Pretty darn cool coming from a "Has Been"

Absolutely awesome! Last year at our division Christmas party, we did a "Chinese gift exchange." This is where you draw a number, the first person picks a gift and opens it. The second person can either open a different gift, or steal the first person's gift. This goes on until the last gift is opened.

OK, so I won't bore you with any more of the details... Lets see, where was I? Oh yeah, last year, someone brought in "The Transformed Man" by William Shatner. Seems this was a spoken word CD that Shat had done back in 1968. One of my favorite artists is Ben Folds, and I knew that Ben had done some work with Shat, so I thought that it would be cool to have "The Transformed Man" in my collection. Everyone thought I was absolutely insane for actually stealing the CD from someone else. Needless to say, I didn't have to worry about anyone stealing it from me.

Fast forward to this year. For our Christmas party, I bought a copy of "Has Been," the album that Ben had arranged for Shat back in 2004. When I bought it, I thought "Cool, I wish they had two copies..." Well, I had forgotten that I would have a chance to steal that very copy for little old me. Again, it should be obvious that I didn't have any trouble getting it back for myself.

Now "The Transformed Man" was complete and total kitsch. Thanks to Ben, "Has Been" actually has substance. Shatner does a great job, and with Ben's arrangements backing him up, it is hard to believe that it could be this good.

And of course there are a couple of standouts. You have to love a song that starts out:

Live life.
Live life like you're gonna die,
Because you're gonna.

OK, while this may seem twisted and morbid, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the song is driven home by the list of folks who have "left us"...

Johnny Cash, JFK, that guy in the Stones
Lou Gehrig, Einstein and Joey Ramone.

And wait, it's even better. There is a gospel choir in the background that sings "You're gonna die," and while he is reading the list of folks who have left us, the choir chimes in with "dead" after each line, and follows up Joey Ramone with a soulful "Joey Ramone". And at the end, the choir sings a list of diseases in the background...

Lung cancer, heart attack, diabetes, drug overdose, choke on a chicken bone, hit by a
lightning bolt, spider bite, airplane crash, car wreck, a cap in your ass.

The other standout is "I can't get behind that." It is an almost stream-of-consciousness piece done with none other than Henry Rollins. It would be almost impossible to capture everything without copying it verbatim. Suffice to say, after going through this list of things they "can't get behind," Shatner says:

I can't get behind so-called singers that can't carry a tune, get paid for talking, how easy is
that? Well, maybe I can get behind that.

OK, I'll stop there and let you check it out for yourself if you would like. All that I can say is that I am very glad that I stole this back...