Goodbye, Tom Lehrer
At some point in the 1950s, the mathematician began to sing.
Tom Lehrer, who died this week at the age of 97, started by beavering away on a conventional career as a mathematics professor with a side hobby composing satirical songs and performing them on the piano. He turned the songs into an album and sold it by mail order.
It went viral. That was pretty hard to do in 1953.
The album looked like this.
My parents had a copy. It was probably the only novelty record they had; the rest were folk music by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary; Joan Baez; and Simon & Garfunkel.
As an adolescent, I was curious, so I played it. It was perfectly designed to delight a young adult with a sick sense of humor and a desire to transgress boundaries.
My friends and I were drawn further into the Lehrer fan club by his unofficial publicist, Dr. Demento, who on his weekly radio program showcased Lehrer songs along with other nuts like Alan Sherman and Napoleon XIV.
What attracted me to Lehrer was the combination of spot-on imitations of a variety of musical styles, wickedly clever turns of phrase, unconventional rhymes, and total violations of convention.
The Vatican Rag, for example, is a musically flawless ragtime tune with perfect rhyme and scansion, poking fun at then recent changes intend to make Catholicism more accessible:
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.
If it is, try playin’ it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!
We were delighted sing along with a ghastly Irish Ballad about the girl who murdered her whole family:
One morning in a fit of pique,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
One morning in a fit of pique,
She drowned her father in the creek.
The water tasted bad for a week,
And we had to make do with gin,
With gin,
We had to make do with gin.And when at last the police came by,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
And when at last the police came by,
Her little pranks she did not deny.
To do so she would have had to lie,
And lying, she knew, was a sin,
A sin,
Lying, she knew, was a sin.
And if you prefer the tango, there was one dedicated to masochism:
Let our love be a flame, not an ember
Say it’s me that you want to dismember
Blacken my eye, set fire to my tie
As we dance to the Masochism TangoI know too well I’m underneath your spell
So, darling, if you smell something burning, it’s my heart, ‘scuse me
Take your cigarette from its holder and burn your initials in my shoulder, ah
Fracture my spine and swear that you’re mine as we dance to the Masochism Tango
As a tour-de-force, he set the periodic table of elements to an upbeat Gilbert & Sullivan showtune. Given the pronunciations of most of the elements, rhyming wasn’t that hard, so he upped the challenge by weaving the chemical names with breathtaking poetic skill and, ending with, of course, a perfect rhyme for Boston accents only.
These are all the ones of which the news has come to Haaah-vard
There may many others but they haven’t been discaaah-vered.
Despite a pretty clear lack of ambition on his part, his musical career continued to grow, leading eventually to a gig writing songs for a short-lived TV show called “That Was The Week That Was.” Lehrer turned his gimlet eye to politics and took on lighthearted topics like World War III:
So long, Mom
I’m off to drop the bomb
So don’t wait up for me
But though I may roam
I’ll come back to my home
Although it may be
A pile of debrisRemember, Mommy
I’m off to get a Commie
So send me a salami
And try to smile somehow
I’ll look for you when the war is over
An hour and a half from now
And then . . . Tom Lehrer faded back into the mundane world of teaching mathematics at some second-rate schools in Boston called Harvard and MIT, emerging only briefly to pen a couple of educational songs like “Silent E” for the learning-to-read PBS show The Electric Company.
And he eventually put his words and music into the public domain, a shocking move in a world where anything popular is endlessly monetized. You can download it all from his website and do anything you want with it.
It’s inconceivable today that a person with so much talent, whose popularity was cresting without much effort on his part, would just give up and go back to being a middling academic. But Lehrer never loved performing and clearly didn’t relish the pressure of having to continually create and challenge authority. He did what he liked, not what the rest of us wanted.
What Tom Lehrer meant to me
I continued to be avidly interested in all things Lehrer, even if he had ceased to produce. I went to a performance of a show based on his music, “Tomfoolery,” in Boston and a choral concert of his songs in Lexington, Mass. (I’m sure it took months for them to learn the elements song, and the performance was flawless.)
Tom Lehrer gave me encouragement to make endless puns, trained me to look askance at everything, and prodded me to violate norms in search of delight.
This has pissed off everyone around me who has respected me at one point or another.
It’s also inspired me and kept me smiling through the worst times. And if he could reach the heights of creativity and go back to being a mathematician, maybe I could learn something from that, too. I never completed my own career as a mathematician, but I did learn the deeper lesson: that even if you’re doing great at something, it’s always time to think about what the next thing might be.
The result is a life that’s been anything but boring. Thanks, Tom. And now that I’m old, this lyric on the inevitability of decline seems appropriate:
Since I still appreciate you,
Let’s find love while we may.,
Because I know I’ll hate you
When you are old and gray.So say you love me here and now,
I’ll make the most of that.
Say you love and trust me,
For I know you’ll disgust me
When you’re old and getting fat.An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I’ll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability,
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility,
So let’s act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we’ll soon reach senility
And lose the ability.Your teeth will start to go, dear,
Your waist will start to spread.
In twenty years or so, dear,
I’ll wish that you were dead.I’ll never love you then at all
The way I do today.
So please remember,
When I leave in December,
I told you so in May.
I’ve written the lyrics for two musical plays and 34 song parodies. So I believe me when I say that, for sheer virtuosity, Lehrer the lyricist had only three peers: Stephen Sondhein, Tim Rice, and parodist Randy Rainbow. Of the four, Rainbow is the best.
Thank you for this! I remember pulling out my father’s albums when I was young and feeling the same giddiness at feeling in on the joke!
My friends and I learned of Tom Lehrer through Dr Demento as well, and he has had a fan in me since. When he released his music to the public, I downloaded them all.
You have written a touching tribute.
Thank you.
Also a fan. Lehrer lyrics were a good litmus test for compatibility with others based on their sense of humor.
Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect. RIP, Tom Lehrer!
Oh, my! I was raised Catholic, so “Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect” always has me in stitches!
Must disagree with some of his lyrics on aging.
I have not lost my teeth or my waistline.
I am having a wonderful life at 90, and wish the same for you.
Mother
You go, Mom! My mother was the same. She died at 96, a tiny dynamo, still with full faculties and all her teeth.
In 1952 Tom Lehrer wrote “I Got It From Agnes,” and performed it live throughout the 1950’s, but he didn’t record it until many decades later. In less than 2 minutes, using what we’d say are PG lyrics today, he manages to sing charmingly about every sexual perversion you can imagine (or at least that I can imagine, but I don’t claim to be very imaginative). I Got It From Agnes can now be heard on Youtube, of course.
Josh – what a great tribute, and gah… what sad news!
I essentially grew up on Tom Lehrer, one of my parents few non-classical or folk music artists in the vinyl collection. My dad was an organic chemistry professor, and would sing The Elements every semester – he had a voice that could boom out to fill the room, and somehow, he could make it through the lyrics without a hesitation or flub.
Between that and burning donuts over a bunsen burner to demonstrate how long it takes to burn off different quantities of calories, most students vividly remember his classes for a long time!
Brilliant piece. Thank you.
My parents had a modest stack of classical records when I was a boy, which they occasionally played on an old portable mono record player.
And they had a single LP that was not classical music: An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer.
When I was a teenager I discovered the connection: my father was a Russian spy, and Lehrer was a courier for the Comintern. The two met backstage at his performance in my home town of Canberra, the capital of Australia, before Lehrer went to a party for the Party in a nearby Canberra suburb.
His precipitous retirement from performing has long baffled his fans, but a few years ago I discovered the reason. Here’s how I described that revelation in the draft of my biography of my dad, My Aussie Father was a Russian Spy:
“Not so long ago I was at a funeral/wake where I fell into conversation, as you do, with a former federal bureaucrat with “connections in intelligence”. I took the opportunity to ask what he knew about my father, only to be disappointed, as he didn’t even recognise the name (which I believe features in the proceedings of the Petrov Royal Commission). He asked me who Dad’s contacts had been, and I had to confess I couldn’t give him a single name. Then it occurred to me to mention the meeting with Tom Lehrer, and the old man immediately wanted to know more, saying that ‘the services’ had wanted to arrest Lehrer for espionage, but had been persuaded by their colleagues in ‘partner services’ overseas to settle for a deal under which he would retire early and go back to teaching mathematics, and name names.”
It’s the end of an era! There was no one like Tom Lehrer! We, too, have that single vinyl album, in our basement. Those of our generation appreciate how he snapped up every music style to fit his parodies. Gilbert and Sullivan figured largely in our household, so “The Elements” became my favorite patter song. Another great, Victor Borge, loved to play words with music, too. Aren’t we lucky to have grown up with masters like these?
I was introduced to Tom in school in the late 70s. Thank you to whichever middle school teacher decided that was appropriate.
My last “interaction” with Tom was in Hawaii–I bought one of his albums at a local library’s sale and when checking out the library clerk mentioned his love of Tom’s work, so I gifted the album to him.
The world is a lesser place without Tom, but we do have his world and our memories.
Sending good vibes.
I love the post, Josh. Every one of Tom Lehrer’s raging fans has their favorites. Mine ate the elements song and “Werner von Braun.” Thanks for writing a fine reminder of how delightful Tom Lehrer’s songs were.