Remembering Tom Lehrer
I was sorry to see that the great Tom Lehrer passed away yesterday. Given that he was 97, at least he had a long run.
As readers of these pages know, I was a huge admirer of his work, and posted a lot of it over time. Far too much to single out, but if you want to see it all, just to a search for "Lehrer" and it will overflow.
The short version is that he was a high-level mathematician who taught at Harvard, M.I.T. and UC Santa Cruz -- and even briefly worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. As a side gig, he wrote and performed some of the funniest, most deeply satirical, and often darkly outlandish songs, with several very successful albums to his credit. And most successful of all, his That Was the Year That Was, his concert performance of songs he'd written for the political satire TV show in the 1960s, That Was the Week That Was.
And a few years ago, he gave it all away, posting on his website that he renounced all rights to everything he wrote, and that anyone was free to use the material however they see fit.
The New York Times wrote a far better appreciation of his work and life, which you can read here.
The only thing of note that the article misses is that it doesn't mention how, long after he'd retired from performing, he wrote and performed the wonderful song, "Hanukkah in Santa Monica" for Garrison Keillor's radio program, A Prairie Home Companion.
I was trying to decide on what to post, since there is so much to choose from. And I ended up with this -- a concert he gave in Copenhagen in 1967, which turns out to have been his last public concert. (He made a few other brief appearances in the subsequent years -- including at a big tribute for Cameron Mackintosh, who produced a stage revue of Lehrer's work, Tomfoolery. For that TV performance, he was introduced by his summer camp mate, Stephen Sondheim. I posted an article about it and the song here.)
The only downside of the Copenhagen concert video is that since a lot of the humor in the song has a strong satirical relationship to the United States, the laughter isn't as lout from the audience as on Lehrer's albums -- although, in fairness, for all I know (since clearly they were big enough fans in Denmark to have him there and put a full concert on TV...), the audience just wasnt mic'd all that much for getting an audience reaction.
Regardless of what we hear from the audience in Copenhagen, the song themselves are what matters and are a joy.
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