October 10, 2004

William Shatner's New Enterprise

OS ANGELES

"THIS is the nerve center of the William Shatner schedule," said his assistant, Chris Carley, by way of welcome to the actor's nondescript office in the North Hollywood area of Los Angeles. The décor tells the story of Mr. Shatner's peculiar life in the arts. One set of shelves contains a full set of the two dozen-plus "Tek War" and "Star Trek" science-fiction novels Mr. Shatner wrote in the 1990's. On another sits a miniature model jet, with the logo for Priceline.com, for which he is a pitchman. Near the entrance hangs a poster for the recently rereleased "Incubus," a pre-"Star Trek" avant-garde horror film with dialogue entirely in Esperanto, the language invented in 1887.

There were no mementos from some episodes of Mr. Shatner's career. For example, no sign of the video "William Shatner's Spplat Attack" (2002), described on its Web site as "a sci-fi-themed paintball war scenario," and no copies of his 1968 album, "The Transformed Man." That record, a passion project produced at the height of his television fame, alternated covers of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" with soliloquies from Shakespeare. It was forgotten until a number of tracks were excerpted, out of context, on the 1988 album "Golden Throats."

Mr. Carley delivered a Subway sandwich to Mr. Shatner's inner sanctum, where the 73-year-old actor discussed "Has Been," his latest foray into music. "I'm trying to distill moments of my life, so I can enlighten my loved ones," explained Mr. Shatner. His frequently parodied speech patterns - halting, stentorian - were in full effect: "This album was made. For the people I love. So that they can remember. What it was. I was feeling, thinking." Occasionally he paused to take an enormous bite out of the sandwich.

"Has Been" is likely to turn expectations of Mr. Shatner on their head. For one thing, it is a highly autobiographical and sometimes moving effort. The subject matter shifts comfortably from the profound to the ridiculous. For example, the lone spoken-word piece, a moving elegy about the 1999 drowning death of Mr. Shatner's third wife, Nerine, is followed a few tracks later by "Ideal Woman," a kind of tango for his current wife, Elizabeth, in which he wryly recites his fickle tastes. "I love what you wear 'cause you're wearing it/ That shawl/ That clinging dress/ That svelte black jacket/ Those leopard capris.../ Well, maybe not the capris."

Remarkably, the album coheres. While it has affinities with the inadvertent self-parody of musicians-turned-reality TV stars like Jessica Simpson and Ozzy Osbourne, "Has Been's" wide emotional range is quite unlike those efforts.

The sincerity of the venture is confirmed by the fact that "Has Been" was produced by the singer-songwriter Ben Folds, a critically acclaimed and well-respected piano man who has had several records on the pop and alternative rock charts. Mr. Folds gathered a cast of equally esteemed pop-culture collaborators for the recording. Guests include the singer-songwriters Aimee Mann and Joe Jackson, the punk icon Henry Rollins, the country star Brad Paisley, the guitarist Adrian Belew and the British novelist Nick Hornby. And it's not just in music that Mr. Shatner is having a career renaissance: the album comes two weeks after the actor's first Emmy, won for the role of the amoral lawyer Denny Crane on "The Practice." This season he will reprise the part on "Boston Legal." In early 2005, his own reality TV show, "Invasion Iowa," will make it debut on the Spike TV network. (In late September, in a headline-grabbing incident, it was revealed that he had set up a bogus film shoot in Riverside, Iowa, as a front for the show.)

To hear Mr. Shatner tell it, his choices have always been deeply serious albeit quirky. He defends "The Transformed Man" as a noble if unsuccessful effort to relate classical literature to the modern literature of song lyrics. With its unvarnished creativity and strange vulnerability, the album impressed Mr. Folds: "I got it at a yard sale as a kid, and that's how I got a little Shakespeare burned into my head. And hearing that next to Bob Dylan, that's pretty interesting. It might be laughable to someone that's older or thinks they've got it all figured out, but I just locked onto his voice and his timing. It's classic American 1965 orator. When I hear it with my adult ears, I can laugh along with anyone else, but I still think there's more method behind the madness than people appreciate."

The collaboration developed out of a friendship that began when Mr. Folds asked Mr. Shatner to appear on his album "Fear of Pop, Volume 1" (1998). They later appeared together in a Priceline commercial. In early 2003 , Shout! Factory, an eclectic-minded entertainment venture, asked Mr. Shatner if he would cut a new album. The company is run by the Foos brothers, the same entrepreneurs who reissued excerpts of "The Transformed Man" as comedy. Mr. Shatner surprised them when he persuaded Mr. Folds to produce the sessions.

Early on, Mr. Shatner wanted to know that he was not misplacing his trust. He didn't want to further caricature himself. He recalls the key moment in the planning sessions with Mr. Folds: "I asked Ben: 'What am I going to do? I've never written a song.' And he said the key words: 'Let's tell the truth. I'll make the song, and you go write and tell the truth.' "

Mr. Folds was adamant about working with collaborators who would share his respect for Mr. Shatner. "I've become really aware of class in the world of pop music, like the difference between Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie," Mr. Folds said. "You will equate Bowie with being cooler than the Springsteen. I recognize Bill as being a brother in working-class entertainment. You do your job, you do it with integrity, and you don't worry about the reviews and what the cool kids think. Everyone that worked on his record had working-class upbringings. There was a boldness about it that the art school students usually weren't into." As proof of his thesis, he cites artists like Tori Amos and the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne who refused to appear on the album.

Mr. Folds edited Mr. Shatner's thoughts and stories into lyrics, then created suitable musical backdrops like doo-wop and sugary pop. The album was recorded live, over two weeks, in a Nashville studio. Figuring out how to bridge the gap between Mr. Shatner's musically untrained voice and Mr. Folds's polymath abilities presented a final challenge. The duo turned it into a strategy.

"Many older guys who are singers lose relative pitch," Mr. Shatner said. "They're like me. In fact we thought of Johnny Cash and his last albums as a kind of template as where to go." Indeed, the effect is similar to that Mr. Cash had on his unlikely covers of contemporary artists like Nine Inch Nails and Beck. As Mr. Cash's booming voice transformed those songs into his own, Mr. Shatner's signature cadence prevents him from being overshadowed by his collaborators. To this day, Mr. Shatner is only partially aware of their bona fides. During the interview, he referred to Mr. Hornby as a playwright and seemed unfamiliar with Pulp, the authors of "Common People," a working-class anthem that he covers as the opening track of "Has Been."

Mr. Folds is cautiously forecasting audience response: "I realize some are going to hear 'Has Been' and it's going to be a bit of a shock to the system. At first they're going to be, like, 'Oh that wacky William Shatner,' but then they'll go back and say 'Wow.' If it's funny, it's funny on his terms."

Alec Hanley Bemis has written about pop culture for The New Yorker, LA Weekly and Slate.