For those who haven’t seen:
https://youtu.be/QuQbus0xfhk?si=rj-XjaOhCt-evltR
Don’t get me wrong the song is chock full of
campy charm. But I have to ask how did this wind up getting made and made in this way? Like what on Earth possessed some music producer to say—“people want a musical summary of The Hobbit and they want Leonard Nimoy to headline it. And it must be preserved on film.” As far as I can tell it was not tied into any other derivative IP from Tolkien. And Tolkien was alive when this came out! Any idea what he thought of this project either before or after?
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One would imagine there to be more on this than there actually is. Unfortunately nobody really seems to have looked into this, and so although ‘The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’ is frequently invoked as a punchline, its exact origins are rarely the subject of much attention. Even the 2019 book The Musical Touch of Leonard Nimoy gives irritatingly little information about the production history of either the song or the video. The result is a frustratingly incomplete, but nevertheless hopefully illuminating, picture of this intersection between the lesser-known parts of Leonard Nimoy’s career and the long-lived but similarly under-appreciated history of Tolkien in music.
As far as I know, the only time Nimoy spoke about the origins of the song was in this interview in 2003 (though he also briefly comments on its legacy in a 2010 Huffington Post interview). From the Vulcan’s mouth:
> TB: There’s another franchise you were involved with, and that it’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I heard from a friend you sang a song, called “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”…
> Nimoy: Many, many years ago, yes. In the late sixties, early seventies, I was doing some recordings, and a producer sent me this song, called “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins,” which I thought it was very charming and I was very interested in the Hobbits stories, and I did make a recording of it, yes.
> TB: Any chance for a re-release?
> Nimoy: I have no idea where the original masters are, to tell you the truth. I am aware that as a resolve of the various Lord of the Rings movies, that some people have dug up copies of that song that I recorded and are playing it here and there, but I don’t expect it to become a major factor. I’m not looking for a wave of Leonard Nimoy Hobbit songs all over the world. I don’t think it’s gonna happen (laughs).
Nimoy doesn’t name the producer here, but it very likely refers to Charles Randolph Grean, who produced four of the five albums Nimoy released with Dot Records (a Paramount subsidiary) between 1967 and 1970. ‘The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’, released as a single in July 1967, would later feature on Nimoy’s second album, Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, in February 1968. The origins of the song seem to be essentially as described above, as Nimoy never actually mentioned it in either of his memoirs, nor indeed went into any significant detail on his four years making music with Dot Records, mentioning none of his producers by name. All I can add is that Nimoy’s children were 12 and 10 at the time, ideal Hobbit age and perhaps explaining their father’s interest.
We do have, in theory, a comment by William Shatner published in his 2016 book Leonard, which says the following:
> Leonard was a big fan of The Hobbit, so it was not at all surprising that he decided to record “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” It was on his second album, and he performed it on several TV shows, including American Bandstand and a short-lived variety show hosted by Ricky Nelson called Malibu U. When asked about it, Leonard described it as a delightful kids’ song but said it fell under the “be-careful-what-you-do heading, because it lasts a long time.”
The problem of course is that Leonard is basically ghostwritten, and all of the information in the above passage can be found on the internet. You can see very easily how Nimoy’s 2003 and 2010 interviews have been used, in conjunction with some basic Googling for Nimoy performing the song on TV. With Shatner basically being a wash, everything that we can realistically say about the specific origins of that song have to be gleaned from Nimoy’s one statement from 2003.
But what about the music videos? The American Bandstand appearance was on 26 August 1967. If there is a recording I cannot find one online, but would be very eager to find out. The video that circulates round the internet actually came first, being part of a musical interlude in an episode of Malibu U which aired on 28 July 1967. The circumstances under which these appeared are similarly obscure, but the music video on Malibu U needs to be understood as promotion for Nimoy’s wider music career, not as a discrete, self-contained project.
The extent to which Nimoy was particularly enthusiastic about his music career is difficult to say, as it was in many ways deeply tied in with his much-resented persona on Star Trek, whose studio also owned the record label he recorded with. The first album was literally titled Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, while Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy featured Nimoy in and out of Spock makeup on the cover, and his fourth album, The Touch of Leonard Nimoy, features the song ‘Maiden Wine’, which Spock sings in TOS 3.10, ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’. I think it is no coincidence that Nimoy’s last album with producer Charles Grean came out the same month that Star Trek aired its final episode, and that his next and final album with Dot Records, which came out a year later, was much more eclectically developed. Even the Malibu U video for ‘The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’ carries artefacts of the sci-fi persona, as Nimoy, who filmed the sequence during the production of Star Trek‘s second season, still sports his Vulcan haircut.
Could Tolkien have heard the song? Yes, as it turns out, although it seems he may have been one of very few people in the UK who did. I don’t have the original source to check on the details, but Tolkien did apparently submit a complaint to (or through) the Performing Rights Society about the song regarding its possible copyright infringement, and received a response in the negative on 20 June 1968. There is nothing to suggest that Grean – or indeed any other producer at Dot – ever contacted Tolkien regarding the song, and it is also fairly unclear where he came across the song. Neither American Bandstand nor Malibu U were rebroadcast in the UK, and neither the single nor the album saw an official UK release either, not least because Star Trek did not air on UK television until 12 July 1969, over five weeks after the show ended its run in the US and over a year after the release of Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy. How Tolkien caught wind of the song is thus rather unclear, and whether he took aesthetic offence to it or simply sought to protect his copyright is unlikely to be known unless someone can check the relevant original correspondence.
The song did not languish in total obscurity, as in 1986, for their second album All-Night Lotus Party, Volcano Suns recorded a cover of the song, which warranted remark in a review of the album in the January 1987 issue of Spin magazine. But the video that now circulates first reached infamy after 26 August 1996 (coincidentally the 29th anniversary of the American Bandstand broadcast), when BBC2 held a ‘Star Trek Night’, hosted by Red Dwarf star Craig Charles, to mark both the 30th anniversary of TOS and to launch Voyager. As part of this special broadcast, radio DJ John Peel presented a 15-minute segment called Funk Me Up, Scotty about the music careers of the TOS cast, which included, for the first time, an excerpt of the Malibu U video that now serves as the core part of the re-edited versions you can find online. This, it seems, is what actually put it in the public eye, just ahead of its rise to Internet infamy following the release of the Peter Jackson films, and eventually culminated in this convention appearance and this 2013 Audi advert.
That said, Tolkien in 1967 was actually fairly involved with one musical production relating to his work. Donald Swann, generally better known as one half of a musical comedy duo along with Michael Flanders, had been taken with Tolkien’s poetry and, with the author’s approval, set several of his poems to music as a song cycle titled The Road Goes Ever On. Recordings have been made and re-released several times, with some expansions over time to include new material. In particular, the 1978 edition saw the addition of ‘Bilbo’s Last Song’, based on a piece that Tolkien had left to his secretary and which Swann was given the chance to read during Tolkien’s funeral in 1973, and the 1993 edition, released just before Swann’s passing, also included a setting of ‘Lúthien Tinúviel’ that he had made some years prior. The only video that exists of Swann performing any of these songs (although I believe there are audio recordings of his doing the full cycle) is this one, an interlude during a Flanders and Swann show in New York during their final tour in 1967 before their (amicable) dissolution of partnership.
Returning to Nimoy, then, what we are looking at really is a kind of unlicensed fan project. Nimoy seemed to want to do some music, Paramount was willing to indulge him, his producer put forward an idea he liked, and a slot opened up on a variety TV show to promote the new single. Although there was an initial negative reaction from Tolkien, he seems to have been successfully convinced that it was not worth his while, and so the tune remained a harmless novelty for decades after its release. Only with the rise of Star Trek to mainstream popularity in the 1980s and 1990s did it even vaguely reappear on people’s radars, and it was amid the Peter Jackson films bringing Tolkien firmly to the mainstream that this particular video came to be embedded in the minds of nerdy fandom.
I cannot answer how specifically Nimoy’s nightmare-fuel song came into being, but it is not at all surprisingly to see Tolkien’s work inspire the popular culture.
In the late 1960s you had Led Zeppelin reference Tolkien’s work in Ramble On, as well as Misty Mountain Hop, and the Battle of Evermore. John Lennon briefly referenced LotR in the Beatles’ “She Said, She Said.” Genesis referenced LOTR in 1970 in their song Stagnation”. And in the 1970s Styx, Rush, and Black Sabbath all had Lord of the Rings inspired songs. And these are just the famous acts. Literally dozens of band and musical acts referenced LOTR in the 1960s and 1970s.
So what accounts for this popularity, particular among musicians? Well this BBC article encourages us to differentiate between the modern “geek” fandom of Lord of the Rings, and the counterculture “hippie” fandom of the late 1960s or 1970s.
>aspects of Tolkien’s worldview matched the perspective of hippies, anti-war protestors, civil rights marchers and others seeking to change the established order. In fact, the values articulated by Tolkien were ideally suited for the 1960s counterculture movements. Today we’d think of Tolkien’s work as being aligned with the geek set of Comic-Con, but it was once closer to the Woodstock crowd. How did this happen?
Hobbits and hippies: Tolkien and the counterculture
LOTR was fairly ever-present in the late 60s culture beyond music; most notably “Frodo Lives” graffiti appearing on subway stations across the globe.
But Music is the most notable reflection of LOTR on the counterculture.
So how does this lead to the nightmare fuel that is “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”? (Well that video is pure nightmare fuel at least for me). It’s hard to say, but I can offer some thoughts. Throughout the 60s and 70s it was extremely common for actors to release typically terrible albums of covers or original songs, to trade on their popularity as an actor. “Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood sing Cowboy Favorites” is a particular favorite of mine, but the most famous one is likely William Shatner’s “The Transformed Man” where he shout-talks through covers of famous songs like Lucy in the Diamonds: “Picture yourSELF. In a BOAT.. on a river. With TANgerine trees AND marmalade SKIES!”
So my supposition is that Nimoy was either approached by a music producer, or approached a label himself; and was hired to create an album. And Nimoy’s popularity in the mid-to-late 1960s was somewhat in the same realm as the counterculture milieu as Lord Of the Rings. Science fiction for sure, but also Star Trek’s focus on a progressive future appealed to the counterculture beyond the Sci-Fi conventions.
So what is a likely subject matter to appeal to that counterculture for Nimoy’s album? Bilbo Baggins would fit that bill nicely.
More about the song and video