.png)
The great comedic songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer passed away at 97 yesterday, outliving one of the writers credited with penning the “advance” obituary that The New York Times had been holding for many years, a phenomenon that sometimes occurs with notable people who live longer than expected. Leher might also have been amused by the people who heard news of his passing and expressed astonishment that he hadn’t already kicked the bucket. He released his first album in 1953 and retired from live performance in 1967, never to return, although he continued to write and record new songs in studios for another decade.
Some mistook his withdrawal from public life for having died; A 2003 Sidney Morning Herald profile of Leher began, “Word that we’ve secured an interview has people around the office launching into such unlikely yet infectious ditties as ‘The Vatican Rag,’ ‘Smut’ and Lehrer’s ode to spring pursuits, ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.’ It also has people asking with a surprised tone: ‘Is he still alive?’”
It’s fun to imagine the songs Lehrer would have written about all this. His discography is stocked with all-timers, but only if you’re into novelty songs that riff on things that were happening in the middle part of the 20th century but now require footnotes. The work combines erudite social commentary, boundary-pushing cheekiness, and a piano sound rooted in the music halls that birthed vaudeville.
“We Will All Go Together When We Go” captures the bleak absurdity of mutually assured destruction in the Cold War era, and now sounds like a predecessor to “Dr. Strangelove” as well as to Randy Newman’s “Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One).” “The Masochism Tango” is about what it sounds like it’s about (“I ache for the touch of your lips, dear/But much more for the touch of your whips, dear”). So is “The Elements,” which is set to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major-General” song, and consists mostly of Lehrer reciting the names of elements listed on the periodic table, but artfully rearranged so they rhyme. “National Brotherhood Week” calls out the hypocrisy of devoting a mere week to brotherhood while letting people who loathe each other the other 51 weeks of the year an opportunity to pretend they’re decent (“It’s fun to eulogize/The people you despise/As long as you don’t let them in your school”).
One of my favorites is Lehrer’s nonexistent title song for the film adaptation of Oedipus Rex, which includes such verses as, “He loved his mother like no other/His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother!/One thing on which you can depend is/He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is!”
I first encountered Lehrer’s work when my fourth-grade choir performed a few of his songs during a winter recital. One of them was “Pollution,” which is done in the style of a song that the Sharks would’ve sung in West Side Story. It’s a toe-tapping ditty about humanity’s destruction of the environment. It begins, “If you visit American city/You will find it very pretty/Just two things of which you must beware/Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!” The first chorus goes, “Pollution, pollution/We got smog and sewage and mud/Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud!”
Memorizing the names of songwriters wasn’t something I did at that age, but I made a point of memorizing Lehrer’s after I heard “Pollution” and other Lehrer classics played on The Dr. Demento Show, a syndicated radio program specializing in comedic songs, sketches, and other silliness. Demento, also known as Barret Eugene Hansen, announced his retirement earlier this year. Still, his show ran for more than five decades, introducing established names like Lehrer to new generations while giving up-and-comers a platform to find a mass audience. Demento’s most significant find was “Weird Al” Yankovic, who, as Yankovic himself has said on many occasions, probably would not have existed if he hadn’t grown up listening to Lehrer.
Lehrer was originally a mathematics professor (first at the University of California, Santa Cruz, then at Harvard) and continued to teach even when his music was at its peak. He was a ferociously nimble pianist and a composer of funny, topical songs that he’d play for friends. It all started in 1953 when, mainly for the heck of it, he paid for the pressing of 400 albums of his original work to give out to friends. A 1997 profile by Elijah Wald sums up his ascent:
The 1950s are often remembered as a cultural war zone, with Eisenhower and suburban conformity on one side, and the wildness of rock ‘n’ roll and beat poetry on the other. Lehrer stood firmly against both, and against decency, compassion, and virtually the whole range of human virtues. His songs, crafted with the care of the great Broadway tunesmiths, were studiedly intellectual and fiendishly irreverent. His idea of a cheerful ditty was “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” His idea of nostalgic sentimentality was an ode to “The Old Dope Peddler.” His idea of romance was “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” a paean to the woman he has killed, but whose hand he has kept as a souvenir.
“I think I could get away with that stuff because I was this clean cut college kid in a bow-tie and horn-rimmed glasses, being kind of innocent and smart,” Lehrer said. Fans took the record home on vacations, and orders began drifting in from around the country. “The word spread like herpes,” as Lehrer puts it, and soon he was making nightclub appearances. After a while he graduated to concert halls, then recorded his second studio album in 1959. That same year, he recorded live versions of both albums, one at Harvard and the other at MIT. (His advertisement for a live set said it “contains exactly the same songs, but unfortunately also includes Mr. Lehrer’s tedious spoken commentary.”)
In reality, Lehrer’s onstage patter was as sharp as his lyrics. “You know, of all the songs I have ever sung, that is the one I’ve had the most requests not to,” he said after performing, “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” a charming tale of murder and dismemberment, on “Songs by Tom Lehrer.” In that same show, Lehrer said, “I don’t like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn’t as though I had to do this, you know. I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching.”
Lehrer became a national phenomenon when he was invited to perform his work on “That Was the Week That Was,” a U.S. adaptation of the same-named satirical-musical British series that looked back on the previous seven days’ worth of news. “TWTWTW,” as it was known, ran just two seasons, from 1963 to 65. Lehrer’s work survived and endured, though, probably because each song seemed to exist in its own hermetically sealed universe.
Lehrer declined all requests to return to the keys and unveil new material or play the hits. Part of the problem, he told interviewers, was that he didn’t find much humor in many of the major political developments after his heyday. What was he gonna do, a funny song about 9/11 or the 2008 recession? More than that, “I didn’t feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding,” he said. “To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.”
However, although Lehrer stopped performing and recording fairly soon into his music career, he was always willing to discuss his work. He did countless interviews over the decades. They produced many amazing quotes, like “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it,” and “Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize,” and my favorite, “Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
“I really don’t have anything more to say,” he told Bob Claster last year, in one of his last interviews. “To just come back and stand on a stage and do the old songs again doesn’t really appeal to me, and performing doesn’t appeal to me at all.” He said people used to speculate that he must not have liked performing if he decided to stop doing it. Leher would reply that he liked high school, but didn’t want to do that again, either. Then he added that he was grateful for his brief window of fame because it let him travel all over the world and meet interesting people and, more importantly, it “enabled me to do what I always wanted to do, which is teach part time and hang out.” If not for the music, “I would have had to have a real job, god forbid.”
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/L7DufBY
.png)
