LEHRER WITHAL

This one hurts. The great Tom Lehrer has departed us, at 97. Too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

In the late '60s, we had the album That Was the Year That Was in our house...

It's a live recording, made at the hungry i in San Francisco in 1965, of Lehrer performing topical songs he had written for the NBC comedy series That Was the Week That Was, interspersed with his commentary. At 6 or 7 years old, I of course understood very little of what he was singing about. When he said "dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it," in the intro to his marching anthem "Smut" I can remember wondering why a physically unclean book would be fun, and when, in the song itself, he refers to "...a dirty novel I can't shut," I can remember picturing a book with a broken spine that he literally couldn't close.

So you can imagine how little of the political and social material I grasped. But it didn't matter. I listened to the album endlessly. It's probably my favorite record of all time, to this day. The reason, of course, is the sensibility; the snide, snarky yet genial and affable manner. Tom Lehrer was exactly the smartass I wanted to be when I grew up. And now, at 63, I'm not sure I see much reason to revise or abandon that ambition.

Lehrer was also the first of many lyricists and poets to teach me a love of rhyme I've never gotten over. From "Smut," for instance, comes Lehrer's admirable "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be ut/Terrly without redeeming social importance..." Or, from his  splendid ballad "Alma" (about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel): "and that is the story of Alma/Who knew how to recieve and to give/The body that reached her embalm-ah/Was one that had known how to live!"

So was yours, good sir.

Also, in one of the more badass show-business gestures ever, in 2020 Lehrer, a lifelong bachelor with no children, released all of his songs to the public domain.

Back in 2000, one of the few music reviews I ever wrote at New Times (for the great Gilbert Garcia, then Music Editor) was of a Lehrer boxed set containing almost all of his recorded work, including a couple of marvelous tunes he wrote and sang for The Electric Company.

Peace and joy eternal to you great man, and as my friend Owen Kerr would rightly say, Ave, magister.