The album that made William Shatner fall in love with The Beatles
One way or another, mentioning William Shatner in the same sentence as The Beatles is destined to generate a response from fans of either the Star Trek icon or the legendary and influential band.
Shatner’s famous – or perhaps infamous – cover of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was named as the single worst Beatles cover of all time, proving so detestable that it managed to defeat Pinky and Perky’s butchery of ‘All My Loving’ to claim the top spot.
Appearing after a monologue called ‘Spleen’ on his 1968 debut album The Transformed Man, hearing Shatner take on The Beatles is forever seared into the memory upon first listen. In fact, it took on a life of its own, as future collaborator Ben Folds – who produced his 2004 effort Has Been – explained to Kevin Pollack: “He didn’t even know what he had done; it was just like, he just left. And then it became this huge cult classic.”
However, despite being the record on which ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ first appeared, it wasn’t Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that first saw the erstwhile Captain Kirk fall in love with The Beatles. During an interview with Music Radar, Shatner instead named The White Album – which coincidentally released the same year as The Transformed Man – as the one that sent him head over heels.
Explaining the impact it had on him, it was Shatner’s embracing of emerging technology that turned him onto the album’s substantial merits: “I bought an iPod years ago, and I needed some music to put on it. I knew somebody with over 4,000 songs on his iPod, who said that he would download his music onto mine,” he said.
Adding: “Once we did that, it was interesting: I realized that I had that person’s musical soul on my iPod. I was assuming his musical taste.”
While shooting a scene at night, Shatner found himself with some time to kill, and he decided to spend it listening to music he’d never experienced before: “I’m scrolling through, scrolling through, and I come to the ‘White Album’,” he continued. “With the headphones on, the quality of sound was amazing – I could hear all the intricacies in the music. That’s when I fell in love with The Beatles.”
Despite his connection to The Beatles, though, Shatner never got the chance to work with any of them directly, even if Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry did come mighty close. In the book The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years, producer Susan Sackett dropped the bombshell that Rodenberry almost partnered up with Paul McCartney.
Noting that “Paul contacted him and was a Star Trek fan”, McCartney gave Roddenberry an outline for a story focusing on “bands from outer space and they were having a competition”. This was during the period Star Trek was off the air following its third and final season in 1969, but would have nonetheless added another fascinating wrinkle to Shatner’s bizarre infatuation with The Beatles.
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