Who remembers Tom Lehrer?
Michael Barber celebrates the great iconoclast, now 88 and long retired from singing and songwriting.
According to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr the 1950s were the most humourless period in American history. Unless he was making a distinction between humour and wit, Schlesinger overlooked the mordant songs of his fellow Harvard alumnus Tom Lehrer, who at 88 is still, in his own words, ‘sliding down the razor blade of life’.
Lehrer began performing at a time when ‘there were certain things you couldn’t say in front of a girl’. But he was equal to the challenge. Sixty years on there is still something wicked – in every sense – about lines like this from his Boy Scout riff ‘Be Prepared’: ‘Don’t solicit for your sister/that’s not nice/unless you get a good percentage of her price.’ He also rhapsodised about necrophilia and masochism, celebrated drug-dealing and plagiarism, and wrote a jaunty Revivalist hymn in praise of nuclear apocalypse: ‘Oh we will all fry together when we fry/we’ll be French fried potatoes by and by …’. No wonder Time denounced him as ‘unAmerican’, and the New York Times warned that ‘Mr Lehrer’s lyrics are not fettered by such inhibitory factors as taste.’
A great admirer of W S Gilbert, Lehrer struck a chord in Britain when it was revealed in 1957 that Princess Margaret was a fan. Reassured by this, the BBC played some of his less-offensive songs and his first LP became a must-have for embryo satirists like Richard Ingrams, who described him as ‘a real breath of fresh air. We sang all his songs – they were very provocative. Lehrer was a genuine satirist, well ahead of his time’. He did a brief sell-out tour here in 1959 and later contributed to That Was the Week That Was.
Five years younger than Ingrams, I too became a fan, without realising quite how inflammatory Lehrer’s lyrics were. Consider ‘I Wanna Go Back to Dixie’, in which he says ‘I wanna talk with Southern gennl’men/put my white sheet on again/ Ain’t seen one decent lynchin’ in years …’. It never occurred to me that were Lehrer to sing this in, say, Little Rock, Alabama, he might well be lynched himself. In fact he was careful not to push his luck,
‘I don’t crave the affection of an audience. Royalties are what I want’
choosing venues where he could be sure of a liberal, literate audience. The nearest he came to physical assault was in San Francisco at the hands of the devout Mexican film star Ricardo Montalbán, incensed at his mockery of ‘modernised’ Catholic ritual in ‘The Vatican Rag’: ‘Do whatever steps you want if/you’ve cleared them with the Pontiff …’.
Someone else who, like me, discovered Lehrer as a teenager, compared him to Roald Dahl: they both had an edge that delighted kids and disturbed their parents. ‘The nastier the sentiment, the wider the smile,’ Lehrer told Sir Cameron Mackintosh when Mackintosh was putting on Tomfoolery, a celebration of Lehrer’s songs.
From a privileged rag-trade background in New York, where his father made neckties, Lehrer was a mathematical prodigy who entered Harvard in 1943, aged fifteen. By then he was also an accomplished pianist who liked to parody popular songs and by the time he began to study for a doctorate was in demand at student parties and local nightclubs. His first LP, a privately pressed edition of 400 copies, spread ‘like herpes’ far beyond the Harvard campus, and eventually, after several re-pressings, sold more than 350,000 copies.
Fame beckoned, but Lehrer wanted it on his own terms, saying ‘What good are laurels unless you can rest on them?’ The thought of having to sing the same songs night after night appalled him: ‘It would soon become very boring. I don’t crave the anonymous affection of an audience. Royalties are what I want, not applause.’ Aged forty, having written 37 songs, he gave up performing. A few years later Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after which, as Lehrer famously said, ‘political satire became obsolete’.
Lehrer never had to sing for his supper. Although he failed to complete his doctoral thesis, he taught maths for forty years, first at Harvard and MIT, latterly at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he also gave a course in musical theatre, revealing an unexpected passion for Rodgers and Hammerstein. He never married either, and so could do as he pleased. Recalling how his class soon learned not to quiz him about his fifteen minutes of fame, a student of his said he was ‘one of the most private people I’ve ever met’, a verdict Lehrer did not dispute. He was mightily relieved to have done so little prime-time television, thus minimising the risk of being accosted by strangers.
To me, his catchy ragtime melodies and pithy lyrics, delivered with sardonic brio, are still as fresh as when I first heard them long ago. But it’s a mark of how far the liberal consensus has shifted that in some circles he is now considered politically incorrect. Could it be because, in ‘My Home Town’ he describes someone as ‘the village idiot’? – surely a mild epithet given that he ‘liked to burn down houses just to see them glow’. He himself explained that he gave up writing songs once it became apparent that ‘audiences wanted to be exhorted rather than amused’, adding that what he really cared about was ‘old-fashioned things like nuance and the challenge of finding a rhyme, which don’t seem to matter any more’. More’s the pity.