Here I am, an old man, writing about the passing of an even older man. I was 12 years old when I first heard Tom Lehrer. My sister and her new boyfriend (who would eventually become my brother-in law) had just returned from a New York nightclub called The Blue Angel, where they heard a 25 year-old Harvard graduate and MIT math instructor sing his mordant take on a number of popular song staples. They brought with them a 10-inch LP (remember them, and you’re as old as I am!). For me, it was as if my favorite horror stories from E.C.’s “Tales From the Crypt” filtered through the satiric lens of “Mad” magazine had suddenly come to life in musical form. I was hooked from that moment on. Well, brother Lehrer has passed on to his final reward as had his contemporaries, my late brother-in-law and his close friend, Marvin. While neither of them made it even close to 97, the two of them were of the same generation as Tom, and were like the big brothers I never had.
But this homage is to Tom Lehrer, someone a friend and I referred to as “The Master.” I think what we meant by this was that he did what he did better than anyone else. People know that Lehrer was an academic genius—he entered Harvard at 15, was graduated Magna Cum Laude, got a Masters Degree and taught math at both Harvard and MIT. In his later years, he taught what he called “Math for Tenors,” and “The Broadway Musical” at San Jose State. From the vantage point of such a long life, I guess it’s fair to say that music was his avocation. For someone to have had the disproportionate impact on the musical public with only three albums of music is remarkable. As a sometime singer-songwriter ( also an avocation), Lehrer’s impact upon my musical efforts (such as they are) is undeniable. Not only do I admit it, but I’m proud of it. Whenever someone says, “Gee, that reminds me of…” I thank them for the compliment. But, as the egotist says, “enough about me.” This is about Thomas Andrew Lehrer and the national treasure he was. Apart from the relative success of his third album, “That Was the Week That Was,” (which charted at #16), he never achieved more than niche recognition. Ah, but what a niche it was.
There are a couple of things that Lehrer did from the very beginning which distinguished him as a lyricist. While not the first to play games with words (Yip Harburg, Cole Porter, Larry Hart and Noel Coward come to mind), Lehrer seemed to take a special delight in finding unusual rhyming patterns. His first album includes three “love songs,” and more’s the pity for the objects of his love. One was killed by him, and he retains her hand as a “precious souvenir” (“I Hold your Hand in Mine). A second is cautioned that his love for her will fade with the passage of time (“When You are Old and Gray”). In the third, “The Weiner Schnitzel Waltz,”he observes, “The music was gay and the setting was Viennese, your hair was in roses or perhaps they were peonies, I was blind to your obvious faults.” He goes on to observe, “Your lips were like wine, if you’ll pardon the simile, the music was lovely, and quite Rudolph Frim-l-y.” And yes, Tom, we pardon the simile. That first album, in the guise of sardonic humor, went from gentle send-up of a college football song (“Fight Fiercely, Harvard”) to an ironically endearing ode to the community narcotics dealer (“The Old Dope Peddler”). In each song, he chastises national shortcomings in the guise of popular song forms. He takes on nuclear bomb tests under the loping gait of a cowboy song, “The Wild West is Where I want to be”). This is the land “where the scenery’s attractive and the air is radioactive” and later “midst the Yuccas and the thistles I’ll watch the guided missiles while the old F.B.I. watches me” Once again, those brilliant rhymes: “I will leave the city’s rush, leave the fancy and the plush , leave the snow and leave the slush on the ground. I will seek the desert’s hush, where the scenery is lush, how I long to see that MUSHroom cloud.” Indeed.
In “Dixie,” long one of my favorites, he debunks the myth of the “gallant South.” Consider, “I want to talk with Southern gentlemen, put my white sheet on again.I ain’t seen one good lynching in years. The land of the boll weevil where the laws are medieval (how’s that for a rhyme?) is calling me to come and never more roam” In “The Hunting Song” he takes on the cherished American tradition of killing animals, resulting in festooning his trophy room with a catch consisting of “Two Game Wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow.” I could go on and on, but that is better left to Tom.
In a performing career which was remarkably short (he was said to have much preferred people listening to his music than watching him perform—viz: “I enjoyed it up to a point, but…performing the concert every night when it was all available on record would be like a novelist going out and reading his novel every night.” More’s the pity for Lehrer fans. The one concert extant is a marvelous one from Copenhagen in 1967. It’s available on YouTube and as part of a mini-box set called “The Tom Lehrer Collection, in which the DVD concert is said to be in Oslo. Since I speak neither Danish nor Norwegian, I can’t say for sure, other than the audience loved it, and so will you. The real tragedy of his reluctance to perform is how good he was at it. For those unfamiliar with Lehrer’s oeuvre, I strongly suggest you listen to his concert recordings. As good as the studio albums were, you will find (as I did) that his song introductions in his concerts are such wonderful accompaniments to the songs themselves, that they are indispensable. They also contain some of his best quotes. He began one song by saying words to the effect of “My reporter friends, of whom I have none…” In another, he described a physician as specializing in “diseases of the rich.” Anyway, I’ll not spoil the surprise of you hearing him live any further.
While some of his lyrics will seem dated, this is unavoidable for a topical-political songwriter. I think these older references such as his World War III salute,”So long, Mom, I’m off to drop the Bomb,” in which he says, “As we’re attacking frontally, watch Brink-aly and Hunt-a-ly describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost…” only add to the appreciation of when it was written. “Who’s Next,” an extremely funny song about nuclear proliferation has a side-splitting reference to Egypt and Israel’s quest for “the bomb,” ending with a segregation-era cautionary “We’ll try to stay serene and calm when Alabama gets the Bomb.” Makes us forget how scary it all is, especially today.
As Lehrer himself would have (and did) say, “but I digress.” For those of you who already know and love Tom Lehrer, I’m preaching to a secular choir. For those who don’t, you’ve got a great treat in store for you. My children were raised on Lehrer’s music and lived to tell the tale. We will jointly assume the responsibility for passing this on to their children. Tom Lehrer was, by all accounts, a very private person. I don’t know if he has left behind anything which might comprise a memoir. If not, I hope an enterprising biographer might undertake the task. Speaking personally, I feel as if I lost a big brother I never got to know better. It is a cliche to say that, when a celebrity with whom we grew up dies, we suddenly feel older. But when that person helped shape my sensibility, let alone my sense of humor, I feel as if yet another chunk of my youth has been taken from me. So long Tom.
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