George Konig / REX USA
Nearly 25 years ago, Jeff Morris, a high school senior in Jeffersonville, Ind., placed a phone call to his new idol. A skinny music nerd with an easy laugh, Morris was a devotee of the Dr. Demento Show, a long-running collection of brilliant musical oddities, from Frank Zappa to "Weird Al" Yankovic. That’s where he first encountered Tom Lehrer, whose music was a staple and who was, in the reckoning of the show’s eponymous host, the greatest musical satirist ever recorded. Morris had been assigned a first-person interview on the subject of censorship, and Lehrer seemed obvious.
Lehrer had been a sensation in the late 1950s, the era’s musical nerd god: a wryly confident Harvard-educated math prodigy who turned his bone-dry wit to satirical musical comedy. His sound looked further back, to Broadway of the ‘20s and ‘30s — a man and a piano, crisp and clever — but his lyrics were funny and sharp to the point of drawing blood, and sometimes appalling. One famous ditty celebrates an afternoon spent “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” Another cheerful number, “So Long Mom,” dwells on the details of nuclear holocaust. “I Got It from Agnes” is an extended joke about sexually transmitted disease.
Many of Lehrer’s fans thought the artist might be dead, a belief Lehrer encourages. ("I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail," he told the Harvard Crimson in 1981.) But Morris found him where he had always been, in a modest brown house on Sparks Street in Cambridge, Mass., where a mirrored wall helps Lehrer stay fit with tap-dancing routines and custom-ordered Moxie sodas sit in the fridge.
“Is this Tom Lehrer?” Morris asked over the phone, working to hide his nervousness.
“Yes,” replied a voice some 1,000 miles away.
“The Tom Lehrer who teaches math?”
“Yes.”
“The Tom Lehrer that did some records in the '50s and '60s?”
“Yes.”
Morris apologetically explained his school assignment, worried that Lehrer wouldn’t want to speak to him and self-conscious for having interrupted his day. The retired performer listened patiently to his request.
"Rather than talk to me for very long, just make up anything you want and I won't deny it.”
George Konig / REX USA
In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture — and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure. During his golden decade, he appeared on The Tonight Show twice, drew a denunciation in Time magazine, and by the early 1960s, seemed poised for a lasting place on an American cultural scene that itself was undergoing a radical upheaval.
Then Lehrer simply stopped performing. His entire body of work topped out at 37 songs. He bounced around Cambridge, never quite finishing his doctorate on the concept of the mode — the most common number in a set — in statistics. He kept the Sparks Street house but began spending most of his time in Santa Cruz, Calif., where he became a beloved instructor in math and musical theater for some 40 years.
“There's never been anyone like him,” said Sir Cameron MacKintosh, the legendary Broadway producer who created Tom Foolery, a musical revue of Lehrer’s songs, in the ’70s. “Of all famous songwriters, he's probably the only one that, in the great sense of the word, is an amateur in that he never wanted to be professional. And yet the work he did is of the highest quality of any great songwriter."
Indeed, Tom Lehrer has done everything possible, short of dying, to vanish from the American cultural scene. Actually, if he were dead, or had gone insane, or had holed up in New Hampshire and burned his later work, his story might carry him more neatly into the canon.
Instead, he’s alive and well at 86. He’s a hard — but not quite impossible — man to reach, and an even harder one to engage in conversation. He’s said he’s glad the Johnny Carson videos were lost, and he gave away the master recordings of his songs to an acquaintance. But he has, over the years, given (and regretted giving) enough interviews, and touched enough lives — from those of his brilliant Harvard peers to his generations of students — to piece together a picture, if not an explanation, of an artist’s strange and indifferent relationship to his own legacy.
Lehrer’s songs and influence have survived his own indifference, and survived his place in the cultural cul de sac that was the anti-hippie, anti-folk music square left. If your parents went to a fancy college in the late 1950s, they probably played you “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” when you were 7, and “New Math” when you were 11, and blushed trying to explain “I Got It from Agnes.” And if you have kids of your own now, you’re probably playing them the same songs on the radio as you drive them back from a soccer game or over to their grandparents’. “Wernher Von Braun,” implausibly, cracks them up every time.
If you have a “Tom Lehrer” column in Tweetdeck, you’ll see about five tweets with his name an hour.
Lehrer was heir to Gilbert & Sullivan’s light opera; he can be heard today in what’s left of musical satire and in nerd-rock, from the nominally adult They Might Be Giants to the booming new genre explicitly aimed at kids. His latter-day admirers include Daniel Radcliffe. “He’s kind of my hero,” Radcliffe explained giddily, before performing a live rendition of “The Elements” in 2010.
"I wouldn’t call anybody today a modern-day Tom Lehrer," said Yankovic, enthusing over how "sick and twisted" Lehrer's work was. "Though he’s been inactive musically for several decades, I maintain that Tom Lehrer is our modern-day Tom Lehrer. However, there are quite a few current artists doing clever, creative musical comedy, including The Lonely Island, Flight of the Conchords, Tenacious D, Ylvis, Garfunkel and Oates, Reggie Watts, Bo Burnham, and (I’d like to think) myself. He set the bar for me — and provided an example of how a nerdy kid with a weird sense of humor could find his way in the world.”
Ted Streshinsky/Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images
That darkness in Lehrer’s work certainly didn’t come from a difficult childhood. He grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the son of a pioneering necktie manufacturer, James Lehrer, known for his obsessive involvement in every detail of the design and manufacturing process, and for his contributions to the United Jewish Appeal.
In a range of interviews over the years, Lehrer has recalled his childhood as idyllic. He skipped grades, studied math and piano and played with logic puzzles, and immersed himself in pop culture: He bought one or two 78 records every week, and favored the popular comedy show Vic and Sade on the radio. He grew up, most of all, on the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter, which seems to have been more or less the equivalent of temple in his secular Jewish home. He spent summers in Maine at Camp Androscoggin, where he rubbed shoulders with a boy two years younger than he who would also eventually become one of his musical idols: Stephen Sondheim. They weren’t close. (“A 9-year-old isn't friendly with a 7-year-old,” Lehrer's friend David Robinson recalled him explaining.)
Lehrer was also a true prodigy. He raced through Horace Mann, a private high school in the Bronx, and graduated from Loomis Chaffee, a Connecticut prep school, in 1943. It was at Loomis that he wrote his “Dissertation on Education,” the poem he used to apply to college. Its last stanza:
“But although I detest/Learning poems and the rest/Of the things one must know to have ‘culture,’/While each of my teachers/Makes speeches like preachers/And preys on my faults like a vulture,/I will leave movie thrillers/And watch caterpillars/Get born and pupated and larva’ed,/And I’ll work like a slave/And always behave/And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…”
When Lehrer entered Harvard’s freshman class in the fall, he was 15 years old.
There, among the elite young men of his generation, Lehrer stood out for his wit and brilliance. In his room at Lowell House — a friend, Lew Branscomb, still recalls the room number, M33, Lehrer had a stand-up piano. Lehrer and his friends reserved the evenings and weekends for pranks, insult comedy, and Lehrer just showing off: He once played a Rachmaninoff concerto with the left hand in one key and the right in half a key below.
He earned his first measure of campus fame in 1945 with “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” a song that questioned the toughness of the genteel school’s football team. (“How we shall celebrate our victory / We’ll invite the whole team up for tea!”)
When Lehrer entered graduate school in 1946 — at 18 — he found himself at the center of a group of friends who called themselves the “Graduate Gang.” They amused themselves with the quizzes, crossword puzzles, and math games they brought to their dinners in the Harvard dining hall. It was, in retrospect, a gilded circle: One member, Philip Warren Anderson, went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics; Branscomb served as the chief scientist of IBM; and Robinson was executive director of the Carnegie Corporation.
“Tom was the intellectual leader in the sense that he was the funniest and he would come up with cuter problems,” Robinson said, adding that when Anderson wrote his 50th Anniversary Report for the Harvard class of ‘94, he’d recall: “When I was a student with Tom Lehrer…”
In January 1951, Lehrer staged The Physical Revue , a musical drama of 21 songs that he had written and refined throughout his time at Harvard. The show was performed in Room 250 of Jefferson Laboratory for the introductory physics class Branscomb taught, and recorded using wire technology by Norman Ramsey, a young physics professor who would also go on to win the Nobel Prize. The next month, as a result of the success of the Revue, Lehrer and his friends were invited to perform at the Freshman Smoker, a raucous and, according to Robinson, “big-time” event that was described in a 1949 issue of the Harvard Crimson as “sex, beer, and a riot.”
He made it to the front page of the Boston Globe for his ad hoc Arbor Day Festival, calling upon friends to dress up as bulls to be felled by a “priestess,” plant miniature steel trees, and sing, while he presided as master of ceremonies.
Lehrer hadn’t worked at stardom, but he was becoming a star. People had begun asking him to do performances at cocktail parties and private events. “He kept doubling his price and would get half as many [gigs], which was just fine with him,” Robinson said.
Within the year, though, his graduate group of friends had begun to trickle out of Cambridge, first the chemist, then the physicists, then the historians who took much longer to get a Ph.D. As a souvenir for them, Lehrer decided in 1953 to make a record of the songs he had written at Harvard. He recorded Songs by Tom Lehrer in one session at Trans Radio studios in Boston on a 10-inch LP. He wrote the liner notes himself, called upon the wife of Robinson’s boss to do the illustrations, and had the covers printed at Shea Brothers printers near Harvard Square, just up the street from where he and Robinson shared a room on the third floor of a house.
He asked Robinson for advice on how many copies to print. Lehrer had paid full price, $5.59, to buy five for his parents; his father promised to buy another 35 to give away. It would take 250 records to break even. They puzzled over the math, and Robinson suggested he print 300; Lehrer paused for a moment. “I’m going to get the 400.”
A couple of days later, Robinson would receive a telegram from Lehrer while on a trip to California. Lehrer had just finished performing at Dunster House, and had taken his records with him. The message was brief: “They’re all sold.”
Lehrer then incorporated Lehrer Music, bought the rights to the record from Trans Radio, and began selling it by mail order through P.O. Box 121 at the Cambridge post office. He rented an empty room on the second floor of his rooming house, hired Harvard freshmen to help him with packing, and trudged down to the post office every Monday for months to send shipments.
By 1954 — when he was trying to avoid the draft by working for a defense contractor — he had sold 10,000 records. He had also quickly dissolved Lehrer Music, of which he was president, in December for “various reasons,” among them: “Certain stockholders objected to the president’s face.” He gave up and shipped off to Fort Meade in 1955, an early officer in the National Security Agency. (He is believed, during that time, to have invented vodka Jell-O shots.) By the end of the decade, he had sold 370,000 records.
Lehrer had also begun performing at nightclubs, first at Alpini’s Rendezvous on Kenmore Square in Cambridge and eventually at places such as The Blue Angel in Manhattan and The Hungry i in San Francisco. He also traveled extensively to college campuses, and performed benefits for liberal and anti-war groups.
He began performing internationally in 1959, when the Palace Theatre in London asked him to perform the first two Sundays in May. “In England in 1959, you couldn't put on a play, [on Sunday] so the theaters were closed,” Robinson recalled. “But you could put on a concert.”
Lehrer filled the 1,400-seat theater both weekends and was a big enough hit that they kept him on through the end of May, after which he booked several more performances throughout England in June and early July.
Yet despite his enormous success, global popularity, and the release of his second album, More Songs by Tom Lehrer that year, it was exactly at this time that Lehrer first told Robinson he wanted to stop performing. Lehrer has told friends and various interviewers that he didn’t enjoy “anonymous affection.” And while his work was widely enjoyed at the time, it was also something of a scandal — the clever songs about math and language were for everyone, but Lehrer’s clear-eyed contemplation of nuclear apocalypse was straightforwardly disturbing.
And amid the clever songs about math and language, and confrontational politics, a distinct lack of prudishness: There’s BDSM, promiscuity, gay Boy Scouts. "If you’re out behind the woodshed doing what you'd like to do, just be sure that your companion is a Boy Scout too,” Lehrer advised in “Be Prepared.” (He later changed that lyric to involve a Girl Scout in a futile effort to get a mainstream record deal.) Lehrer’s father, whose New York circle included figures like the lyricist Irving Caesar, had connected him with every prominent record producer in town. But though he drew their interest, he had too much edge.
“They were all afraid of the sick humor,” Robinson said. Goddard Lieberson, who would later become president of Columbia Records, gave the most generous estimate for Lehrer’s sales. He told him he would never sell more than 40,000 records.
In July 1959, Time featured Lehrer alongside Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl as the avatars of a new “sick” comedy, which it played as the symptom of a sick society. “What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world,” the magazine wrote.
It was a dated indictment, naive in light of what the next decade would bring. But it also captured something that remains disturbing and compelling about Lehrer’s work. Years later, when Lehrer collaborated with MacKintosh on Tom Foolery, he gave the director a note: “The nastier the sentiment, the wider the smile.” In 2000, the New York Times’ Todd Purdum reported that Lehrer was still playing around with the occasional political tune, including one, on the subject of late-term abortion, called “Bye-Bye, Baby.”
“Done right, social criticism set to a catchy tune always makes politics easier to digest,” said Lizz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show and a women's rights activist. "You add a layer of humor and you can break down two barriers: One, singing a song over and over leads to repetition of a message, and two, humor creates likability. The more polarizing the issue, no matter what you say, you will have people who do not think you should use humor. He went for the jugular when it was desperately needed [yet] was always hilarious and poignant."
Sick comedy was, in retrospect, a sign of artistic life in a conformist era. Lehrer ate up the notoriety, but he did not so easily find a place in the era that replaced it. He all but stopped performing concerts domestically in 1960, though he was happy to re-avail himself for a slew of international gigs in 1965 and 1967. “Here was a way for him to travel and get all his expenses paid,” Robinson recalls of the decision. He also had a brief stint on That Was the Week That Was, an early NBC precursor to Saturday Night Live. He spent the bulk of his time in Cambridge, where he’d been from the beginning, teaching math at Harvard and MIT. But he couldn’t, it seemed, quite finish his doctorate.
Jan Persson/Redferns
From BuzzFeed