'm up to the book of Revelation the end of all things coming and the horrible things that are in store as as the world gets worse and worse

and even those horrible things are God's attempt to bring the last few to himself even in times of

horrible

travail because

as long as things are going okay, they just don't feel they need him.

So he will finally let things get worse and worse and worse

till we're sort of backed into corners, which is sometimes

where we make our right choices.

But I think the things are crumbling and

we're losing so many of them.

I've made a couple of speeches, had to write them out.

One's called Losing Liberty.

How can we possibly in this country lose liberty?

We're the greatest nation in the world.

We can lose it through apathy, ignorance.

Those two ways we can lose it.

It's being taken from us now.

I mean, right now, they're changing wanting to change the Constitution.

They're wanting to take to call some things in the Bible hate speech.

And they're not wanting

people to stay under God and the Pledge of Allegiance.

And these things are happening.

We're going to have to take stands eventually because

you you remember the up with people

thing a long time ago.

Up, up with people is

people wherever you go, and freedom isn't free.

You've got to pay the price for your liberty.

So I think we're coming to that.

I'm just hoping that we're going to,

that there will be a return.

I think even show business people

are giving people, and they go out of their way to do good things just from a human, humanitarian standpoint, which is good.

And maybe don't get enough credit, but

it's on their part, it's trying to answer the call that I think we do feel.

All of us, most of us, feel that we'd like to, if there is a God,

you know, we'd like

to be in his good graces.

We'd like to please him.

I feel sorry for people like Bill Maher who make fun of anybody who is, quote, religious.

And I understand

how, quote, religion, which is not what God wanted, he wants relationship.

Yeah.

He wants people who want to be like him.

That's it, people.

It's like Gandhi said.

I love this Jesus of yours.

I just don't like his followers.

Yeah.

And it's because a lot of the followers are just as judgmental as Bill Maury is.

Right, right.

And as I say, I found myself guilty of that too.

So

I've been no saint, although technically you can call me St.

Patrick because

you've been around some snakes in your life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

it's a wonderful life to live

believing that God is in charge and that

he'll excuse you and even work with your mistakes and errors and judgment.

And it'll all turn out, if, turn out well, if

you're trusting him.

And that, as we, and what I'm looking at right now, and in the case of several good friends who we've said goodbye to temporarily,

that they didn't die.

They didn't cease to exist.

They moved on.

You don't have to talk about a saint.

That is somebody who, the Bible says, precious in the

sight of God is the death of his saints.

That's in one of the Psalms.

Precious in the sight of God.

Why precious?

Because he brings them to himself.

And that ain't bad.

It's a good time.

It's a time to celebrate.

It is.

If you've become part of his family.

That's the thing.

And we can all, every one of us, can be part of his family.

Okay, kind of rapid fire.

A couple things, just real quick.

Greatest experience of your life, something that you've done that you were like, I cannot believe I did that or I saw that?

I just

I showed, I know this seems trivial, but for me it wasn't.

I was in Dublin making a movie, and I had a couple of days off, and I had a bike.

I was renting a bike so I could ride around because I'm Scots-Irish myself,

and I wanted to see more of Ireland and around Dublin in the spring.

And there was an AAU track meet.

And

I, on my bike, I stood on the wall in the stadium, outside the stadium, watching the thing happen.

Americans and Irish compete.

And somebody recognized me and had me come over.

And I was in the infield talking to some of the coaches while all the things were going on around me.

And I'm in shorts.

He said, you look like you're in pretty good shape.

I said, yeah, I am.

And he said,

you ought to come out here tomorrow and run in our 440 relay.

Our dash man is taken sick.

We're going to have to cancel.

And I said, really?

And he said, yeah.

And I said, well, I never ran track, but I think I'm pretty fast.

He said, no, I was just kidding.

I mean, if you haven't run track,

but I must have wheedled him or something.

He decided, hey, you know, if you want to do it,

we'll talk to the Irish coach.

And we'll do the event.

It won't be official, but, you know, maybe we'll see if we can, if you say you're pretty fast, maybe we'll build up a lead and you can bring the baton home or at least make a good effort.

I said, yeah, I'd love to do it.

I came back, my manager was apoplectic again.

He thought, how can you be setting yourself up like this?

And I came back and they gave me some shorts and some track shoes I'd never worn and the baton.

We practiced passing the baton the safe way with your thumb on the hip.

And the guy comes running behind you and puts it there and you've got to make sure you got it running.

And now they tell me that there's more people in the stands.

They've heard the words around, I'm going to be running in this track meet

against their team.

And they decide they don't want to get beat by three track men and a singer.

And so they bring in Noel Carroll,

who was in Stanford, but he was Irish, and he was running for the Irish team.

He had just set the world record

in the two-mile.

Now he's going to run anchor against me.

Now I want out.

I know this is going to be embarrassing.

But I'm out.

I'm in it.

I can't get out.

And so now the gun goes off and I look down at the, and I see the first 110 yards.

And the American guy builds up about a three-yard lead, passes the baton.

And now here comes up to the second guy, and it's up to about a four or five-yard lead.

And here comes a guy toward me, and I put my thumb on my hip, and I start running, and I feel the baton, and I go take it around, and I'm running.

I said, no man alive could catch me.

But I'm hearing, those are my steps.

And I hear thump, thump, thump.

And this two-miler

world record holder is coming behind me.

And on my phone, and I could show you the picture that somebody sent me recently, Associated Press.

I crossed, I break the tape,

half a step ahead of Noel Carroll.

Wow.

Won the AAU.

Of course, it wasn't official, but it was in Sports Illustrated.

But you mentioned a moment in your life it seemed impossible that i would win an aau track meet that is great uh and there's a picture to prove it just as i'm about to break the tape i say it's probably trivial but but but then being inducted into the rock to the gospel music hall of fame

was a very emotional moment and uh and to me

you know you hear what i'm about what my life is dedicated on and to

that to be in the gospel music hall of fame and now

that that music that they gave me an award for is what, the way we start our day every day, Shirley and I.

That album I did called Songs from the Inner Court

is, it was, it's from the 10th chapter of Hebrews where it says

Jesus took away the curtain,

and we can now come into the Holy of Holies and right before the throne.

And so in my album, Songs from the Inner Court, which Christian bookstores, it was too religious for them because it wasn't performance, it was worship.

But we started every day

to create an atmosphere of worship while we're trying to keep Shirley with me a while longer.

And

so that induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame

is

evidence that what I started out to do has been recognized and by people that I really care about and something that is most important to me.

So that is something that's better than an Oscar, or I'm not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, never will be because

I didn't just record rock and roll.

I had more rock hits than some that are there,

but that doesn't matter to me at all.

But

I like being in the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

I know that

how much you miss your wife.

wife, and I

can't tell you how much it means that you would travel out to take time away from her and sit in a very cold studio

with me for a while.

Well,

I've wanted to do this for a very long time.

I mean, I first started watching you on Fox, and I was cheering you on all the time, and then

dumbstruck when you left.

But now I know you made the right decision, and I'm glad that you're still

speaking out about the right things.

You're like Paul Revere.

I'm glad you use Paul Revere because sometimes people will use people from the Bible and everyone they use dies.

No, stop that.

Paul Revere is okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Paul Revere.

He just kept saying, they're coming, they're coming.

And that's the way I always saw you was

you had the blackboards and you were showing the facts.

that nobody should be able to refute, but they weren't getting the message.

You were putting all the facts up.

A lot of people did.

Yeah, they did.

A A lot of people did.

Oh, yeah, yeah, sure did.

So, Pat, thank you.

Thanks for this time.

It's a privilege for me.