"Beam me up Scottie, I'm ready to ride/ To take my place at the helm of the Enterprise/ And boldly go through the starry skies/ Hey, I've proved my worth on Earth/ I'm a Star Trucker - a Star Trucker/ and it's time for me to go interplanetary."
Diehard Slim Dusty fans must have been a little bemused by track four on the 1997 Makin' a Mile album, the story of a trucker who dreams of stepping into the shoes of Captain Kirk and taking his driving skills into space.
From a man who released 106 albums in his lifetime, is it all that surprising that one of the 1,000-plus songs is Star Trek-themed?
It was certainly no secret that my grandfather had a bit of the larrikin about him and was not above having a laugh at himself.
After all, while bush ballads celebrating people and landscapes of Australia were the bread and butter of Slim's work, the song that truly launched his career was the tongue-in-cheek tale of "A Pub With No Beer" (recorded on April Fool's Day, 1957).
Although "Star Trucker" did not have the meteoric success of "A Pub With No Beer", it announced to the world one of Slim's lesser known interests. Yes, Slim Dusty was a Trekkie.
To be fair to the truly committed Trekkers, he was not fluent in Klingon, did not attend fan conventions in costume, nor have enough dialogue memorised to casually intersperse it through his conversations.
But he was a fervent viewer of the original TV series and movies and proud owner of the associated paraphernalia: a poster signed by Leonard Nimoy and other original cast members, an alarm clock that issued a wake-up call in Klingon as well as English, a limited edition phaser replica and a model of the starship Enterprise which was suspended by a piece of fishing line (another of his pastimes) outside his 'den', at a height which clocked taller visitors on the head.
David Baxter, who was director of strategic marketing at EMI in the late '90s and had worked with Slim for more than a decade, remembers his surprise at discovering Slim's interest in the pop culture phenomenon when visiting him at his Sydney home.
"He had all these VHS tapes [of Star Trek]". It became the inspiration for EMI's gift to Slim on the anniversary of 50 years as a recording artist with the company in 1996. "What do you get someone who has everything?" A visit to the Star Trek set at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, of course. "He had such a buzz about it," recalls Baxter.
Very Sad
I just saw this guy for the first time over the weekend on my kids Wiggles DVD, it is very sad to see he has passed away.