OT(unfortunately): TOM LEHRER: still crazy after all these years

Date: 8 Mar 2003 08:09:19 -0800
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical.recordings
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Stop clapping, this is serious
March 1 2003
'I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't
figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I
don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to
vaporise them."
The speaker is Tom Lehrer, arguably the most famous living satirical
songwriter. And, in a roundabout way, the New York-born singer,
composer and mathematician is explaining why he has been all but
silent since 1965.
It's 50 years since Lehrer's first recordings, and 38 years since his
last album of new material, yet word that we've secured an interview
has people around the office launching into such unlikely yet
infectious ditties as The Vatican Rag, Smut and Lehrer's ode to spring
pursuits, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
It also has people asking with a surprised tone: "Is he still alive?"
Yes, Lehrer is very much with us, despite being quiet for so long (he
once told The New York Times he had encouraged rumours of his demise
in the hope of cutting down junk mail). And the writer of the nuclear
holocaust anthem We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the prescient
Pollution, is as feisty and as funny as ever. He just isn't doing
anything about it.
Lehrer is that rarest of beasts a performer who was never seduced by
the roar of the crowd and who rejected show business well before it
had a chance to do the same to him. His concert tours were brief and
motivated either by a desire to visit a new place (such as Australia,
in 1960) or to test and polish material for a recording. Even after
his biggest hit, the 1965 album That Was the Year that Was, he quickly
returned to academic life rather than cash in with concert tours.
"I wasn't really a performer by temperament," he explains today. "I
can't imagine Rex Harrison doing the same My Fair Lady every night for
years. That would drive me crazy.
"I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the
dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then
getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on
the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record."
"The record" is a body of work comprising fewer than 50 songs, yet one
that has made an indelible impression, not just with the many
musicians and humorists who cite him as a hero.
In 1999, Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Winston Churchill and
famous chronicler of the 20th century, named Lehrer as one of the 10
great figures of the previous 100 years. "Lehrer was able to express
and to expose, in humorous verse and lilting music, some of the most
powerful dangers of the second half of the century ... Many of the
causes of which Lehrer sang became, three decades later, part of the
main creative impulse of mankind," he said.
Boredom wasn't the only reason Lehrer gave up the industry that made
him famous and, thanks to a very canny business sense, surprisingly
wealthy (his first album was recorded for just $15 and sold more than
370,000 copies on his own label). Years ago, Lehrer quipped:
"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize." And he wasn't being entirely flippant. Almost
everything about the world of entertainment and politics has changed
and he doesn't see any room for a modern-day Tom Lehrer.
"With audiences nowadays I see it with these late-night [TV show]
people, Jay Leno, David Letterman and so on the audience applauds the
jokes rather than laughs at them, which is very discouraging.
"Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. But you can easily
clap just to say [deadpan]: 'A ha, that's funny, I think that's
funny.' Sometimes they cut to the audience and you can see they are
applauding madly. But they're not laughing."
Then there are the issues themselves. When Lehrer talks in his
still-boyish voice about vaporising Bush, he quickly adds: "And that's
not funny." It's hard not to laugh, nonetheless, if only because of
the sudden change of tone accompanying the word vaporise.
"OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not
really satire," he says.
The issues during the Cold War days of mutually assured destruction
were, Lehrer insists, easier to make fun of. "Things are much more
complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot
of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good.
"I have become, you might call it mature I would call it senile and I
can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on
the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.
"The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes
are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the
important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines."
Telling sophisticated jokes about politics is something Lehrer
believes works only in clubs such as the hungry i in San Francisco.
Those clubs don't exist any more, nor, he reasons, do the audiences
that once filled them.
"The people who go to comedy shows are kids that don't know anything,
I think, and so you have to make jokes about your girlfriend or your
family or that kind of thing only, make them as vulgar as possible."
Television has taken over the mainstream comedy beat, he says, and
generally won't stand for partisan political humour because it will
offend half the potential audience. "One of the problems I see with
these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since
you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and
so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to
these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack
of articulateness."
He adds that it's not funny just to say something insulting about the
president. "Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what
these comedians lack." Lehrer admires Eddie Izzard and a small number
of other modern comics, but has no solutions to what he sees as a
decline in political satire.
He says he couldn't do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians
"because I'm against everybody and I can't take a side". Nor can the
man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in
impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September
11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk
about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.
"They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it
was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a
disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year
that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending
some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against
it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up
or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for
one thing."
Not the sort of sentiments that will get you air time in the US at the
moment, he agrees. And clearly signs of a man who is getting highly
passionate, yet who acknowledges such a condition is bad for humour.
"That's what happened to [satirist] Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and
then he wasn't funny any more. You have your choice there."
It would be wrong to assume, however, that Lehrer, 74, is bitter and
twisted. He proves quick-witted, lively and extremely friendly. He
keeps a keen watch on the world from his Santa Cruz beach house and,
although he stopped teaching two years ago, he still "hangs out"
around the University of California at Santa Cruz.
He writes songs for friends and special occasions "nothing
recordable," he insists and, for his own pleasure, plays selections
from the heyday of the American musical theatre on his piano. That's
no surprise Lehrer's sense of rhyme and rhythm is as acute as the best
Broadway songwriters and, for 25 years, he taught a course on the
American musical, alongside mathematics.
He says Stephen Sondheim "is the greatest lyricist the English
language has produced and that's not an opinion, that's a fact". He
also reveals a soft spot for The Simpsons, which he calls the most
consistently funny show on television.
Talk of the manned space program turns to questions on Lehrer's
hilariously black song about Nazi rocket scientist-turned-NASA star
recruit Wernher von Braun.
He says that a line from the 1965 song "once the rockets are up/ who
cares where they come down/ that's not my department, says Wernher von
Braun" is his most quoted.
"The idea that Wernher von Braun was a hero didn't make me angry so
much as, well, it was just so silly. It was one thing to hire him, OK,
but to make him a hero, which a lot of people did ... he may have
helped us land on the moon a few years earlier than we did, but who
cares?"
The widespread rumour that von Braun sued Lehrer proves to be a
furphy. "I've heard that a lot, that I have to pay all my royalties
for the song to him and so on and so forth. No, that's one of those
myths. There is no possible way he could have sued me."
Lehrer's decision to give a rare interview was at least partly
motivated by his desire to talk about his Australian tour of early
1960, during which he was banned, censored, mentioned in several
houses of parliament and threatened with arrest. He calls it "the
highlight of my life".
When he arrived in Australia, he hadn't sold a huge number of records,
but press had been given to Princess Margaret's affection for the
recordings of this "sick singer" and "professional ghoul". In an era
when most American performers rushed in and out quickly, Lehrer stayed
for two months, and his highly quotable quips made him a press and
television favourite.
"The Sydney and Melbourne concerts were fine I think the best audience
I've ever had was in Melbourne. But Brisbane was a problem because the
chief of police said I couldn't sing the boy scout song, particularly.
That was the one that bothered them."
That song was Be Prepared!, including such revised scout pledges as:
"Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice/ Unless you get a good
percentage of her price."
He says: "The chief of police couldn't come out with any specific
threat and so I took a chance and I sang the song and everything was
fine. The Sydney and Melbourne papers were having a wonderful time
reporting this but, in Adelaide, they caught on and they didn't want
to be made fools of, so they made me sign a petition saying that I
wouldn't sing five songs. And, since I was using the Town Hall and it
was sold out already, there wasn't much I could do."
The ban also covered I Hold Your Hand in Mine, the tale of a man who
cut off his girlfriend's hand and kept it as a "precious souvenir".
"The Australian Opera had just done Salome in Adelaide," remembers
Lehrer, "where she cuts off the guy's head and carries it around, but
they objected to my song."
Unfortunately for authorities, they couldn't ban what they didn't know
about, so Lehrer was able to sing several songs then unreleased in
Australia, such as The Masochism Tango (Sample lyric: "Take your
cigarette from its holder/ And burn your initials in my shoulder/
Fracture my spine/ And swear that you're mine/ As we dance to the
Masochism Tango.")
By the time he left, it was fair to say Lehrer was more famous in
Australia than anywhere else.
His second album, launched here soon after the tour, carried more song
parodies than political comment pieces. It wasn't until That Was the
Year that Was in 1965 that Lehrer's songs became overtly political. In
the scathing National Brotherhood Week, he sang: "Oh, the Protestants
hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the
Hindus hate the Muslims/ And everybody hates the Jews." (Lehrer has a
Jewish background, but is not religious.)
He caused even more outrage (and plenty of mirth) with The Vatican
Rag, a swipe at the Catholic Church's attempt to modernise, which set
a proposed "hymn" to a brash show tune ("Get in line in that
processional/ Step into that 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").
And he gave US foreign policy one serve after another in songs such as
Send the Marines.
Sadly, though, Lehrer is of the opinion that while satire may attract
attention to an issue, it doesn't achieve a lot else.
"The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always
regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was
titillating the converted.
"The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in
fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather
than angry, which is what they should be."
His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter
Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to
be a satirical venue modelled on "those wonderful Berlin cabarets
which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak
of the Second World War".
Lehrer says you can't satirise real evil. "You can make fun with
Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the
concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but
benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or,
instead, thinking they were doing good."
Lehrer enjoyed quoting scathing reviews on his album covers ("More
desperate than amusing," said the New York Herald Tribune; "He seldom
has any point to make except obvious ones," reported the Christian
Science Monitor) and referring to himself as the derriere-garde in
American music. Those few interviews he has granted in recent years
are also filled with self-deprecation.
"Well, that's part of the act," he says with a laugh. "I can't say
'I'm the greatest performer that there ever was'. But, if I say 'you
probably won't like these songs', it works."
It's his way of saying he's proud of what he's done. "There are some
words here and there I would probably change but, for the most part,
I'm delighted that I don't have to be ashamed of it."
The wit of Tom Lehrer
When You Are Old And Grey (1953)
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 ...
We Will All Go Together When We Go (1959)
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner-or
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
But don't you worry.
No more ashes, no more sackcloth.
And an armband made of black cloth
Will some day never more adorn a sleeve.
For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbours too,
There'll be nobody left behind to grieve.
Memorable stage patter
On ageing: "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he
had been dead for two years."
On performing: "It isn't as though I have to do this, you know, I
could be making, oh, $3000 a year just teaching."
On his claimed Latin translation of The Wizard of Oz: "[it] remains
even today the standard Latin version of that work..
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/28/1046407753895.html