I first heard of Tom Lehrer through the Dr. Demento cassette collection, the one that's delineated by the decade. It was "The Masochism Tango" that caught my eye (not literally in your left castanet, thank you), and it quickly became one of my favorite songs. On another cassette I found "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," which quickly became a second favorite. But it never occurred to me that he might have made more songs. (I was a freshman in high school at the time, so I wasn't very bright.)
Around the same time I caught an episode of HBO's Real Sex that featured the song. I giggled, thinking, I know that one! And I also learned that Weird Al Yankovic, the only musician I'd seen in concert at the time (now it's one of two, the other being Alestorm when they were too young to drink at their own show) and someone I respected a great deal, revered Lehrer, which meant he'd made more songs than two.
(Incidentally, I didn't have a bedroom back then, so I didn't have an inner sanctum to escape to with the volume low. I slept on a cot in the living room, but we had a basement where we--meaning, me and my brothers mostly--watched a lot of stuff. I was 14, so I could watch PG-13 movies, but my brothers were still forbidden. So we watched Real Sex with the volume low enough, and if we heard someone on the stairs, they would certainly be someone who would disapprove, so we had the remote set to return us back to another channel just in case.)
 |
Back then we didn't have the internet, so I went to the library to do more research, and lo! and behold! We had one of his live albums! It was Tom Lehrer Revisited, and I listened to that tape so much it practically became my Bible. Imagine my pleasure when I discovered more albums, which I quickly purchased from Borders (because they could order it, and Best Buy wouldn't).
(Another side note: when the library decided to get rid of their cassette collection, I saved this one from the garbage. I recently had to abandon my own cassette collection, but I saved a few, and this is one of them.)
Without Tom Lehrer, I don't know what my sense of humor would be like now. He's an essential part of my building blocks. For the longest time I had a quote of his paraphrased on my wall next to my dinosaur computer (back when it wasn't a dinosaur but top of the line!): "If after [reading] my [stories] just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will have all been worth the while." But there's an even better scenario that he described that works more toward my way of thinking.
I think he was interviewed by the New Yorker back when I was still working at the library (I found it while I was working the periodicals section in the haunted up-upstairs area), but the gist of it was this. He said he described his humor as thus, and I'm going off memory here, so don't be too harsh if it's not exact. He said, "You throw a baby up in the air and catch it, so the baby laughs. But I throw the baby up and don't catch it, so I laugh."
I know for a fact that I've written a GF about Lehrer before, maybe a few, but this is the first time I've done so since he died last week. He was well into his nineties when he passed. He'd left music to go back to his true love, teaching math (he worked at Los Alamos . . . as a spy), but he was always a violently funny musician to me.
Tom Lehrer is gone, and I'm going to miss him, but before he died he released his music into the public domain so anyone could use it. That was pretty nice of him. You can go here for all your Tom Lehrer needs. And if you don't think I'm a big enough fan of Lehrer's, please know that I once got in trouble at Conference Plus, my first big boy office job, for singing one of his songs on the floor. This one, in fact. It's the greatest love song ever written in my opinion.
If you've never heard his songs before, I encourage you to listen. If you think it's too old-timey for your likes (they were mostly written from the 'Fifties to the 'Seventies), just listen to the lyrics. Keep an eye out for the guy who took a knife and monogrammed his wife and dropped her in the pond and watched her drown, oh yes indeed the people there are just plain folks in my hometown!
Goodbye, Tom Lehrer.
No comments:
Post a Comment