‘Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy’: when Spock created one of the most bizarre albums ever
There’s always been a joke in Hollywood that all actors want to try to be singers at some point. Johnny Depp has been spending the last half of his career chasing his dream of becoming a rock star, and how can we forget the many ventures where Russell Crowe tries his hand at becoming the swaggering rock god he always wanted to be? It’s not like it’s impossible for artists to make that transition, but one of the strangest vanity project albums by an actor came from Mr Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy.
Then again, I don’t really think “vanity project” is the right word for this. That usually implies that an artist is just throwing money at a passion project that is destined to be relegated to the bargain bins the minute that it comes out. No, no… when Nimoy decided to try his hand at music, the people came to him.
Rather than profiting from his acting career’s success, the album Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy began in Charles Green’s mind at Dot Records. While his label was far from a novelty label, he had the idea of putting together a project featuring bits and pieces of songs related to Star Trek. If they couldn’t get anyone to sign off on the rights, then why not get one of the guys who was actually in the show?
According to Nimoy, he was open to the idea and even saw a little bit of success from his turn as a recording artist, telling Maidenwine, “Dot contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in either speaking or singing on the record. I said I was very interested in doing both…That was the first album we did, which was called Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space. It was very well received and successful enough that Dot then approached me and asked me to sign a long-term contract.”
This kind of thing wasn’t new in the world of Star Trek. William Shatner had already been putting out spoken-word albums where he talked his way through some of the greatest pop songs ever made, but Nimoy’s debut actually beat him to the punch, coming out in 1967 while Shatner made The Transformed Man in 1968.
Then again, Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy works much better as his sophomore effort. Compared to the other vanity projects that try to ignore their celebrity for a few hours, the best part about this album is how much they lean into the joke. Although Nimoy delivers every line in his stone-cold expression as Spock, hearing songs like ‘Highly Illogical’ are actually pretty decent novelty tracks that were clearly done with a lot of love.
And at the risk of sounding like an uncultured philistine, Nimoy’s version of this kind of music might actually be better than what Shatner. For all of the big names that he’s worked with in the past, Shatner’s music usually fits into this uncanny valley where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh at it or cry at the thought of him taking this whole thing deadly serious.
For Nimoy, he’s not putting on any kind of pretentious act. He’s just looking to have a good time in the studio, and it’s not like the reward didn’t pay off. While ‘The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’ may have just been an album track when it was released, the song did see a little bit of a resurgence once The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy started to make waves.
Actors might just be looking to have fun every time they go into the studio and try their hand at music, but what Nimoy did was far from just the standard karaoke fodder. This was his attempt at bridging the gap between the album format and his time onscreen, and just like his extraterrestrial alter ego, he managed to take us to places that no man had ever seen before.
