Tom Lehrer

 

Tom Lehrer in 1983

The trigger for this particular blog was the fact that I bought a copy of The Guardian on Wednesday 22 May [I allow one actual newspaper a week, max. More would mean I did nothing else but read newspapers which is not a shameful occupation; people from my generation gratefully acknowledge newspapers as the primary news source for the discerning.] In the paper was a double spread on Tom Lehrer about whom I haven’t thought for years. It was enough to send me to my relatively sparse remaining CD collection to dig out my one and only Tom Lehrer CD. [probably the '65 edition.] Of course, when I played it, I was incredulous that so much time had passed since it was last heard by me. It remains as sublime as ever and I’m ashamed to have forgotten to play it, though Tom would understand that Life got in the way.

Francis Beckett

Tom in his fifties

The Guardian article is by Francis Beckett, a long-time Lehrer worshipper, who, following Lehrer’s statement in 2020 that he had placed all that he had written in the public domain, generously making his lyrics and sheet music available for anyone to perform or use without paying royalties, decided he could then afford to write a show he had long had in mind, about Lehrer. The Fringe Theatre, Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, agreed to stage his eventual production called Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want To Talk To You. This is now scheduled to run from May 28 to June 9 and my big current regret is that I am not up to journeying to Highgate to see it!!

And why this hero worship? Lehrer, born into a wealthy New York Jewish family in 1928, was a child maths prodigy who entered Harvard at 15 in 1943, took a first class maths degree at 18 and acquired a Masters a year later. After graduation in 1946, he worked at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory before becoming a Maths Professor at M.I.T. apparently without effort but his talent, his “prodigious talent” as described by Beckett, has been for composing bitingly caustic, musical social comment and criticism. But his work is also wonderfully funny too with magical, stunningly harsh, but light-heartedly irreverent turns of phrase and comment. The music is jaunty, catchy, memorable and induces a novice’s desire to ape the Master or, at least, applaud or echo. Frankly, Lehrer is for the satire-obsessive set to music.

Fortuitous photograph of squirrel and pigeon
in the Abbey Gardens

Almost always, as I walk through the Abbey Gardens early each morning, there are dozens of pigeons busily pecking and snuffling in the grass, I always happily greet them and their companion squirrels but I always silently sing remembered remnants of Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons In The Park as I smile benignly at the birds. I love the familiarity of the song, and, it must be said, pigeons; but I cannot resist Lehrer’s subversive lyrics.

“Spring is here, spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don't you? Course you do
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me
And makes every Sunday a treat for me

All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon  /When we're poisoning pigeons in the park

Tom Lehrer singing 
Pigeons in the Park

Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons in the park

When they see us coming
The birdies all try and hide
But they still go for peanuts
When coated with cyanide

The sun's shining bright
Everything seems all right
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park

We've gained notoriety /In the Audobon Society

With our games.

They call it impiety
And lack of propriety
And quite a variety of unpleasant names

In middle and old age

But it's not against any religion

To want to dispose of a pigeon.

So if Sunday you're free
Why don't you come with me
And we'll poison the pigeons in the park
And maybe we'll do in a squirrel or two
While we're poisoning pigeons in the park
We'll murder them amid laughter and merriment/Except for the few we take home to experiment

                                                     My pulse will be quickenin'
                                                     With each drop of strychnine
                                                     We feed to a pigeon
                                                     It just takes a smidgin
                                                    To poison a pigeon in the park.”

Lehrer wrote and performed in the 1950s and 1960s but he suddenly gave it up in 1960 with a brief reprieve in 1965 when he re-emerged to write new songs for the American version of the British satirical show, That Was The Week (Year)That Was. A second CD resulted containing many new, even more hilariously naughty and overtly political songs, making fun of the Catholic Church in ragtime for instance: The Vatican Rag: “Then the guy who’s got religion’ll/ Tell you if your sins original.” Plus three songs condemning nuclear weapons. He expressed his horror that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was then working for the Americans: “When the rockets go up who cares where they come down/ ‘That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

At the height of his fame, in September 1967, he was made
honorary student in the Copenhagen Student Union

And then, Lehrer-silence, at  the height of his fame and, short of 40 years in age, as he spent the rest of a long life [96 in April 2024] mostly as an unknown maths lecturer, living in self-chosen obscurity with the maths courses he taught at a modest university level rather than at High Honours; he called it, “Maths for tenors” He also added, at the university of Santa Cruz where he remained from 1972 for almost 30 years, a course on the history of the American musical, one of his passions.

Francis Beckett who wrote the Guardian article suggests:

“… Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that.”

I think that my favourite comment by Lehrer [from perhaps thousands] is:

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

[N.B. Kissinger spied for the F.B.I. as a student, on fellow students, in search of 'communists', and later, masterminded the carpet-bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War] 

Although, temptingly, there is also:

"If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”

Plus, of course, there is "My songs spread slowly, like herpes."

When George W. Bush was President, Lehrer admitted, "I don't want to satirise George Bush, I want to vaporise him."

The Boy Scout Movement in Australia had him barred from entry in the Fifties. In 1958, five years after the release of his first C.D. it was released in the U.K. and the BBC promptly banned ten of the twelve songs on it.

All of Lehrer's work [he wrote  only 37 songs] can be accessed
free of charge on
tomlehrersongs.com

 

                                                              tomlehrersongs.com.