Time was when a person who aspired to a career in show business was expected to have several talents. The late Leonard Nimoy was a trouper of the old school, with an old-school actor’s survival instinct. We all know the role of Spock both defined and kind of destroyed his life as a castable character actor—though I would point to his post-Star Trek work on Mission Impossible and in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake as signs of vitality. In order to keep the pipe lit, Nimoy worked as an actor, director, and TV presenter, a writer of books, a photographer (notably of mystical Jewish erotica), and, even more intriguingly, a recording artist. Of his five studio LPs, a few were clearly Star Trek-derived novelties (e.g., “Highly Illogical,” from his 1967 debut, The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy). But Nimoy’s oeuvre was expansive enough to contain other kinds of fantasy numbers (“The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” from the same album), as well as a host of easy-listening covers of both hits (“Everybody’s Talkin'”) and deep cuts (“I’d Love Making Love to You”) from the period during which the folk craze of the previous decade finally melted all the way down into the MOR idiom. Unlike the hilarious, histrionic recordings of his Enterprising colleague William Shatner, Nimoy is just a very pleasing, semi-conversational singer, the way any actor who expected to find work used to have to be. He just stumbled into a strange career that required him to wear pointy ears on his album covers from time to time. A noble life. Just listen:
Highly Illogical
Everybody’s Talkin’
The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins
Let It Be Me
I Walk the Line
Proud Mary
I’d Love Making Love to You
Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town
Nature Boy
If I Were a Carpenter
