William Shatner – "It Was a Very Good Year" (1968)

But now the days are short

I’m in the autumn of the year

(I’m “in the autumn of the year”?  IN MY DREAMS!)

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured Pulp’s big Britpop hit, “Common People.”

And the next 2 or 3 lines will feature William “Captain Kirk” Shatner’s very odd cover of that song, which was released in 2004 on Has Been – his second album.  (God willing, it will be his last album – although it is being reported that the 94-year-old Shatner plans to release an album of heavy-metal songs sometime this year.)  

But today we’re featuring a track from his debut album, The Transformed Man, which was released in 1968 – 36 years before Has Been.

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It may surprise you to learn that the original Star Trek series was not a very popular show.  In fact, the show was cancelled by NBC in 1969 after only three seasons on that network.

The show’s star, William Shatner, saw the handwriting on the wall when Star Trek’s ratings sank during its second season.  “I honestly did not think we’d pull through to a third season,” Shatner later told a reporter.  “I was . . . sure we were to be canceled.”  So he began to look around for other projects. 

Shatner bought the movie rights to a book he liked and had a script based on it written, but it the project never went any further.

He also released one of the oddest record albums of all time.  The Transformed Man combined readings from Shakespeare and other authors with spoken-word covers of pop songs. 

One reviewer hit the nail on the head when he wrote that the songs on Shatner’s album are “really, really awful.  In fact, they are so awful that they're great!”

Here’s what another reviewer said about The Transformed Man:

It’s unclear if Shatner is merely having a good time and goofing around, or if he’s embarrassingly dead serious. . . . The result is a must hear (unintentional?) comedy classic.

There’s no way Shatner had his tongue in his cheek when he did this album.  I would bet dollars to doughnuts that he was as being serious as cancer when he recorded The Transformed Man.

Click here to hear Shatner’s mashup of Hamlet’s “To be, or not be” soliloquy with “It Was a Very Good Year,” which had been a big hit for Frank Sinatra in 1966.

Click here to buy that track from Amazon.

Pulp – "Common People" (1995)

She came from Greece

She had a thirst for knowledge

She studied sculpture at Saint Martins College

“Common People” is a snarky song about a Greek art student that Blur frontman Jarvis Cocker wanted to sleep with.  Unfortunately for Cocker, the woman had no desire to sleep with him.

If she had slept with him, I’m pretty sure the song would have been quite a bit less snarky.

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Cocker met the woman in 1988 while both were students at the Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London.

The woman told him that her father was very wealthy, but that she wanted to move to Hackney – which was a very sketchy neighborhood at the time – and “live like the common people.”

The singer in “Common People” tells the woman that even if she rents a crummy, cockroach-infested flat and spends all her time dancing, drinking, and screwing, she’ll never truly be one of the common people because “[i]f you called your dad, he could stop it all.”

Cocker – whose father had deserted the family when he was seven – knew that people with rich daddies will never have a clue what life among the “common people” was really like.  His song heaps scorn on “class tourists” like the Greek art student who “think that [being] poor is cool.”   

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“Common People” is considered by many to be the greatest of all the records that came out of the Britpop movement of the 1990s.  (My personal Britpop favorite is Blur’s “Parklife.”)

The producers of a 2006 BBC documentary about “Common People” went through Central St. Martins enrollment records in an unsuccessful attempt to ascertain just who the Greek art student in the song was.  (They thought they had identified the woman in question, but Cocker told them they were wrong after watching a video interview of her.)

In 2015, a Greek newspaper concluded that a different female artist was the subject of the song, but that woman – who was the daughter of a textile magnate and went to Central St. Martins at the right time – has neither confirmed or denied the rumor.

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Click here to watch the official music video for “Common People.”  (It’s dreamy!)

Click here to buy “Common People” from Amazon.

 

Beatles – Rubber Soul (1965)

I thought I knew you

What did I know?

Oy vey!  Who knew that I would have to listen to so much kvetching when I didn’t include a Beatles album in my list of the greatest albums of rock music’s “Golden Decade”?  

(Like I don’t have enough tsuris in my life already!)

Some of you nudniks have a real mishegas when it comes to the Beatles.  So I’m going to give in and add a Beatles album to my list.  

But which Beatles album?

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Some of you think that Sgt. Pepper should have been on my list.  

Are you kidding me?  When it has dreck like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” and especially “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which may be Paul McCartney’s worst song ever?  

Others of you have nominated Abbey Road.  

Side two of that album is pretty great.  But side one has “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Oh! Darling,” and “Octopus’s Garden” – all of which are horrible!  (And let’s be honest: “Something” kind of blows as well.)

How about The Beatles – a/k/a/ “The White Album”?  

I’m willing to cut the Beatles some slack on this one because it’s a double album.  But there are sooooo many bad tracks on The Beatles.  “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Don’t Pass Me By,” “Yer Blues,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Honey Pie” . . . need I go on?

Let It Be?  Spare me!  Other than “Get Back,” Let It Be reminds me of one of those collections of B-sides and unreleased tracks that record companies put out to squeeze every last dollar out of a group’s fans. 

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That leaves Rubber Soul and Revolver.  (The earlier Beatles albums aren’t really albums – they’re just agglomerations containing a few hit singles and some filler  . . . which is what most LPs were back in the day.) 

If I absolutely have to include a Beatles album in my list, I could live with either of those.

Unfortunately, Rubber Soul is marred by the truly execrable “Michelle.”  But otherwise the album represents the Beatles when they were at the height of their greatest-boy-band-ever powers – it’s chock full of perfect little two-minute-plus pop songs like “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Think for Yourself,” and “Run for Your Life.”

I’m surprised that the longest song on Revolver is barely three minutes long.  The arrangements on that album are much more layered and complex than those on Rubber Soul, but most of the songs on Revolver have relatively simple and straightforward structures.  (There’s nothing comparable to “A Day in the Life.”)

Revolver marks George Harrison’s coming of age – “I Want to Tell You” and especially “Taxman” are exceptional songs.  

Lennon and McCartney contributed some winners – e.g., John’s “She Said She Said” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” and Paul’s “Got to Get You Into My Life” – but also a few losers.  (“Here, There, and Everywhere” is a waste of time, and my life would have been better if I had never had to listen to “Yellow Submarine.”)

I think Rubber Soul represents the high point of the Beatles’ existence as a group.  Things started to get complicated for the Beatles after the release of Rubber Soul.  They stopped functioning as  a cohesive unit – John and Paul became rivals instead of partners, and George sort of went his own way.  Drug use began to be a real problem.  

Revolver may have higher highs but it also has lower lows – and it’s less of a Beatles album than it is a Lennon-McCartney-Harrison album. 

If I could pick and choose individual tracks, I’d go with Revolver.  But if I had to listen to one of those albums straight through, I’d choose Rubber Soul.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Since the concept behind this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days is albums in their entirety – we’re looking at the whole, not the sum of the parts – that means Rubber Soul gets the nod.

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Click here to listen to Rubber Soul.

Click here to buy the UK version of the album from Amazon.  (For some reason, Amazon doesn’t sell the U.S. version of the album in digital form.)

     

Monks – Black Monk Time (1966)

Cuckoo, cuckoo

Who’s got the cuckoo?

So far, this year’s “28 Posts in 28 Days” has been a bit of a yawner.  

It’s hardly surprising that I included records like Pet Sounds and Led Zeppelin I and Tommy and Let It Bleed in my list of ten great “Golden Decade” albums.  No one with a lick of musical taste would question those choices.  But they’re a bit predictable.

So I decided to shake things up with the last of my picks.

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Admit it, you’ve never heard of the Monks and their one and only album, Black Monk Time.  And you would have almost certainly gone the rest of your life without becoming acquainted with the amazing songs on that record were it not for my wildly successful little blog.

The Black Monk Time album cover

But it’s your lucky day!  Bow down before the one you serve – you are not going to get what deserve!  Because 2 or 3 lines is a merciful blogger.  You who have been walking in darkness are about to have that darkness turned into light.

And while I’m at it, I’m also going to make the rough places smooth . . . no charge!

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The five Monks were American soldiers who met in 1964 when they were all stationed in Germany.

The band’s look – they tonsured their hair, and dressed up in robes and rope belts like medieval monks – was weird enough.  But the songs on Black Monk Time are a thousand times weirder than the group’s appearance.  

The Monks getting tonsured

The Monks started out playing covers of American rock-and-roll hits for other GIs at bars near the army base where they were stationed.  

In 1965, they showed up at the door of Polydor Records with an LP’s worth of original songs.  It’s amazing to me that a major label agreed to release an album of such radical music, but that’s exactly what happened.

The band toured West Germany to promote the Black Monk Time, but it did not sell well.  

After a two-week mini-tour of Sweden in early 1967, the Monks learned that Polydor had decided not to release their album in the United States.  Apparently, the antiwar sentiments expressed in some of the songs on Black Monk Time were considered too controversial for American tastes.

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Before you poo-pooh the record company’s decision, you might want to listen to the album’s first track, “Monk Time,” which kicks off with a demented-sounding spoken rant by Monks frontman Gary Burger:  

All right, my name’s Gary!  Let’s go, it’s beat time, it’s hop time, it’s monk time!  

You know we don’t like the army.  What army?  Who cares what army?  Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?  My brother died in Vietnam!  

James Bond, who was he?  Stop it!  Stop it!  I don't like it!  It’s too loud for my ears!  Pussy Galore’s comin’ down and we like it!  We don’t like the atomic bomb!  Stop it!  Stop it!  I don't like it!  Stop it!

Polydor released records by Jimi Hendrix and Cream that year, but the Monks were a little too much for them to handle.

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“Monk Time” is so bizarre that you might assume it’s not representative of Black Monk Time as a whole.

Take my word for it.  The other tracks on the album – which include “Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice,” “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy,” “I Hate You,” “We Do Wie Du,” “Drunken Maria,” and (last but certainly not least) “Cuckoo” – are just as odd.

But in addition to being odd, the music on Black Monk Time is oddly compelling – and (dare I say) delightful.  

Give the entire album a listen.  I’ll bet that by the time you get to the end of it, you’ll think it’s delightful, too. 

Click here to listen to Black Monk Time, which finally released in the U.S. in 1997 – 30 years after it was recorded.

Click here to watch The Transatlantic Feedback, a 2006 documentary about the Monks, on Amazon.