Tom Lehrer finally slipped this mortal coil this past weekend, aged 97. It was a fairly lowkey news item, in part because this was at the end of the week when we also lost Ozzy, the Hulkster, and Theo Huxtable.
But there's another reason, implicit in Harry Briggs's memorial piece. Which, as a side note, mentions Lehrer having "no interest" in Stephen Sondheim, which is a little strange since Sondheim introduced him in what may have been his last live performance. But never mind. No, as Briggs notes, Lehrer "effectively vanished from the public eye half a century ago."
The idea that satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize makes a good cover for Lehrer's retirement from songwriting. But it's more that satire is a limited resource. Mark Russell spent decades doing concerts, crafting parody songs for every political occasion. On one level you have to admire his persistence, but how much of this stuff lasted?
Lehrer recorded four albums, with his first live album being basically just the second studio album plus an audience. Then two more songs in the 70s for The Electric Company. But the best of these songs struck at the heart of basic situations to reveal what was appalling and funny about them. He had no need to keep up with the political Joneses.
2 comments:
There haven't been tons of obituaries for Tom Lehrer and I don't know if there would have been more had nobody else passed away this week, but there have been enough written by people who loved him, never mind those who knew him, that I've learned a few things about Tom I hadn't known before.
The politics and rudeness of his material so put off the record companies that he self-financed his debut album, 'Songs by Tom Lehrer', in 1953. He paid $15 to have the master recording cut and $700 to press 400 copies which he then sold to his fellow students at Harvard. They were so popular he had to keep getting more cut. It was the underground success of the decade.
It's quite obvious to anyone who has listened to his songs that he hated government. Perhaps his most deranged parody of government policy, however, had nothing to do with war or politics. In the 1950s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to control rodent and bird populations by dropping strychnine-laced grains around the Northeast. Lehrer cast the federal wildlife agent as a cheerful serial killer in 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park'.
I think Tom Lehrer was smart enough to know where he'd be happiest and that wasn't being a successful performer. He believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war.
I've always liked The Vatican Rag but my favorites have always been the song I'm listening to now.
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and from jer about just how interesting a character Ishiro has always been:
https://youtu.be/GtImIqR5neU?si=aR6rUGHEv9R79Ygv
It probably is true that the quality of remembrances people have for you when the time comes is more important than the quantity.
The record companies wouldn't be interested right off because there was very little in their experience to compare this to. There might be dark show tunes released now and then like "To Keep My Love Alive", but the starkness of just Tom at the piano was something else again. He chose between two recording studios in the Boston area, and one was discourteous, so he chose the other one. After a while he was a proven success, at least on a certain level, so record companies were interested after all.
I hadn't known where the central idea of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" had come from. It makes sense that he got it from something that was actually happening. That's an insane policy. Strychnine-laced grains on the ground stay poisonous regardless of who or what eats them, or whether they get washed into a pond or something. This should be self-evident.
Lehrer had his own interests and his own priorities. A more extensive career in show business would have played havoc with those. He didn't have a grandiose notion about his place as a songwriter. The last songs he wrote professionally were for The Electric Company. If nothing else you might as well give kids an amusing way to learn grammar.
"The Vatican Rag", inspired by changes to the Catholic liturgy brought about by Vatican II. That is a good one.
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Not a bad answer from Ishiro. Hell, there was enough of a wait that Costas must have been relieved just to get an answer.
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