n 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was one of his more cheerful messages.
I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.
But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime: “Then the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.
Years passed. I looked for Lehrer’s take on George W Bush and Tony Blair and Iraq, but had to be satisfied with a quote about how he said he didn’t want to satirise Bush; he wanted to pulverise him. Occasionally I would meet someone who loved Lehrer’s work as much as I did. Drink would be taken, a few favourites sung tunelessly but noisily.
Then, in 2020, Lehrer put out a statement saying that he had placed everything he ever wrote in the public domain. HisThe statement ended: “Don’t send me any money.” This is unheard-of. Famous performers usually maximise their royalties income. In my book about the 60s, I quoted the odd line from songs by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and my horrified publishers took the lot out. The royalties would bankrupt them, they said.
Was it because, as he once said, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war.
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