LITTLE ROCK — Tom Lehrer turned 82 on Friday.
Read no further if your reaction to that news is, “Tom who?”
But if “Wow!” is your response, there’s all the more reason to celebrate, thanks to the release this week of The Tom Lehrer Collection.
Touted by Shout! Factory studio as the nonpareil parodist’s “first-ever hits collection,” this double-barreled package ($15.98) includes a CD showcasing 26 of the musician/mathematician’s satirical songs from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s also a DVD of him performing 12 of those songs at a 1967 concert in Norway, along with a half-dozen other video snippets.
Fittingly for an octogenarian, “When You Are Old and Gray” is one of the vintage Lehrer ditties reprised here. It also happensto be a stellar example of his remarkable rhyming mastery, as in this breathtaking stretch of virtuosity bemoaning the advent of old age:
An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I’ll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability.
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility.
So let’s act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we’ll soon reach senility
And lose the ability.
A Harvard University graduate at age 19, Lehrer wrote songs mainly about personal relationships in the ’50s. He performed at first in Boston-area clubs, to his own sprightly piano accompaniment.
The songs were frequently mordant, as in “The Masochism Tango” and the gloriously grisly “I Hold Your Hand in Mine, Dear” (unaccountably absent from the new album).
They were sometimes ribald, as in “I Got It From Agnes” (the “it” being a venereal disease) and “Smut,” a passage from which bears repeating:All books can be indecent books Though recent books are bolder, For filth (I’m glad to say) Is in the mind of the beholder;
When correctly viewed
Ev’rything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there’s a dirty old man!
Lehrer turned to social and political topics in the ’60s, particularly when he was writing for the American version of the television show That Was the Week That Was.
Black humor continued to be his stock in trade, and some of the choicest examples grace The Tom Lehrer Collection.
In the Cold War era of duck-and-cover and mutually assured destruction, his musical rhyming was especially trenchant in “We Will All Go Together When We Go.” The final verse is illustrative:
And we will all go together when we go,
Ev’ry Hottentot and ev’ry Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we will all go together
When we all go together,
Yes, we all will go together when we go.
Lehrer wrote a song that reportedly infuriated the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who had designed missiles for Nazi Germany before going to work for the U.S. government. One passage retains its stiletto sharpness after nearly a halfcentury:
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.
It beggars the imagination to conceive of a song Lehrer might write to address the ongoing Roman Catholic scandal over child-molesting priests.
But he did venture into high-humored sacrilege in 1966 to lampoon the reforms of the so-called Vatican II ecumenical council. “The Vatican Rag” is one of his masterpieces:First you get down on your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Do whatever steps you want if You have cleared them with the Pontiff, Ev’rybody say his own Kyrie eleison, Doin’ the Vatican Rag.
Get in line in that processional, Step into the small confessional, There the guy who’s got religion’ll Tell you if your sin’s original.
If it is, try playin’ it safer, Drink the wine and chew the wafer.
Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate!
So get down upon your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Make a cross on your abdomen, When in Rome do like aRoman.
Ave Maria,
Gee, it’s good to see ya,
Gettin’ ecstatic an’ sorta dramatic an’
Doin’ the Vatican Rag!
Although hardly as reclusive as J.D. Salinger, Lehrer stopped performing in public in 1973. He said at the time that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger rendered political satire obsolete. In 2003, he told an interviewer that boredom with doing the same songs over and over again led to his musical retirement.
His only stage performance since 1973 took place in London in 1998, and one of his songs from that Lyceum Theatre appearance is shown on this album’s DVD. It’s the mirthful Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, and the following verse is a personal favorite:We’ve gained notoriety, And caused much anxiety In the Audubon Society With our games.
They call it impiety, And lack of propriety, And quite a variety Of unpleasant names.
But it’s not against any religion To want to dispose of a pigeon.
Style, Pages 53 on 04/11/2010