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Liner Notes
Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer
$9.98
Songs & More Songs By Tom Lehrer
Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded.
You probably knew that already, but perhaps you didn't know this: His first album, Songs By Tom Lehrer, was one of the most profitable investments in the history of the music business. Recorded for an initial studio cost of $15 (15 dollars -- for the entire album) and initially released for sale only on and around the Harvard University campus, Songs By Tom Lehrer went on to sell 370,000 copies on Lehrer's own do-it-yourself label, one of America's biggest-selling -- if not the biggest-selling -- humorous-music album of the 1950s on any label, large or small.
This compilation contains the original 1953 version of Songs By Tom Lehrer and his only other studio album, More Of Tom Lehrer, both in their entirety. Also on this CD are all of Lehrer's hard-to-find 1960 recordings with full orchestra, including one track never before released in any form and a brand-new Lehrer performance of one of his most famous (or infamous) songs, "I Got It From Agnes," which he's never before recorded commercially.
Lehrer's career as an entertainer was as brief as it was brilliant. He didn't become a professional performer until 1952, just before he made his first album. He dropped out of show biz in 1960, and two years of that eight-year span were spent in the Army. Aside from a very short comeback in the mid-'60s (when he recorded his highest-charting album, That Was The Year That Was), he's spent his time teaching and, by his own account, taking life easy.
Tom Lehrer was born (April 9, 1928) and raised in New York City.
"My father was a tie manufacturer, a big man in the industry. I had a normal childhood, I would say. I took piano lessons; everybody did in those days. I didn't like classical music, though. I would practice the absolute minimum that I had to for my piano lesson, and then I would start picking out popular tunes I'd heard on records, and my parents finally caught on. They didn't have many pop-piano teachers in those days, but my mother, bless her, actually scouted around and finally found me one."
"My parents would take me to Broadway shows. There was one I saw many times: Let's Face It with Danny Kaye. Danny Kaye was certainly my inspiration -- more precisely his songs, especially those which Sylvia Fine wrote. I had an album of his 78s that I played over and over when I was 15."
The Kaye influence is evident in a number of Lehrer's songs. In particular, "Lobachevsky" was directly inspired by a routine Kaye performed about the great Russian director Stanislavsky. "The Elements" was an attempt to top the song "Tschaikowsky," by Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill. Kaye sang it in the show Lady In The Dark, rattling off at lightning speed the names of 50 Russian composers.
A precocious student, Lehrer graduated from high school at age 15 and entered Harvard. He soon began writing little songs and parodies for parties and special occasions. In 1945, at age 17, he wrote "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," the earliest composition that appears on his recordings. He got his bachelor's degree in mathematics at 18, and remained at Harvard as a graduate student until 1953, except for one year spent at Columbia University.
"The first time I ever sang for anybody, other than at a private party, was when I was in graduate school. They had a quartet singing contest at a law school dance, and four of us entered and sang some of my songs. We were the only entry, so they refused to give us the prize, but we sang anyway! Then we got hired to sing at the Harvard freshman smoker, an annual event where the whole freshman class --all boys in those days -- got together to drink beer and throw up. The other three singers went on to other careers after that, but I continued to sing on my own around the campus, at dance intermissions, things like that.
"My first real public performance was in the fall of 1952, at a nightclub called Alpini's Rendezvous in Boston, for $15 a night. I got a couple of $5 raises, but when I got to $30 they said that was too much, so I quit."
The LP record had recently been introduced, which made it more feasible to record and release an album on one's own than it had been in the days of fragile, cumbersome 78-r.p.m. discs.
"There was a doctor in Boston named Shep Ginandes, who sang folk songs. He made an album of them and issued it privately. I called him up, and he helped me a great deal. I found a studio in Boston, and they set up the recording session plus the LP pressings and the printing of the jackets. I recorded the first album on January 22, 1953, all in one session. I think it just took an hour; it might have been a little longer.
"The whole idea was just to sell it around Harvard. Record stores agreed to take it for $3 and sell it for $3.50, just as a public service to the community. Also, each (dormitory) at Harvard had a newsstand kind of thing, and they would also sell it, give me $3 and sell it for $3.50. The first 400 copies have my home address at the time on the back: 6 Kirkland Road."
That summer many Harvard students played the album for their friends back home.
"I began getting orders from college towns around the country. Then I began getting a lot of orders from San Francisco, which I couldn't figure out. It turns out that the music reviewer of the San Francisco Chronicle had devoted a whole column to the record, giving the price and the address.
At Christmastime 1953 Lehrer was booked into the Blue Angel, then one of the top nightclubs in New York. After he talked the city's two largest specialty record stores into carrying the album, which promptly began flying out the doors, several major record labels expressed interest. All of them eventually backed off because of the album's controversial lyrics. Like it or not, Lehrer remained an independent entrepreneur.
"I spoke to Manny Sachs at RCA. He explained that RCA sold refrigerators and other consumer items and wouldn't want any protests because of something on their record label."
Radio also shied away from Songs By Tom Lehrer, except for a few FM stations late at night (those were the days when only serious music and hi-fi buffs had FM radios). But those mail orders continued to roll in, more and more each week. Tom eventually set up a downtown office for Lehrer Records, and hired assistants to take orders and deal with the pressing plant and the jacket manufacturers. There was another pressing matter, though, that he had to handle personally: the draft.
"I went into the army for two years -- January 1955 to January 1957. I decided to surrender to them, because they were drafting people up to age 35 at that time. But first I dodged the draft by getting a job that would defer me until I could get all this record business settled, and until there was no threat of anybody shooting anybody. Meanwhile the record had two years to percolate and spread around. By the time I got out, I had a little notoriety (nationwide), so people suggested I do concerts.
"By '59 I had enough material for another record. Most popular groups record before they tour, but with comedy I didn't want that. I didn't want the audience to know the stuff beforehand. So I decided I'd retire in '59, after I'd been everywhere, and put the new records out afterward."
More Of Tom Lehrer was recorded on July 8, 1959. This time it cost a bit more than $15 -- the session was held at RCA's first-class studios in New York. Once again, though, the entire LP was cut in a single session -- three hours including playback and editing time.
An offer to tour Australia and New Zealand, where he hadn't yet been, helped delay Lehrer's retirement until mid-'60. There also was the matter of another recording session. A friend of his, Robert Sylvester, was part-owner of Unicorn Records, a Boston label that recorded local radio heroes Bob & Ray, along with some esoteric classical music. Sylvester wanted to record some of Lehrer's better-known songs with a full orchestra, and try for a hit single. The well-known arranger/conductor Richard Hayman was brought in, and four songs were cut in New York on January 21, 1960. "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" and "The Masochism Tango" were released shortly afterward as a single on Unicorn's Capricorn label (no relation to the Capricorn label that recorded The Allman Brothers, et al., starting in the 1970s). But radio wasn't any more receptive to Lehrer with violins than it had been to Lehrer with piano, and the other two songs weren't even released.
Sales were much better in England thanks to BBC airplay, but Lehrer held firm to his decision to abandon the concert hall for the classroom. Did he not enjoy performing, one wonders?
"Oh no, it was fine. I enjoyed high school but I wouldn't want to do that again either. I had a good time, going to new places and meeting new people, but getting out on stage and performing was not all that interesting. I felt like a novelist being asked to read his novel every night. One night I was performing at (New York's famous) Town Hall. I sang 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard' and I started with the second verse instead of the first, and I thought How am I going to get out of this? So I just stopped, and started again, and got confused again, and finally said, 'Oh, you all know this song anyway. Let's go on to the next one.' It was embarrassing. I hadn't been thinking about the song, but about what I was going to have for dinner afterwards or something. So I thought OK, the time has come."
Except for that 1965-66 burst of activity when he recorded "That Was The Year...," Tom Lehrer has been comedy's most celebrated nonperformer ever since. Of all the artists ever heard on the Dr. Demento Show, only "Weird Al" Yankovic gets more requests than Tom Lehrer. Meanwhile, theatergoers have been reintroduced to his work by the revue Tomfoolery, produced by British impresario Cameron Mackintosh in 1980 and since presented in most of the world's larger English-speaking cities.
Lehrer has never totally retired. He continues to teach a variety of courses in musical theater and in mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Despite having turned his back on his songwriting and performing career, he retains a lot of pride and affection for his creations.
True, a few of his songs may be perceived differently today, compared with when they were written. "The Old Dope Peddler," for instance.
"That was just intended as a takeoff on a certain genre of sentimental songs, like 'The Old Lamplighter' and 'The Umbrella Man,' which no one remembers any more. The idea was, it was only going to be funny if I took the most repulsive, antisocial character to write the song about. I thought about doing 'The Abortionist,' but at that time you couldn't even say that. The dope peddler was the second choice, so there it was.
"'I Wanna Go Back To Dixie' was a crowd pleaser in the 1950s because one associated that kind of bigotry with the South. Now the North is just as bad, so it doesn't really make much sense anymore. 'I Got It From Agnes' was written in 1952. Originally it was 'I Got It From Sally.' I used to sing that in nightclubs, but I didn't put it on records because I didn't want to be identified with so-called 'party records' like those by Ruth Wallis, Rusty Warren, Redd Foxx. I didn't want to be in that bin. When Cameron Mackintosh asked if there was anything else in the trunk that they could use for Tomfoolery, I polished it up, wrote a new verse, made it more like a British music-hall song. Of course, that was all before anybody had heard of AIDS. And 'The Elements' -- they keep coming up with new ones! I'd have to put out a new edition every couple of years."
All of us at Rhino are proud to bring you this new edition of the (almost entirely) timeless works of Mr. Tom Lehrer.
-- Dr. Demento
(Quotes from Tom Lehrer are from an interview I conducted with him in August 1996.
Thanks to Jeff Morris for additional information from his interviews with Mr. Lehrer.)
Original notes from Songs By Tom Lehrer:
About The Composer:
This recording of the imitable songs of Tom Lehrer has been issued, in spite of widespread popular demand for its suppression, primarily for the benefit of a small but diminishing group of admirers of his dubious talents, talents which have been on display for several years at functions, orgies, and divers festive occasions around Harvard University, where he was in attendance until June 1953, as undergraduate, graduate student, and teacher of mathematics. A few television and night club appearances have also been part of his infamous career. Now at last some of the songs with which he has been revolting local audiences for years are available to all, and it is no wonder that a great deal of public apathy has been stirred up at the prospect.
For those who are unfamiliar with the details of his sordid life, brought so vividly to the screen in Quo Vadis, we offer a brief biographical note:
Tom Lehrer, longtime exponent of the derrière-garde in American music, is an entirely mythical figure, a figment of his parents' warped imagination. He was raised by a yak, by whom he was always treated as one of the family, and ever since he was old enough to eat with the grownups he has been merely the front for a vast international syndicate of ne'er-do-wells. But enough of Lehrer the artist. What of Lehrer the bon vivant, man about town, and idol of three continents (and Madagascar, where half a million gibbering natives think he is God)? At last reports he had settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he earns a precarious living peddling dope to the local school children and rolling an occasional drunk. Here he spends his declining years with his shrunken head collections, his Nobel Prizes, and his memories.
ABOUT THE SONGS:
Fight Fiercely, Harvard -- Most football fight songs have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth and violent. This one, however, written for the author's Alma Mater, is rather dainty and thus fills a need which has long been felt.
The Old Dope Peddler -- Dedicated to that member of the community who goes modestly and inconspicuously about his job of spreading happiness among his fellow citizens, but who has never been properly recognized in song or story.
Be Prepared -- This song, whose title is of course the motto of the Boy Scouts of America, is a rousing anthem, dedicated to that worthy institution.
The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be -- A 20th century cowboy song about the wonders of the present day Wild West, as described in the few news stories that penetrate to the East.
I Wanna Go Back To Dixie -- Here we have a typical Dixie song, all about the many delightful FEATUREs of the South.
Lobachevsky -- The composer happens to be a mathematician in real life, and this is his description of one way to get ahead in that field (or, for that matter, in any academic field). (Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1793-1856), incidentally, was a genuine mathematician, whose best-known contributions were in the field of geometry.)
The Irish Ballad -- The folk song has in recent years become the particular form of permissible idiocy of the intellectual fringe. Here, for these elite, is an ancient Irish ballad; it is complete with modal tune, simple story line, and inane refrain, but it differs from other ancient ballads in that it was written in 1950.
The Hunting Song -- During the hunting season one finds countless items in the news concerning individuals who have shot other individuals under the impression that the latter were deer, rabbits, squirrels, or other fauna. This song is written to herald this encouraging new trend in a grand old sport.
My Home Town -- One of those exercises in nostalgia in which the singer tells you what a great place his own home town is.
Three Love Songs -- The love song is of course by far the most popular species of American song. Here are examples of three important subspecies: (1) the no-matter-how-moldy-and-decrepit-you-get-I'll-always-feel-the-same type (When You Are Old And Gray), (2) the tender ballad (I Hold Your Hand In Mine), and (3) the gay, lilting, Old-Vienna-ad-nauseam-gemütlichkeit waltz (The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz).
Original notes from More Songs By Tom Lehrer:
About The Composer:
Tom Lehrer, who must take the blame for this record, was not content with a bachelor's and a master's degree from Harvard University, but stayed on there until June 1953 as graduate student and teaching fellow (no, not quite a professor) in the field of mathematics, living simply and hoping only, like Pinocchio, to become one day a real live boy. During this period he supplemented his meager income by making up and selling salacious double-crostics, giving lessons on the ukulele da gamba, and regaling local degenerates with songs of his own devising.
Subsequently, after a certain period of draft-dodging, he succumbed to the importunings of his Selective Service board, and following a semester of basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he spent the rest of his two years as an army enlisted man in the environs of Washington, D.C.
Upon his discharge (which was, to his chagrin, quite honorable) a return to the academic life was presumably in order. It seems, however, that some years earlier he had had the effrontery to issue a 10" LP called Songs By Tom Lehrer, 1 containing some of the peculiar compositions by which only Harvard ears had previously been defiled. Because of the unexpectedly high national incidence of delayed adolescence, the record managed to achieve a certain notoriety even outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, and so, when the author redonned his mufti in 1957, he found that he was in some demand not only for engagements in various intimate (i.e., hot, fetid, smoky, and uncomfortable) night clubs, but also for one-man recitals in concert halls, theaters, and auditoria.
The night club audiences over whose conversation he has performed have included those at the Blue Angel in New York, Storyville in Boston, Ciro's and the Interlude in Hollywood, and the hungry i in San Francisco. He has performed his "concert" program (the same songs but with a tuxedo on) in such cities as New York (at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall), Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and others, and before numerous college audiences across the United States from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Stanford, U.C.L.A., and the University of California at Berkeley. He has also appeared on quite a number of obscure television programs, most of which are no longer on the air.
In the spring of 1959 he did a series of concerts in London (including one at the Royal Festival Hall) and also appeared at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The success of this tour tends to prove that depravity is the same the whole world over.
The sales to date of Mr. Lehrer's first record have been phenomenal -- over thirty copies in the United States alone -- and accolade upon accolade has been heaped on him by critics present at his personal appearances. For example:
"More desperate than amusing..." New York Herald Tribune
"He seldom has any point to make except obvious ones..." Christian Science Monitor
"Mr. Lehrer's muse (is) not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste..." New York Times
"Vulgarity..." Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph
"Obvious, jejune, and remarkably unsophisticated..." London Evening Standard
"Plays the piano acceptably..." Oakland Tribune
But he has not been spoiled by this critical acclaim, nor is money what he is seeking. "If, after hearing my songs," he says, wistfully, "just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while."
ABOUT THE SONGS:
(First of all, a note on the playing of this record: A survey has shown that many owners of Mr. Lehrer's first LP, Songs By Tom Lehrer, prefer to play it at 78 rpm, so that it is over with that much sooner. The same technique may, of course, also be used with this record.)
Poisoning Pigeons In The Park is a gay spring song, proselytizing for one of the author's favorite avocations.
The generic college alma mater is epitomized in Bright College Days; it is certainly not worth pointing out in passing that in the second line there is an obvious "sight gag" (as they say in show biz), which can not, alas, be captured here.
The spirit of twentieth-Century American Christmas -- that cherished season during which we honor the nation's manufacturers -- is glorified in A Christmas Carol.
The Elements is simply a setting of the names of 102 chemical elements to the tune of the Major-General's song from The Pirates Of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan; the words of its last line were true as of the date of the recording, but presumably will not remain so for long.
Oedipus Rex is a suggested title song for a recent motion picture version of the classic tragedy by Sophocles.
In Old Mexico is a paen to our good neighbor.
What might have happened if professional song writers (in this case Cole Porter, Mozart, any real cool cat, and Gilbert and Sullivan) had written folk songs is illustrated in Clementine.
It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier concerns the peacetime army, not as the author experienced it himself, it must be confessed, but as he believes purchasers of his records would like to think he experienced it.
She's My Girl and The Masochism Tango illustrate two archetypes of the love song.
A reassuring look into the future, ending the record on an inspirational note, is provided by the last song, a modern revival hymn called We Will All Go Together When We Go.
1 The same record has since been reissued as a 12" LP by the simple device of spacing the grooves farther apart.
