Silver Machine - William Shatner

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2012, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
> On 06 Jun 2012, at 08:01 , Albert Bouchard wrote:
>> There is and always will be only only one Bill Shatner. If you never saw
>> Boston Legal you might not get him. Like a fine well-kept cigar he gets
>> better with age. It's cool that he murders Silver Machine though, not that
>> I would ever actually listen to it… more than once anyway.
> Perhaps mercifully, he didn't attempt ETI or Astronomy or something ;)

 	I can totally imagine Shatner doing either of those and probably 
no-one should suggest it to him, since records indicate that he has no 
known shame and he might try it.

> Although unfortunately, I _can_ create a pretty good mental "aural 
> image" of Shatner attempting "Dominance & Submission", and even the 
> imagined version is pretty scarring .... ;)

 	I have enough willpower not to follow you there, thank goodness. 
But seriously--or rather not--he's known he's a joke with perfect clarity 
for a long long time now. If you want to see a song that practically 
deserved the Shatner treatment, and worryingly close to topic, witness 
this version of Elton John's `Rocket Man', it's *hilarious* and totally 
self-conscious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvQwXOCKNLY
Space travel, sneaky drugs references and ham acting, served deadpan in 
black tie with the aid of low-grade seventies TV trickery, I think this 
all goes to show it's OK when it happens to something we don't own and 
love ;-)

> PS - The cover of "Iron Man" -- with the participation of Zakk Wylde, 
> heavens help us -- is fairly scarring as it is ....

 	Zakk must have been taken in by the success of Shatner's older 
collaboration with Henry Rollins :-) But that version at least is arguably 
no sillier than the original... Yours,
 					Jon


-- 
   Jonathan Jarrett       "There is scarce any tradition or popular error
Medievalist historian    but stands also delivered by some good author."
        Oxford           (Sir Thomas Browne, "Pseudodoxia Epidemica", 1646)