It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be a Tom Lehrer Fan
If there’s an afterlife, Tom Lehrer has spent the last two days learning whether its proprietors have a sense of humor.
Lehrer, who died Saturday in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 97, wrote the 20th century’s finest catalog of satirical songs. Some were a little dark.
He was perhaps best known from the short-lived 1965 NBC-TV series That Was The Week That Was, a sketch show to which Lehrer contributed sharply amusing topical songs about things like pollution, National Brotherhood Week, new math, Hubert Humphrey and nuclear proliferation.
He submitted another half-dozen songs that the TW3 producers rejected as too sharp.
The rejects included “Wernher Von Braun,” a ode to the World War II German rocket scientist for whom the United States won a bidding war with the Russia. Sample verse: “Some have harsh words for this man of renown / But some think our attitude / Should be one of gratitude / Like the widows and cripples in old London town / Who owe their large pensions / To Wernher Von Braun.”
Perhaps the most infamous reject was “The Vatican Rag,” in which Lehrer mused on how the Catholic Church might better “sell the product in this secular age.” Sample: “Get in line in that processional / Step into that small confessional / There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.”
Actually, Lehrer confessed in a 1997 interview, “I didn’t even send them the demo on that one.”
After TW3 ended, Lehrer cut a live album of 14 TW3 songs himself, including “Wernher Von Braun” and “The Vatican Rag.”
That record permanently branded him a social satirist, which he said in 1997 he found amusing — not because he didn’t write any social satire, but because from his very first song, when he was a teenager in 1944, that was never his focus.
“I was playing off musical forms,” he said — melancholy Irish ballads, glib folk songs, exuberant Gilbert & Sullivan rousers, love songs that find no fault with their subject, military marching anthems and so on.
He also recorded the TW3 album, he said, because he was so appalled at how Nancy Ames, the most frequent singer of Lehrer’s songs on the TW3 telecast, interpreted them.
“Nancy Ames was awful,” he said. “I would write on the demos, ‘Please don’t let Nancy Ames sing this.’ After a while I gave up.”
Nancy Ames did not. She asked Lehrer if she could include “Pollution” io her nightclub act, to which he reluctantly agreed. “And,” he joked 30 years later, “she never paid me royalties.”
Lehrer fans, of whom there are many, equally savor his pre-TW3 songs, many of which were written in the early 1950s when he was a student a Harvard “and was writing purely for the amusement of my friends.”
Subtlety was not a hallmark of these songs. Wit and wordplay were. From the self-explanatory “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”: “When they see us coming / The birdies all try ‘an hide / But they still go for peanuts / When coated with cyanide.”
He drew on his military career for “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”: “Our old mess sergeant’s taste buds had been shot off in the war / But his savor collations add to our esprit de corps.”
He wrote songs about the famous Russian mathematician Lobachevsky and the much-married European socialite Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel: “While married to Gus she met Walter / Gus died and her teardrops were copious / She cried all the way to the altar.”
He imagined a love song to a girl “who has nothing whatsoever to recommend her” and wrote a brisk ballad about hunting: “I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow / Two game wardens, seven hunters and a cow.”
He also wrote a song whose lyrics are the periodic table of the elements. The social satire there is very subtle.
Lehrer’s output over 97 years was modest, just a few dozen songs that he made available to the public. “I wrote a lot of others,” he said in 1997, “but they just weren’t very good. Once in a while people will push me to play one of them and when it’s over they’ll say, ‘You’re right, it wasn’t very good.’ ”
He stopped performing live after a show in Copenhagen in 1967 (a show that was filmed and is still used occasionally for public television fund-raisers). He wrote a couple of songs for The Electric Company and had a hand in the production of Tomfoolery, a show of his songs that ran in multiple countries for several years. But he spent most of the rest of his working life at his other profession, teaching mathematics.
He was pretty good at that, too, joining the faculties of Harvard and MIT, and he never seemed to totally resolve the question of whether music or teaching was his side gig.
“I was all set to get my Ph.D in mathematics from Harvard,” he said. “I had everything except the dissertation, and I had a topic for that. Then one day the thought came to me that if I got this Ph.D I could never do original material again, like my record. And I could always teach math without a Ph.D anyway. So that was that.”
On the other side, he recalled that in the early 1950s he had tried to land a spot playing on the popular Arthur Godfrey Show. “It’s just as well I didn’t,” he said in 1997, “or now I would probably be an assistant professor of mathematics at an obscure university in Iowa.”
Instead, at the urging of friends, he invested in himself, cutting an album of his songs at a local recording studio.
“I paid $15 for an hour of studio time and the tape,” he said. “Have money, will record.”
He pressed 400 copies of the 10-inch record and to his amazement, word of mouth sold them all, inspiring him to record a second volume. He parlayed this into a popular nightclub act, while still switching between musical performance and teaching. He further mixed the two when he began teaching a course in California on the golden age of American musical theatera.
“It’s a class where we have fun,” he said in 1997, though he did take the “golden age” part seriously, arguing that musical theater imploded sometime after the mid-1960s.
“Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, composers like that were who I loved from the time I was growing up,” he said. “Today’s musicals are bad. Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s music is all right, but his lyrics are execrable. The whole point of musical theater is to make the audience part of a community. When you can’t even sing the songs, that’s gone.
“And I’m not a fan of revues, including my own. Tomfoolery was okay. I’m glad they did it.”
He’d thought about writing a book musical himself, he said, but concluded it wouldn’t work.
“I’m not used to collaborating,” he said. “I’d want to meet every Tuesday night and have a good time. The pros don’t work that way.”
He also didn’t regret stepping away from performing his songs.
“I’m not a performer by temperament,” he said. “I want people to think the songs are funny. The pros want people to think they’re funny.”
Nor did he feel any urge to rekindle either song parodies or social satire.
Because his songs played off popular musical genres, he said, he wasn’t sure he knew enough about contemporary music, like rock ’n’ roll, to capture their nuances. “I don’t even know what rock is now,” he said. “I’m not the one to parody that. And I’m not sure what I’d say about the bigger issues today. Things seemed a lot more black and white in the ’50s and ’60s.”
For all his success in two rather challenging fields, Lehrer said he simply preferred a relaxed lifestyle.
“I have my teaching down to one semester,” he said. “So I work for three months and have nine months off. That’s better than the other way around.”
When you live to 97, it’s fair to say that “relaxed” worked, even if the waters were not all smooth.
“I have a computer,” he said in 1997. “A nice young man turned it on for me. But I’m not sure I’d rely on the Internet for information — not based on some of the garbage I see written about me. You have no way to check whether what’s written there is true.”
Not that things were ever perfect. In the 1960s Nancy Ames sung your songs and networks didn’t want you to use the word “crud” in a song about water pollution.
Tom Lehrer seized his time — a time when more people realized that “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” was dark satire, not a call for avian genocide — and picked his spots. No one did it better.
