They were promoting a William Shatner Album.
Kirk is going to need all the help he can get...
William Shatner's version of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds is considered by many to be the worst musical rendition of all time.[1] It regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "Worst music of all time". Shatner defends his "stylings", refusing to acknowledge it as an experiment that went wrong.
The rendition, along with an equally bizarre rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" by Shatner, was released in 1968 on an album of Shatner's vocals, The Transformed Man. The album was widely panned on the World Wide Web on the "Captain James T. Kirk Singalong Page", which began serving clips as early as 1993.
It is often compared to Leonard Nimoy's version of the children's song The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, which is widely considered a comparably poor recording. It chronicles Bilbo's adventures including outwitting trolls.
Nimoy's "If I Had a Hammer" is reputed to be worse. It may be that "Baggins" is more commonly used as a comparison to cast more light on how truly incomparably bad Shatner's vocals are. It is rumoured that the two of them may have conspired to release the worst album ever, just to see if Star Trek fans (who were not at that time the cash cow they are now) would buy it. There may be some truth to the rumour, considering Nimoy's success as a comedy film director.
Florence Foster Jenkins often vies with Shatner for the dubious "worst" honour. A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation vote put Shatner first, Jenkins second. However, Shatner is a Canadian, so this may be favouritism, or the fact that many more people have lived through Shatner's song: most of those who heard Jenkins are now dead.
If (gasp!) you actually appreciate the position, irony, and execution of this and the remainder of The Transformed Man, it might be worthwhile for you to explore performance poetry and the list of performance poets.
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