Fame is a drug, fed by attention, applause and money. Those who become addicted sometimes have a desperate need to hold on, even as the talents that brought renown begin to fade and eventually disappear.
Which brings me to Tom Lehrer.
He died on July 26 at 97, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had once been a student at Harvard University and taught there too. He had been out of the public eye for decades, but his death prompted a New York Times obituary that covered almost an entire page of that newspaper and the internet was filled with memories.
Former local sportswriter Ron Rapoport wrote on Facebook that “much of my generation felt a special sadness (at the news of his death) … Lehrer was the greatest satirical songwriter of his time and he wrote the background music to much of our lives.” Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker wrote that “Lehrer’s gifts included an extraordinary and easily overlooked musicality, the secret sauce of his satire. One simple reason his songs endure is that, for all that they are written for their words, it’s hard to stop humming their tunes.”
My first memories of him were of his piano and voice pouring from the record albums played in my parents’ living room and the laughter that accompanied them. When I first heard them, I was too young to fully understand the lyrics. But his lively piano playing grabbed me, as did his cheery singing and eventually I grew into his ingenious, satirical, subversive lyrics and have been a devoted fan ever since.
He wrote and recorded 40 or so songs and performed them in 100-some concerts, modest numbers for his towering reputation. But his decision to dump his career at its height only added to his legend. As he said, “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection. If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”
Lehrer was born and raised in Manhattan, one of two sons of Morris James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Anna (Waller) Lehrer, who divorced when he was 14. After graduating early from a Connecticut prep school, he went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18, and earned a master’s degree the next year.
He took piano lessons as a child, but shied away from the classics and was drawn to the music of Broadway show tunes and such composers as Cole Porter, Gilbert and Sullivan and the comedy songs of Abe Burrows. It was in college that he began playing his own songs, mostly for classmates.His friends convinced him to make a record. He thought his songs might sell a few hundred copies, so he booked a studio, recorded 11 tunes, had 400 copies of the record pressed and began to sell via mail order.
That first album soon sold 350,000, fueled primarily by word of mouth, especially on college campuses. Most Chicagoans first heard Lehrer when his music was played on the radio by a young talent named Mike Nichols. Before his Nichols & May comedy duo act and directorial successes, he created and hosted “The Midnight Special” on WFMT.
Lehrer’s performance life started then, was interrupted by a two-year Army hitch, and by the late 1950s came nightclub engagements in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Canada and Europe.
He played here, twice at Orchestra Hall, turning down the frequent offers from the brothers George and Oscar Marienthal to play their club, Mister Kelly’s.
Then he was done. Yes, he resumed briefly in 1965 but then stopped for good in 1967, except for contributing a few songs for TV’s “The Electric Company.” His life became one of academics, with teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, where he also taught classes on Broadway musicals.
A new generation met Lehrer in 1980 when the British producer Cameron Mackintosh (the man behind such shows as “Phantom of the Opera,” “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables”) presented “Tomfoolery,” a revue of Lehrer’s songs. It was a smash in London and later came to New York, Washington, Dublin and here in 1982. The show played at the Apollo Theater and was reviewed by Tribune drama critic Richard Christiansen, who wrote that it was “an extremely smart, slick little review that gives us an entertaining opportunity to re-examine and re-enjoy the work of a very gifted comic moralist of our time.” Lehrer also chatted on the radio with Studs Terkel.
Jason Brett owned the Apollo with Stuart Oken when “Toomfoolery” came to town, and over the weekend he told me, “His songs had people howling during the show’s all too brief run. Understandable. Growing up, I played his album so much, my brother hid it from me.”
Lest this story seem a mere nostalgia jaunt, think of it rather as an introduction. The internet is awash in clips of Lehrer and, in keeping with his spirit, he gave away all his music a few years ago, placing it in the public domain. His website is still alive and a wonderful repository.
It’s possible that some of the songs’ subjects — Wernher Von Braun, the German rocket scientist who worked for the Nazis and then for the U.S. — might not register with you folks who enjoyed the weekend’s Lollapalooza, but you will find that most of his work is timeless.
To my mind, it’s impossible not to like his “National Brotherhood Week”:
But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
It’s National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It’s only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!
Or not appreciate his take on nuclear proliferation, “Who’s Next?”:
First we got the bomb and that was good,
‘Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK,
‘Cause the balance of power’s maintained that way!
Who’s next?
Lehrer’s work received a lot of praise (“In his inimitable and ghastly way … he has a kind of genius”) but also had detractors (“More desperate than amusing”). He was angrily assailed in some quarters and no more so than for his “The Vatican Rag”:
So get down upon your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Often wrongly compared to his “funny” songwriting contemporary Allan Sherman, who was much tamer, he is a lot closer to “Weird Al” Yankovic, who has gladly admitted to Lehrer’s influence. Or to comic Mort Sahl.
But he was, remains, one of a rare kind.
Oh, one more thing, from writer Gerald Nachman in his wonderful book, “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1850s and 1960s,” Lehrer was “famous for introducing the ‘Jell-O shot’ … which he perfected in the service as a way to smuggle booze into the barracks.”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
