Tom Lehrer?

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Will Fly
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 04:47 AM

I played his songs over and over again, and still listen to them. They're all wonderful, and insanely clever. He was an excellent musician and, as well as a wordsmith, a clever parodist of musical styles. The Elements is an obvious tour de force, but I think one of my favourites is "Oedipus Rex" - 'who had a very, very strange complex - his name appears in Freud's index - 'cos he loved his mother...'

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 04:04 AM

I first encountered Tom Lehrer when someone sang "The Irish Ballad" round the campfire in the Scouts.

Many years later, my daughter phoned me from Guildford to tell me that her first maths lecture at university had included playing "Lobachevsky".

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 03:40 AM

Tom Lehrer appeared on British TV on David Frost's show (the Frost Report) in the 1960s, as did Julie Felix. His songs have been sung in our folk clubs for several decades, and in fact Leadfingers sang Poisoning Pigeons in the Park at Herga last Monday!

Kitty

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: GUEST, Stilly River Sage (sans cookie)
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 02:13 AM

I think I memorized them upon the first hearing. And my parents loved his songs. My dad performed several in his repertoire.

I corrupted my children at an early age by playing first a little Gilbert and Sullivan, and then a little Tom Lehrer, so they could see where some of it came from. But the sources are many and varied, aren't they?

My daughter (Moonglow) can sing The Elements full speed. I never managed to do that. I can come in on the last few syllables of any line. :)

I don't care if he's gay, straight, or has a harem. I'd love to spend time at a cocktail party with him at the piano, listening to his waggish observations of what is going on in science, politics, and the world today.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Nancy King
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 12:27 AM

I thoroughly enjoyed my parents' copy of Lehrer's original recording, as did they. I recall a sitting with a friend on our dock in Maine, dealing with our peeling sunburns and singing, "...and occasional pieces of skin, of skin..."   I was thrilled when he started writing songs for the TV series "That Was The Week That Was."

Back in the summer of 2000, on the occasion of the release of the 3-CD set, the Washington post had a fine article, which I tore out and saved, about Tom Lehrer. The headline is "For Songwriter Tom Lehrer, the Parody's Still Not Over." According to the article, he is (or was then) still a math professor, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaching the winter semester in Santa Cruz, California. A few excerpts: "By all rights, his records should have long since vanished. The core of the collection, after all, was recorded nearly half a century ago in 1953 -- a famously underground 10-inch LP he produced himself and mailed out, copy by copy, from his Cambridge apartment. He's written almost nothing new since 1965.

"But against every possible sort of odds or prediction, his records have remained in distribution in one form or another from the beginning. To his whimsical delight, these have involved fewer than 50 songs selling more or less steadily -- 25,000 to 30,000 albums a year in recent decades -- for nearly half a century. More than 2 million have been sold in all, he says, but at a rate of growth 'more like herpes than Ebola.'" "...he has been deliciously rewarded by his song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and his Third Reich background.

   Don't say that he's hypocritical,
   Say rather that he's apolitical.
   "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
   That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun....

   'In German or English I know how to count down,
   Und I'm learning Chinese,' said Wernher von Braun.

"Some years ago, Lehrer says, von Braun's daughter applied to an Eastern college, and in the process of her admissions interview, she talked animatedly about her father. 'The admissions officer couldn't wait to call me afterward,' Lehrer remembers with an expression of puckish glee. 'The girl said her father had many interests other than rockets. At the moment he was teaching himself Chinese.'

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 25 Mar 10 - 12:20 AM

Much info at http://dmdb.org/lehrer/

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Crowhugger
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 11:18 PM

My fave is perhaps Vatican Rag then just about everything else runs a close second. Early in childhood I often saw my parents singing and laughing hysterically to his records. Yet I know nearly nothing about Lehrer himself.

~CH.

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: KathyW
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 11:12 PM

Oh my goodness, I remember checking his records out of the library when I was a kid and playing them endlessly! I'm sure it drove my parents nuts, but was probably a nice break from the John Denver albums they were otherwise subjected to. Since it was after most of Leher's songs were topical, it gave me a good reason to learn some recent history. When I was in high school, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" was a popular recital piece among certain of my friends . . .

According to Wikipedia (which is never wrong!) he last taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: GUEST,MeliAlto
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 11:04 PM

He also composed music for the PBS series 'The Electric Company' in the early 70s. I've read he pretty much stopped parodies because he could find nothing funny about either Vietnam or Watergate.

I love his songs and will occasionally sing 'The Hunting Song' to entertain myself.

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Booklynrose
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 10:45 PM

My recollection is that he was wildly popular as a singer and creator of topical songs, and that in the early or mid sixties he stopped performing and went back to teaching math. Did he also move to England, or was that another singing mathematician?

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: Amos
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 10:28 PM

I have his songbook and a head full of memories of listening to hs recordings in my youth. I don't think it matters whether he is gay or not, but it would not surprise me.


A

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: GUEST
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 10:23 PM

Absolutely great. I remember my older brother listening to him when I was a kid. I have many of his songs and he was truly great.

Subject: RE: Tom Lehrer?
From: pdq
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 09:59 PM

I believe he tought at Harvard and at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The claim that he is gay sounds as bogus as the claim that Paul Clayton was gay.

Lehrer is brilliant, attending college at age 14 (if I recall from memory).

Subject: Tom Lehrer?
From: Charley Noble
Date: 24 Mar 10 - 09:53 PM

I don't suppose that many of us are aware that satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer was born way back in 1928, April 9th to be exact. I'd assumed that he was ten years older than myself, given that he was composing and recording such great songs in the late 1950's. But he's much older than that.

I also know that he taught mathematics at Harvard and Santa Barbara for years, and that he's gay but not a whole lot more. I do wonder if he actually is a time traveler, given the insights that are implicit in his songs. But most likely he is simply brilliant, able to leap tall paradigms (where did the "y" vanish in this word?) at a single bound.

We should figure out how to thank him for his songs, and for saving the universe.

Charley Noble