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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[edit] History
[edit] 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 would later be panned on the World Wide Web on the "Captain James T. Kirk Singalong Page", which began serving clips as early as 1993.
In particular, his rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", in which he reads the song's verses in a style as frenzied and overly dramatic as John Lennon's is stoned and affectless, is considered by many to be the worst musical rendition of all time.[1] It regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time".
Shatner has defended 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."
It 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".
His "Mr. Tambourine Man" is also notable for its ending, where Shatner suddenly shouts the song's title in a tortured voice.
[edit] After The Transformed Man
In 1978, Shatner hosted The Science Fiction Film Awards where he performed Elton John's "Rocket Man"[1] (again, in a spoken voice). This performance has been parodied by the TV show Family Guy and musician Beck, to name a few. In this era he also did a handful of other spoken word renditions of other pop songs, such as Harry Chapin's Taxi (performed on the Dinah Shore Show).
Shatner has occasionally spoofed his earlier musical career. At the 1992 MTV Movie Awards he performed all five of the Best Song From a Movie nominees. More recently, he performed 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?". 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 1998 film Free Enterprise, Shatner performed "No Tears For Caesar" in the movie's closing scene with rap artist The Rated R, with Shatner performing Marc Antony's soliloquy from Julius Caesar over Rated R's rap.
In his appearance on the "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" episode of the animated science-fiction TV series Futurama, Shatner recited Eminem's hit "The Real Slim Shady" during a feast, both raising and answering the question of how one can perform a spoken-word rendition of a rap song.
Shatner's spoken-word style was also parodied on The Simpsons, with the radio in one episode playing a spoken-word version of Homer's Christmas carol, "Everybody hates Ned Flanders". In a Treehouse Of Horror episode, the Comic Book Guy (as the super-villain "The Collector") uses "the only working phaser in existence" which "was fired only once to prevent William Shatner from recording another album."
[edit] Has Been to present day
In the fall of 2004, Shatner 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.
On June 9, 2005, Shatner performed a reworked rendition of "My Way" at the presentation of George Lucas's AFI Life Achievement Award, backed by a chorus line of dancers in Imperial Stormtrooper costumes who ultimately picked up Shatner and carried him offstage.
On December 11, 2005, Shatner opened up Comedy Central's Last Laugh 2005 by performing as Lucifer, singing a song about how 2005 was a good year for him as the devil.
On March 29, 2006, TV Land aired an episode of their Living In TV Land series centered on Shatner and subtitled William Shatner in Concert. The episode features footage of Shatner working with Ben Folds on Has Been, plus live footage of Shatner performing with Folds' band and Joe Jackson, ending with a defiant rendition of The Transformed Man's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that is punctuated by Shatner giving the finger.
[edit] Recognition
Florence Foster Jenkins often vies with Shatner for the dubious honor of being cited as the worst vocalist ever. A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation vote put Shatner first, Jenkins second. However, Shatner is 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 (no causality is implied).
[edit] Shatner on Shatner
In an interview in the September 21, 2004 isue of Newsweek, Shatner was asked "Doesn't it bother you that your version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is a camp classic?" He replied,
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- " ...yes, in the beginning it bothered me that people singled it out and poked fun at it. They didn't know what I was doing. The album The Transformed Man is much more extensive than that song. But since people only heard that song, I went along with the joke."
[edit] Music by other Star Trek actors
Shatner was not the only Star Trek star to attempt to record music. Leonard Nimoy's versions of "If I Had a Hammer" and the children's song "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" are widely considered to be comparably camp recordings.
Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols, who sang on some episodes of the show and also in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, also recorded at least one musical album, as did Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In 1997, 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.
[edit] See also
- Mrs. Miller, another singer commonly mentioned as "worst singer ever".
- Golden Throats, a compilation of celebrity singers including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
- The Shaggs, a musical combo (guitars, drums, vocals, songwriting) also commonly found in this company.
