Fans of William Shatner’s work away from the bridge of the starship Enterprise will remember that 2011’s Seeking Major Tom wasn’t the former Capt. James T. Kirk’s first foray into music. His singing career (OK, insert joke here) actually began with the release of The Transformed Man — and some would say ended not long after when he performed his take on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” during a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.
“I had to perform ‘Mr. Tamborine Man’ out of context and without the context you didn’t know what I was doing,” Shatner tells Billboard.com. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”
That context, Shatner goes on to say, was “to take classical literature and put music behind it, perform it and then segue into literature of the present day which were some of those good songs that had good words to it and of course music so the material in the classical literature would either affirm the meaning of the song or be in contrast to the song. For example Cyrano de Bergerac’s speech ends, ‘I may climb to no great heights but I will climb alone,’ and then it segues into a drug song, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ of a man who can’t climb alone, who needs the sustenance of a drug.”
Some would say you might need the same sustenance to get through the former “Star Trek” star’s performance, too:
Shatner’s original intention, he says, was to perform the suite of songs as he does in the above video, but a Carson producer said television time constraints wouldn’t allow for that — thus wrecking the performance.
“He said, ‘Well that’s six minutes, we only have time for three,'” Shatner remembers. “So I did the three-minute cut of the song and I looked over at Johnny Carson while I was doing it and I saw him mouthing, ‘What the fuck?’ That’s one of the stories I tell and from that moment on nobody took me seriously and I couldn’t take myself very seriously.”
Finally, something we call can agree on.
Shatner, by the way, is appearing on Broadway beginning this month. His one-man show is called “Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It.”
Here’s a look back at our review of William Shatner’s Seeking Major Tom. Click through the title for complete review …
WILLIAM SHATNER – SEEKING MAJOR TOM (2011): Jesus, seriously? I have a sense of humor but this is just absolute garbage. William Shatner’s 2004 project with rock piano great Ben Folds, Has Been, was actually an entertaining diversion — tongue fully in cheek, yet it had musical merit: serious fun. This is pure junk, the work of someone with too much time on his hands, access to recording equipment, and a totally ridiculous cast of supporting band members. What you end up with is the kind of thing you pull out for friends with the jokey warning of “get a load of this” rather than Has Been‘s “no, seriously, check it out, it’s actually pretty fun.” Too bad.
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