The nice comedic songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer handed away at 97 yesterday, outliving one of many writers credited with penning the “advance” obituary that The New York Instances had been holding for a few years, a phenomenon that generally happens with notable individuals who stay longer than anticipated. Lehrer may also have been amused by the individuals who heard information of his passing and expressed astonishment that he hadn’t already kicked the bucket. He launched his first album in 1953 and retired from stay efficiency in 1967, by no means to return, though he continued to put in writing and document new songs in studios for one more decade.
Some mistook his withdrawal from public life for having died; design/stop-clapping-this-is-serious-20030301-gdgcoz.html” goal=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>A 2003 Sidney Morning Herald profile of Leher started, “Phrase that we’ve secured an interview has folks across the workplace launching into such unlikely but infectious ditties as ‘The Vatican Rag,’ ‘Smut’ and Lehrer’s ode to spring pursuits, ‘Poisoning Pigeons within the Park.’ It additionally has folks asking with a stunned tone: ‘Is he nonetheless alive?’”
It’s enjoyable to think about the songs Lehrer would have written about all this. His discography is stocked with all-timers, however provided that you’re into novelty songs that riff on issues that have been occurring within the center a part of the twentieth century however now require footnotes. The work combines erudite social commentary, boundary-pushing cheekiness, and a piano sound rooted within the music halls that birthed vaudeville.
“We Will All Go Together When We Go” captures the awful absurdity of mutually assured destruction within the Chilly Battle period, and now looks like a predecessor to “Dr. Strangelove” in addition to to Randy Newman’s “Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One).” “The Masochism Tango” is about what it sounds prefer it’s about (“I ache for the contact of your lips, pricey/However way more for the contact of your whips, pricey”). So is “The Elements,” which is ready to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Fashionable Main-Normal” music, and consists principally of Lehrer reciting the names of parts on the periodic desk, however rearranged to rhyme. “National Brotherhood Week” calls out the hypocrisy of devoting a mere week to brotherhood whereas giving individuals who detest one another the opposite 51 weeks of the yr a possibility to faux they’re respectable (“It’s enjoyable to eulogize/The folks you despise/So long as you don’t allow them to in your faculty”).
Considered one of my favorites is Lehrer’s nonexistent title music for the movie adaptation of Oedipus Rex, which incorporates such verses as, “He beloved his mom like no different/His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother!/One factor on which you’ll be able to rely is/He positive knew who a boy’s greatest good friend is!”
I first encountered Lehrer’s work when my fourth-grade choir carried out a number of of his songs throughout a winter recital. Considered one of them was “Pollution,” which is finished within the fashion of a music that the Sharks would’ve sung in West Aspect Story. It’s a toe-tapping ditty about humanity’s destruction of the setting. It begins, “If you happen to go to American metropolis/You’ll discover it very fairly/Simply two issues of which you will need to beware/Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!” The primary refrain goes, “Air pollution, air pollution/We bought smog and sewage and dirt/Flip in your faucet and get cold and hot operating crud!”
Memorizing the names of songwriters wasn’t one thing I did at that age. I made a degree of memorizing Lehrer’s after I heard “Air pollution” and different Lehrer classics performed on The Dr. Demento Show, a syndicated radio program specializing in comedic songs, sketches, and different silliness. Demento, also referred to as Barret Eugene Hansen, introduced his retirement earlier this yr. Nonetheless, his present ran for greater than 5 many years, introducing established names like Lehrer to new generations whereas giving up-and-comers a platform to discover a mass viewers. Demento’s most important discover was “Bizarre Al” Yankovic, who, as Yankovic himself has mentioned on many events, in all probability wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t grown up listening to Lehrer.
Lehrer was initially a arithmetic professor (first on the College of California, Santa Cruz, then at Harvard) and continued to show even when his music was at its peak. He was a ferociously nimble pianist and a composer of humorous, topical songs that he’d play for buddies. It began in 1953 when, primarily for the heck of it, he paid for the urgent of 400 albums of his unique work to provide out to buddies. A 1997 profile by Elijah Wald sums up his ascent:
The Nineteen Fifties are sometimes remembered as a cultural struggle zone, with Eisenhower and suburban conformity on one aspect, and the wildness of rock ‘n’ roll and beat poetry on the opposite. Lehrer stood firmly in opposition to each, and in opposition to decency, compassion, and nearly the entire vary of human virtues. His songs, crafted with the care of the good Broadway tunesmiths, have been studiedly mental and fiendishly irreverent. His thought of a cheerful ditty was “Poisoning Pigeons within the Park.” His thought of nostalgic sentimentality was an ode to “The Outdated Dope Peddler.” His thought of romance was “I Maintain Your Hand in Mine,” a paean to the girl he has killed, however whose hand he has stored as a memento.
“I feel I might get away with that stuff as a result of I used to be this clear lower faculty child in a bow-tie and horn-rimmed glasses, being type of harmless and good,” Lehrer mentioned. Followers took the document house on holidays, and orders started drifting in from across the nation. “The phrase unfold like herpes,” as Lehrer places it, and shortly he was making nightclub appearances. After some time he graduated to live performance halls, then recorded his second studio album in 1959. That very same yr, he recorded stay variations of each albums, one at Harvard and the opposite at MIT. (His commercial for a stay set mentioned it “incorporates precisely the identical songs, however sadly additionally contains Mr. Lehrer’s tedious spoken commentary.”)
In actuality, Lehrer’s onstage patter was as sharp as his lyrics. “You recognize, of all of the songs I’ve ever sung, that’s the one I’ve had essentially the most requests not to,” he mentioned after performing, “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” a captivating story of homicide and dismemberment, on “Songs by Tom Lehrer.” In that very same present, Lehrer mentioned, “I don’t like folks to get the concept I’ve to do that for a dwelling. I imply, it isn’t as if I had to do that, you recognize. I might be making, oh, $3,000 a yr simply instructing.”
Lehrer grew to become a nationwide phenomenon when he was invited to carry out his work on “That Was the Week That Was,” a U.S. adaptation of the same-named satirical-musical British sequence that seemed again on the earlier seven days’ value of reports. “TWTWTW,” because it was recognized, ran simply two seasons, from 1963 to 65. Lehrer’s work survived and endured, although, in all probability as a result of every music appeared to exist in its personal hermetically sealed universe.
Lehrer declined all requests to return to the keys and unveil new materials or play the hits. A part of the issue, he informed interviewers, was that he didn’t discover a lot humor in lots of the main political developments after his heyday. What was he gonna do, a humorous music about 9/11 or the 2008 recession? Greater than that, “I didn’t really feel the necessity for nameless affection, for folks at the hours of darkness applauding,” he mentioned. “To me, it could be like writing a novel after which getting up each evening and studying your novel. The whole lot I did is on the document and, if you wish to hear it, simply take heed to the document.”
Nonetheless, though Lehrer stopped performing and recording pretty quickly into his music profession, he was all the time keen to debate his work. He did numerous interviews over the many years. They produced many superb quotes, like “If an individual feels he can’t talk, the least he can do is shut up about it,” and “Political satire grew to become out of date once they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize,” and my favourite, “Life is sort of a piano. What you get out of it is determined by the way you play it.”
“I actually don’t have something extra to say,” he told Bob Claster. “To only come again and stand on a stage and do the outdated songs once more doesn’t actually attraction to me, and performing doesn’t attraction to me in any respect.” He mentioned folks used to invest that he should not have appreciated performing if he determined to cease doing it. Lehrer would reply that he appreciated highschool, however didn’t need to try this once more, both. However he added that he was grateful for his temporary window of fame as a result of it let him journey all around the world and meet attention-grabbing folks and, extra importantly, it “enabled me to do what I all the time needed to do, which is train half time and hang around.” If not for the music, “I might have needed to have an actual job, god forbid.”
