Shatner Rules

one morning. They called themselves the Foos Brothers. And no, they didn’t appear to be a vaudeville act.
    They were nice enough fellows, we shared a few laughs and pleasantries, but I wasn’t quite sure . . . who they were. My ubiquitous presence on the media landscape is the result of projects that stem from many meetings such as these, and sometimes I get people mixed up.
    They had a pitch of some sort. I listened politely while craning my neck to get a look at my daily planner. The day was, as usual, very full, and the word “Rhino” was filled in between 10 and 11 A.M. I like rhinos. In fact, there’s a picture of me riding a rhino in my office. What a great day that was when I met the rhino—I also got to swim with an orca and hold some cheetah kittens. Around 1987? My mind was drifting as the Foos boys were pitching; I looked at my rhino picture, and smiled.
    Again, very nice young men, but what did they want—?
    A record.
    They wanted me to record an album. They
used
to be with Rhino Records, and now they had a new label called Shout! Factory.
    Now, Rhino
was
familiar. What did they do . . . ?
    Golden Throats.
    Oh no. The guys who produced
Golden Throats
were in my office, asking me to make a record. Perhaps this could be a perfect opportunity to wring
their
golden throats?
    For the uninitiated,
Golden Throats
was a series of compilation albums released starting in 1988, which featured cover songs performed by people who were not known as traditional singers. Among the highlights: Eddie “
Green Acres
” Albert’s take on Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Mae West singing “Twist and Shout” at an age when she could barely do either,
Dragnet
’s Jack Webb doing a “just the facts” rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Leonard Nimoy hammering away at “If I Had a Hammer” and “Proud Mary.”
    Leonard was one of two artists featured on the album twice. The other was me.
    My renditions of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”—from my 1968 album,
The Transformed Man
—were highlighted on
Golden Throats
. Being highlighted on that album was not a tribute; it was a form of mockery. Needless to say,
Golden Throats
is
not
on my iPod. For one thing, I’d have to know how to put things on my iPod.
    I let these Foos chat on, aware that their intentions for me were probably not the best. I sent my assistant down to the corner for coffee and gave her the wink, which was the signal for “put something nasty in their cups.”
    I clasped my hands behind my head, and let my mind wander again, back many years ago, to the release of
The Transformed
Man.
RULE: When Writing a Lengthy Account of Your Musical Career, Alert the Reader to the Presence of a Flashback so They Don’t Get Confused. . . .
FLASHBACK!
    Sometime in 1968, Fred de Cordova, the executive producer of a famous late night television show, looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Three minutes.”
    I pled, “But the song is six minutes.”
    “It’s two songs,” he insisted, “Do one or the other. If I were you, I’d do the Dylan number. The kids like that.”
    My rehearsal for an appearance on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
had just ended, and we had run through the second track of side one of my album, which was “Theme from Cyrano/Mr. Tambourine Man.” On that tune, I read a poem from Rostand’s
Cyrano de Bergerac
in which “I may climb to no great heights, but I will climb alone” dovetails into Dylan’s song, which I performed as a drug addict hungry for a fix.
    Sound heady? It
was
heady! It was 1968!
    It was the year the Beatles visited the Maharishi, it was the year
Hair
opened, side 2 of the Velvet Underground’s
White Light/White Heat
album featured the seventeen-minute-long “Sister Ray,” the Amboy Dukes took us on a “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” Richard Harris’s seven-minute-long “MacArthur Park” went to number two, Iron Butterfly released the eighteen-minute-long “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Our minds were expanding, and so was our patience for long, freaky pop numbers. And I wanted to be as long and freaky as the rest of them.
    Come on! Six minutes of William Shatner was nothing compared to eighteen minutes of Iron Butterfly, but Fred de Cordova wouldn’t hear of it. I could do Rostand or Dylan, but not both.
    How dare you, Mr. de Cordova? I was a musician! And I had the concept album to prove it.
    And it’s not like I had never