Tom Lehrer
The Remains of Tom Lehrer (Warner Archives/Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
Tom Lehrer
The Remains of Tom Lehrer (Warner Archives/Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Spring 2001
When I look at my music collection and glance across the cassettes, I usually wonder why I haven't replaced them all with CDs yet (beside, you know, money). The Remains Of Tom Lehrer is as good a reason as any, since this 3-CD box set of the complete recordings of the finest musical comedian since Spike Jones (who, when you think about it, was really more of a comic musician) didn't duplicate anything in my collection that wasn't analog. And while Lehrer's albums have been available again for a while now, Rhino has, as usual, put together a package so authoritative and beautiful (with 80 pages of hardbound (!) liner notes) that the individual CDs seem a little sparse in comparison.
The original albums are, of course, indispensable in themselves; if they weren't, collecting them would be a fool's errand. What Remains does, besides just slapping them together, is put them in a context that allows both the albums and the individual songs to communicate with each other in a way that may not have been so explicit before. Disc One includes the studio recordings Songs By Tom Lehrer (1953) and More of Tom Lehrer (1959), while Disc Two's Tom Lehrer Revisited (1960) and the inconceivably good An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1959) present the exact same song program in a live setting. The difference is extraordinary, a reminder that a live audience responding strongly to a performer, regardless of whether they're applauding or (more than once) just hissing, can energize the performance, even if it's just one guy singing at a piano.
Listening to it all at once also puts a few of Lehrer's running obsessions into sharp relief. The Cold War certainly seeped deeply into his consciousness; there are plenty of A-bomb jokes within and informing his songs, including "So Long, Mom (A Song For World War III)" (prefaced with the disclaimer, "if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we better start writing them now") and the unsurpassed "We Will All Go Together When We Go," which is clearly the best, funniest and most optimistic song about mass nuclear destruction that will ever be written. Lehrer also seems to have really, really hated folk music, which was (not entirely coincidentally) peaking in popularity at precisely this time as well. "The Folk Song Army" mocks fans and performers, while his live introductions of "The Irish Ballad" and "Clementine" ("a song with no recognizable merit whatsoever") show nothing but contempt for the form itself.
Maybe he was just upset that music-making was falling out of the hands of trained professionals (a fair conclusion given his statement that "the reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people"). Lehrer's unheralded gifts lay in his piano playing, which encompasses a phenomenal range of musical styles, from popular Broadway showtunes to tango, country to military marches, ragtime to German waltzes. "Clementine," in particular, shows off his superb playing, imagining famous composers taking a stab at the folk standard; in quick order, he barrels through Cole Porter, hipster jazz, classical opera and Gilbert & Sullivan-style pomp without missing a beat or sounding even remotely inauthentic. Take away the wit, humor and intelligence infused in his lyrics and Lehrer surely still possessed the talent to become a professional musician in any style he wanted.
What he chose, though, was comedy (more or less... in the past 50 years, the man's written only 47 songs, all but a handful before 1965), which has a notoriously brief shelf life. Astoundingly, Lehrer's songs not only hold up almost a half century later, they're still funny more than 16 years after I first heard them and, in some cases, get even funnier as I grow older and (ostensibly) wiser. One reason is that Lehrer's deftness as a lyricist is on par with the cleverest writers of the twentieth century; some of his best songs display a playfulness with the language that rivals the skill of Cole Porter and Oklahoma!/Carousel-era Oscar Hammerstein II. Lehrer is a master of restraint as well, structuring his lyrics so as to never telegraph the joke, so that when it comes, its power is devastating (notice, for example, how the verses describing his fellow grunts in "It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be Soldier" don't really betray their comic nature until the punchline).
The other reason for Lehrer's amazing longevity is that he never once underestimated the intelligence of his audience. Graduating from Harvard at an age when most people are getting out of high school, he was clearly smart but never smug or condescending. He assumed that people were getting his jokes; if not, they would eventually. It was, in fact, as a direct result of listening to Lehrer that I became acquainted with such varied and lofty concepts as Lent, Gustav Mahler, base 8, animal husbandry, The Power of Positive Thinking, "fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly," Vatican 2, the Bracero program, Lloyd's of London, Lady Chatterly's Lover and the tradition of giving a matador both ears and the tail of a bull. Having lived with these songs for more than half of my life, what I found most surprising was not that I was still laughing at most of the jokes but that I was just now getting others, especially on 1965's ultra-topical That Was The Year That Was, on which Lehrer still wrings laughter out of topics that mean not much to anybody nowadays (the exception, I hasten to point out, not the rule).
Rhino being Rhino (and a box set being a box set), they hook us anyway with the requisite bonus tracks. I could do without the 1960 orchestral cuts of songs Lehrer had already recorded solo; the original performances were already basically perfect, and all these versions do is try to make Lehrer into Spike Jones. It doesn't work. But the songs Lehrer wrote and recorded for The Electric Company in 1971 and 1972 are brilliant: fun, bouncy and exceedingly clever. "L-Y" is a lesson on adverbs that is more enjoyable than anything should be that can be described as "a lesson on adverbs." "O-U (The Hound Song)" is a nice operatic trifle made indispensable by Lehrer's downtroddenly canine delivery. And the man apparently can't stop: among the recent recordings is "N Apostrophe T," an excursion into contractions in the guise of a dialogue between a cranky hermit and a friendly boy, and "That's Mathematics," which tells us why those numbers are so danged important. The best of the bunch, though, is 1997's "I Got It From Agnes," so jaunty and subtle that its dirty little subject matter sits there waiting to be discovered instead of screaming at the top of its lungs. Which means, when you think about it, that Tom Lehrer has learned nothing about comedy in the past fifty years. Which is why, when you think about it, his music is certain to endure for at least fifty more.