William Shatner's musical career
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William Shatner's musical career has yielded a unique, much-criticized, and much-parodied body of work. Shatner, a vocalist, typically speaks the lyrics instead of singing them, typically as an exaggerated interpretive reading.
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The Transformed Man
Shatner's musical career began in 1968 with the release of his first album, The Transformed Man. Shatner used the album to compare contemporary pop songs of the period to the works of William Shakespeare by providing dramatic readings of Shakespeare interspersed with dramatic readings of the lyrics of songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Mr. Tambourine Man". However, this first release was widely mocked and parodied. The album was panned on the World Wide Web on the "Captain James T. Kirk Singalong Page", which began serving clips as early as 1993.
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
In particular, his rendition of"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" is considered by many to be the worst musical rendition of all time.[1] (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2995901.stm) It regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time". Shatner defends his "stylings", refusing to acknowledge it as an experiment that went wrong, and insisting instead that it was an acting performance from the perspective of an LSD user - the song has often been abbreviated to LSD. This piece of music has been singled out by both Dave Barry and Mad magazine as being, in Mad's words, "truly unfortunate". George Clooney, for instance, chose this as one of the Desert Island Discs he would bring along if marooned - as an incentive to leave the island. He said, "If you listen to [this song], you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it to get off this island."
Florence Foster Jenkins often vies with Shatner for the dubious "worst" honour. A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation vote put Shatner first, Jenkins second. However, Shatner is a Canadian, so this may be favouritism, or the fact that many more people have lived through Shatner's song: most of those who heard Jenkins are now dead.
The song was recently voted in a BBC poll as the worst Beatles cover of all time; also making the ten worst in the poll was Jim Carrey's cover of "I Am the Walrus".
Leonard Nimoy responds
Shatner was not the only Star Trek star to attempt to record music. Leonard Nimoy's version of the children's song "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is also widely considered a comparably poor recording. It chronicles the basic story of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, .
Nimoy's "If I Had a Hammer" is reputed to be worse. It may be that "Baggins" is more commonly used as a comparison to cast more light on how truly incomparably bad Shatner's vocals are. It is rumoured that the two of them may have conspired to release the worst album ever, just to see if Star Trek fans (who were not at that time the cash cow they are now) would buy it. There may be some truth to the rumour, considering Nimoy's success as a comedy film director.
Not too long ago, MCA Records released a single-CD compilation of Shatner and Nimoy's collected music output, under the title Spaced Out: The Very Best Of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner. It included the above songs, plus other contributions. In 2004, Shatner released a new album titled "Has Been". Produced by Ben Folds and featuring a cover of Pulp's "Common People", it was aimed deliberately at the hipster audience to whom The Transformed Man became an unintentional classic.
After "The Transformed Man"
In 1978, Shatner hosted The Science Fiction Film Awards where he performed Elton John's "Rocket Man"[2] (http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/02-2.html). This performance has been parodied by the tv show Family Guy and musician Beck, to name a few.
In recent years, Shatner has been spoofing his earlier musical career, performing in the same style for a series of Priceline.com television commercials. One such commercial featured Shatner with frequent collaborator Ben Folds performing an irony-laden version of the Diana Ross hit, "Do You Know Where You're Going To?". In his appearance on the animated science-fiction TV series Futurama he recited Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" song during a feast, both raising and answering the question of how one can perform a spoken-word version of a rap song. Shatner also appeared on Ben Folds' "In Love" (on the album Fear of Pop: Volume 1), a "song" about how love can go ever so wrong.
In the fall of 2004, he released a new album entitled Has Been, produced and arranged by Ben Folds and with songs composed by Shatner and Folds. The LP has been critically acclaimed for its unique "pop-driven" style. Its sole cover, a version of Pulp's "Common People" performed with Joe Jackson, has received good notices, often to the surprise of the reviewers.
See also
External links
- Voted worst Beatles cover of all time (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2995901.stm)
- William sings "Lucy" (http://www.johnclare.com/toys/shatner/shatner.wav) - hear a sample for yourself
- Simon Davies Chart of the Flops (The Flop 20) (http://www.scbd.connectfree.co.uk/flops/index.html)
- William Shatner in the Sky (http://www.deviantart.com/view/7156316/)