Diving In ‘Baywatch’ Actor Taking Plunge In Domestic Song Market With Release Of His First U.S. Album

It sounds like a bad joke, doesn’t it? David Hasselhoff, beefcake star of prime-time flops “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch,” is Europe’s No. 1 singing star?

What’s the punch line?

If it is a joke, Hasselhoff is going to find out soon. After nearly six years of riding the crest in Europe, he’s releasing his first album here.

We talked via phone last week as he prepared for a day’s work on “Baywatch.” Now in syndication, the one-time NBC ratings loser is watched by millions around the globe. (From Spokane, it airs Sundays at 6 p.m. on KAYU-Channel 28.)

Hasselhoff was sitting in a makeup trailer at 8 a.m. He’d started the day with a 4:30 a.m. workout and knocked off one interview via cellular phone from his steam room. He keeps in shape with a strict exercise program and by avoiding wine and beer, he said.

What, I asked, explains his success as a singer?

“I had a hit song,” he replied, “and with hard work and a little luck I got to the right place at the right time.

“I went over to Europe after ‘Knight Rider’ was canceled (1989) and realized I was pretty popular over there. I was basically out of work and going through a marriage breakup, and it could have been my Ernest Hemingway period where I felt sorry for myself and depressed.”

Instead he recorded a song that got airplay in Austria and immediately hit the top of the charts.

He assembled the show in just two weeks, cramming, he said, “like it was college finals.” He recorded all the music and lip-synced from the stage, including a bit in which he conversed with KITT.

“I was on top of the car, miming and playing the guitar. The next thing I knew, 10,000 people were turning out night after night. I took the tour throughout Portugal, Spain and Finland.”

A producer who previously worked with Englebert Humperdink, Pia Zadora and Germaine Jackson in Europe played Hasselhoff a song called “Looking for Freedom,” which had been a hit in Germany two decades earlier. Hasselhoff recorded it, and his singing career shot into high gear.

“We hit big. We sold 700,000 singles and were No. 1 for eight weeks,” Hasselhoff said. New Year’s Eve 1989, he sang the song before a crowed of 500,00 from the top of the Berlin Wall. That year, he was voted “Most Popular and Best Selling Artist of the Year,” beating out Madonna and Michael Jackson.

He toured for three years in Europe before making his American debut last summer in a pay-per-view telecast from Trump Castle in Atlantic City. A year later he’s ready to take the plunge.

“I know I’m going to sell records, because I have a lot of things lined up to reach my audience - people who like ‘Baywatch,’ who liked ‘Knight Rider,’ who like David Hasselhoff. I’ve got a lot of personal appearances lined up to bring awareness to what I hope is a legitimate release that will get played on the radio.”

Hasselhoff says an appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show” immediately led to nine bookings.

Hasseloff, 42, has plenty to keep him busy. In

addition to “Baywatch,” a spin-off syndicated series in which he will star has just gone into production.

Mention “Baywatch” detractors and Hasselhoff will head you off at the pass.

“I read an article in TV Guide saying that ‘Baywatch’ is America’s ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and that people are watching it because it is so bad. I don’t believe that.

“We’re not doing stuff that is politically correct, as ‘ER’ or ‘Chicago Hope,’ that’s going to win over the snob critics. But I’m sorry, it is the No. 1 show in the world. When I go to see the guy who produces ‘Picket Fences’ and ‘Chicago Hope,’ he says, ‘I wish we had your numbers.’ And I say, ‘I wish we had your writers.”’

Hasselhoff says many of the show’s harshest critics never watch. Inevitably, he says, there are references to sex. Sure, cast members wear skimpy swimsuits. But in “Baywatch’s” entire run, he said, no one has ever had a sex scene.

“And now the American Red Cross has honored us because, they say, at least 20 lives have been saved by people who saw CPR performed on ‘Baywatch,”’ he added.

What American critics ignore, he continued, is that there is more to “Baywatch” than tan, wet, semiclad bodies.

“Around the world, people look at America as the big lifeguard of the world,” he said. “And there’s the further attribute of California’s sun, sand and surf and the American way.”