Tom Lehrer, 1928-2015

New York Times, “Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97“

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

In “The Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

[…]

After graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Mr. Lehrer went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. (He continued his studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his Ph.D. thesis.)

[…]

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

[…]

In 1959, in an unusual move, he simultaneously released a new studio album, “More of Tom Lehrer,” and a live album, “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” which contained concert versions of the same songs. (He later also rerecorded the songs from his first album in concert.) But after another year of touring, he stopped performing and returned to the Harvard faculty.

In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.

[…]

Mr. Lehrer gave up performing again after a concert in Copenhagen in September 1967. This time he stuck to his decision. The rest was almost, but not quite, silence.

His last sustained burst of songwriting came in 1971, when he contributed “Silent E” and other educational ditties to the PBS children’s series “The Electric Company.” The next year he performed at a rally for the presidential campaign of Senator George S. McGovern. But there were no more nightclub or concert performances, and no more albums.

By 1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail,” he said.)

[…]

In October 2020, Mr. Lehrer announced on his website that “all the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else” — in other words, that he was relinquishing the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of those few that used his words but someone else’s music.

He expanded on, and formalized, this announcement two years later, stating among other things that “permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.” Adding that he planned to shut down his website “in the not too distant future,” he concluded: “In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” (His website, and the notice, were still online at his death.)

What’s remarkable is that, while his public career ended before my second birthday, I’ve somehow always knew who he was. My parents almost certainly didn’t own any of his albums. Presumably, I’ve seen a lot of black-and-white clips of his performances over the years and somehow got the impression he was active much longer than he was.

It’s also quite interesting that, despite failure to complete his doctoral work, he enjoyed a long career teaching mathematics at Harvard, MIT, and (mostly) the University of California, Santa Cruz.