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.