William Shatner

Long before William Hung ever tormented us with his tuneless, rhythmless crooning, another William released an album of off-key, off-kilter cover tunes and meandering, self-indulgent poetry that has since become a cult classic. Yes, if you haven’t heard William Shatner’s dramatic readings of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” off his 1968 album The Transformed Man, you haven’t experienced true kitsch in its all its guffaw-inducing glory.

Now, a mere 36 years later, Shatner is back from the Star Trek convention wilderness to grace us with a followup, the brilliantly titled Has Been. At first blush, the timing of Shatner’s return to the recording studio seems calculated to cash in on America’s sudden fondness for entertainers who can’t sing. But this time around, the former Captain Kirk has a secret weapon - a musical Spock up his sleeve, if you will. Has Been was produced, and most of its tracks co-written, by Ben Folds, and with the help of his pure pop brilliance, Shatner has improbably recorded a great album.

What makes Has Been so remarkable is the number of different levels it works on. Songs that seem hysterically funny on the first listen reveal depths of bittersweet pathos after you’ve hit the repeat button a few times. “At my age I need serenity,” Shatner intones on “It Hasn't Happened Yet,” “I need peace. It hasn't happened yet.” His portentous delivery of these lines elicits laughter at first, but the honest sense of longing behind them eventually wins you over. It's impossible not to be moved a guy this unshakably sincere.

It doesn’t hurt that Has Been is strewn with more talented collaborators than your average big-name hip-hop album. Joe Jackson enlivens an astonishing cover of Pulp’s “Common People”; British electronica gurus Lemon Jelly produced the gorgeous accompaniment to “Together”; Henry Rollins stops by to deliver a few rants on “I Can’t Get Behind That.” Folds even enlisted pop novelist Nick Hornby, of High Fidelity and About a Boy fame, to write a sweetly hilarious monologue for “That’s Me Trying.” Maybe best of all, country star Brad Paisley lends his plaintive voice and guitar to “Real,” a song he wrote for Shatner that perfectly showcases the actor’s gift for rendering the absurd (in this case, Star Trek fans writing to him asking him to solve the world’s problems) with absolute, unflappable dignity.

But it’s really not all about the guest stars, or even about Folds and the catchy, note-perfect tunes he cooks up to accompany Shatner’s hammy, spoken-word delivery. The star of Has Been really is Shatner himself, fearlessly offering himself up for ridicule with a sly, self-deprecating smile. “I can’t get behind so-called singers that can’t carry a tune, get paid for talking,” he fulminates on “I Can’t Get Behind That.” Then he mutters: “Well, maybe I can get behind that.” When it’s done this well, so can we. - Andy Hermann

Toward the end of Star Trek's run, William Shatner released The Transformed Man, a collection of spoken word interpretations of popular songs and recitations of poetry pitched halfway between middlebrow art and trippy trendiness. With his overheated, hysteric delivery supported by syrupy strings and studio trickery, Shatner sounded like a psychedelicized Rod McKuen, and The Transformed Man was every bit a period piece as anything McKuen penned during that time -- such as the largely (and justly) forgotten Frank Sinatra concept album A Man Alone. The difference is, where A Man Alone was pompous, pedestrian, and dull, The Transformed Man was pompous, bizarre, and thrilling, a truly strange, compelling miscalculation that was ignored at the time but turned into a cult classic over the years, partially due to Shatner's iconic status as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but mostly because it was flat-out, fall-down funny. Perhaps it wasn't intended as comedy, but by the time Rhino featured his histrionic versions of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" on their 1988 compilation Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off, there was no doubt that they were now considered comedy records, and soon they were well known -- so well known that fans of those two cuts may not have realized that the rest of The Transformed Man was filled with readings of Shakespeare and obtuse poetry that somehow spoke to existential struggles with identity, winding up as some sort of a concept album. Its status as a cult comedy classic didn't get how weird the whole thing was, but it didn't really matter, since "Lucy in the Sky" and "Tambourine Man" were really funny, whether they were taken in the context of the album or removed from it.

By the late '90s, Shatner's status as a serious actor had long since faded, and he was best known as a caricature of Captain Kirk -- not really for the work he did on Star Trek, but how it was parodied, and the songs from The Transformed Man fed into that image, leading to a lucrative role as a Priceline.com spokesman. In those ads, he revived his musical career, but there was a difference this time around: he was in on the joke. Around the same time, Ben Folds enlisted Shatner for a guest vocal on his 1998 Fear of Pop project, beginning a friendship that later blossomed into a full-fledged collaboration on Has Been, Shatner's long-awaited return to recording. Arriving in the fall of 2004, Has Been was released at the height of a Shatner resurgence that those late-'90s Priceline commercials kick started. He had another round of commercials for the company -- this time also starring his longtime comrade Leonard Nimoy -- and a co-starring role in the prime time series Boston Legal, which was a spin-off of the long-running TV drama The Practice, where he had won an Emmy for his guest spot as a sleazy lawyer. Things were breaking in Shatner's favor because he had embraced the overblown, cheerfully smug caricature, playing his persona instead of playing a character. Because of this, it was reasonable to expect that Has Been would be a cheerfully comic record, an album designed to be a comedy album, unlike The Transformed Man, whose humor was unintentional. That's not the album Has Been is. Sure, there's a good dose of humor throughout the record -- not only is Shatner hamming it up, but Ben Folds can never resist a joke -- but that's only one element on an album that's as weird and bewildering as The Transformed Man. In many ways, Has Been is its polar opposite -- there are no baroque arrangements or psychedelic effects, it's grounded in rock & roll and jazzy lounge instrumentals, its message clear, not deliberately cryptic. But the most shocking thing about the album is its sincerity. There's only one cover of a big pop tune, and it's Pulp's "Common People" -- one of the great singles of the 1990s, but a standard only in Europe, and largely unknown in America. While it's played on Has Been with a knowing wink, the song itself is intended to be funny: in Jarvis Cocker's hands, the wit cut like a blade, while Shatner blusters his way through it, but the difference is in delivery -- Shatner knows what the words mean, and he delivers it with an actor's precision. It's funny, but it's sincere, right down to how Folds brings his idol Joe Jackson in to snarl the chorus, so the cover works as a piece of music, not just as a novelty.

That's the approach of Has Been in a nutshell, but the album gets far stranger very quickly as Shatner begins a series of spoken song-poems, all but two written by him and revealing his introspective musings on love, life, work, fear, disappointment, regret, and everyday mundane things that get on his nerves. Even the two songs not written by him -- "That's Me Trying," Nick Hornby's tale of a neglectful father ham-fistedly reaching out to his adult child, and Brad Paisley's peak behind the personal ballad "Real" -- feel autobiographical, feeding into the sentiment that this record functions as a kind of last testament, Shatner getting everything off of his chest while he still has a chance to do so. That he's doing it while cracking jokes, or while Folds crafts the title track into a mock spaghetti Western theme, just makes the entire project all the more surreal and oddly affecting. It may not be an album that's as funny or timeless as The Transformed Man, but Has Been is every bit as bizarre as that cult classic, giving Shatner the distinction of producing two of the strangest footnotes in the history of popular music, as well as celebrity culture. And that's gotta count for something. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide