Up Till Now: The Autobiography

looked at me peeing into the bottle, then her face just lit up with joy and she said, without pausing, “I’m your biggest fan.”
    And to which part of me are you addressing that compliment, madam?
    While I was very pleased that Star Trek was finally getting the attention it deserved, financially it wasn’t doing me any good at all. The actors received only a small royalty for the first few reruns, but nothing after that. There had been some benefits, of course. For example, it was while Star Trek was on the air that I had launched my renowned singing career. Until that moment my singing career had been limited to auditioning once for a Broadway musical and being told by the director to focus on acting. But in 1968 Decca Records asked me if I was interested in doing an album. I hesitated, I wasn’t a singer—but then it was pointed out to me that the first note of the musical scale is do.
    During appearances on several talk shows I had spoken the lyrics of several popular songs without causing any permanent damage. But on my first album I wanted to do more than that, I wanted to explore the unique relationship between classic literature and popular song lyrics. I wanted to emphasize the poetry of language, in both its written and musical forms, used to express the extraordinary range of human emotion. That was my concept for this album.
    What I decided to do was find a selection of beautiful writing and use that as a lead-in to a song that complemented it. Or at least served as a corollary. For example, I would use a selection from Cyrano de Bergerac ending, “I can climb to no great heights, but I will climb alone,” to segue into Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which had been interpreted to be Dylan’s allusion to his experiences with LSD— and I would perform it as a song sung by an addict bemoaning the fact that he is incapable of surviving without his drugs. In much the same way Hamlet’s classic speech, “To be, or not to be,” led directly into “It Was a Very Good Year,” made famous by Sinatra.
    It all made perfect sense to me. But apparently it was a bit obtuse for some other people. Okay, for many other people. All right, for most people.
    The album was called The Transformed Man and Johnny Carson invited me on The Tonight Show to promote it. I decided to do the Cyrano-Tambourine Man cut on the show. It went very well in rehearsal, but it was six minutes long. Producer Freddy de Cordova told me I had to cut it down to three minutes. “Just choose the literature or the song,” he told me. Hmm, I decided I would talk the song, which would be more commercial and certainly more popular.
    Here, let me talk a few lines for you: “Hey. Mister. Tam. Bour. Ine. Man. Take me for a trip. Upon your magic swirling ship. My senses, have been stripped. My hands can’t feel to grip. My toes too numb to step...”
    As I finished this song I glanced over at Johnny Carson, who had a look of astonishment on his face vaguely similar to the look on Spock’s face when his brain was missing. Without the literary lead-in, I was singing the song as a drug addict looking for a fix. Hey, where are you, Tambourine Man? I need you, I’ll follow you anywhere.
    The song was inexplicable to the audience. What the hell is that guy doing? The reviews were very mixed; while some critics wrote that it was the worst album ever produced, others felt just as strongly that there had never been an album like it ever before.
    I didn’t mind. I’d pushed the envelope, perhaps I’d pushed a little too far, but I’d tried. I’d taken a creative risk. I’d tried to do something unique, something very different. And I’d learned very early in my acting career that you can’t improve without taking risks, and sometimes that means making mistakes. The good news was that now I knew for certain that I had a lot of room to improve. I mean, a lot of room.
    Years later, decades later, my debut album The Transformed Man would lead directly to one of the most successful commercial ventures of my career—and another album! But the only reason I was permitted to... let’s call it singing... sing on television was because of Star Trek ’s loyal fan base.
    The end of the initial run of Star Trek ’s seventy-nine episodes was actually the beginning of an entirely new phenomenon. For me, Star Trek was done. The only thing I expected were a few pitiful checks for the first few reruns. At that time there was no such thing as