Tom Lehrer Adjourns
by Jennie Rose Halperin
The musical satirist Tom Lehrer died at 97 last month, and though he claimed to have stoked rumors of his premature death to “cut down on his junk mail,” it still felt like it came too soon. By his own accounting, Lehrer only performed live 109 times, and recorded just 37 songs over a musical career of about twenty years, from the mid-1950s to mid-1970s. But as most of his obituaries note, his legacy is far more significant than his limited catalog might suggest.
A lot of people, including me, started listening to Lehrer as kids; even though he was an unmarried bachelor with no children of his own, much of his music is for children, including “The Elements Song” (the periodic table sung to an excerpt of the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from The Pirates of Penzance), and a number of songs written for “The Electric Company.” But Lehrer also wrote parody for adults, with songs that touch on subjects as diverse and controversial as venereal disease, political inaction, nuclear war, environmental destruction, BDSM, bestiality, and the pervasiveness of American racism. My parents allowed me to listen to it all. His music was so glittering with rhyme, double entendre, and pep, they thought anything untoward would mostly go over my head. And it did—listening to “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer” as a kid, even as often as I did, I had no idea that the “it” in “I Got it from Agnes” is an STD.
Keep us breathing fire!
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