September 11, 1967: Tom Lehrer performs at the Students' Club in Copenhagen, Denmark. While considered "lost" for nearly half a century, the recording of this performance, black and white and for Danish television, remains the best display of the work of the greatest American satirist of the 20th Century.
Born on April 9, 1928 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Thomas Andrew Lehrer grew up there, and learned to play both classical music and show tunes on piano. During the show in question, he lamented that the piano did not lend itself well to folk music, so he asked the audience to imagine he was playing an 88-string guitar.
He was a brilliant math student, enough to enter Harvard University at age 15, graduate magna cum laude at 18, and get a Master of Arts degree at 19. He began teaching math to Harvard students, some older than he, and was already writing satirical songs, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," "New Math," and, to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Major-General's Song," "The Elements."
In 1953, paying $15 for the studio time, he recorded his first album, Songs by Tom Lehrer. The songs themselves had considerably more imagination than the album's title.
They included "Fight Fiercely, Harvard"; "I Hold Your Hand In Mine," which the narrator explains as having kept it after killing his girlfriend; "The Hunting Song," in which a hunter claims he shot no deer, but "There's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now: Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow"; and "The Irish Ballad," with its "nonsense phrase," "Rickety-tickety-tin" and its tale of a girl who murdered her whole family, and confessed, because she knew lying was a sin.
Lehrer was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955, worked at the National Security Agency, and later claimed to have invented the Jello shot as a way of getting around his base's ban on alcoholic beverages.
His experiences serving in official peacetime, but also at a rather chilly point in the Cold War, led to the songs "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier," "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)," and "We Will All Go Together When We Go."
In 1959, he recorded More of Tom Lehrer, with "The Elements," "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier," "The Masochism Tango," and "We Will All Go Together When We Go."
Radio stations with a conventional format wouldn't play his songs, because of the subject matter. In an interview in 2008, he said, "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who saw him in concert in Boston in 1954, said his songs couldn't have been played outside of a nightclub, such was the uptightness of the 1950s. It would take nightclub tours, the growth of FM radio, and the knowledge that Princess Margaret, sister of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, was a fan, to make Lehrer a star.
In 1960, the satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, a.k.a. TW3, hired him as its musical director. This led to such songs as "The Vatican Rag," whose success probably made comedian Lenny Bruce jealous; "Who's Next," as in, to get nuclear weapons; and "Wehrner von Braun," whose rockets bombed London in World War II, and would soon, as Lehrer put it in the Copenhagen concert, "allow America to put some idiot on the Moon."
In 1969, according to pitcher Jim Bouton's book Ball Four, the Houston Astros had turned "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier" into "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be an Astro." And in 1986, at the annual Senior Variety Show at my Alma Mater, East Brunswick High School, Glenn Slater, later to be a successful Broadway songwriter, played "The Masochism Tango." And didn't get in trouble for it. Oddly, Lehrer played neither of these songs in the acclaimed Copenhagen concert, part of a European tour.
Despite being popular all over the world, he quit touring in the early 1970s, tired of the travel and of doing the same songs all the time. He also said the market for what he was doing had declined: "Satire died when they gave Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize." He went back to teaching.
He and songwriter Joe Raposo tried to collaborate on a musical about the fictional murderer Sweeney Todd. It never happened, and, a fee years later, Stephen Sondheim succeeded with one.
But the Lehrer-Raposo collaboration bore fruit when Raposo was hired as the musical director for the Children's Television Workshop, including for the TV show The Electric Company. For animated sequences, he got Lehrer to write and sing songs about the L-Y and S-N sounds, and "Silent E." Millions of kids who might have gone their entire lives without hearing Lehrer's name, much less "The Masochism Tango," were exposed to his work.
He continued to teach at various colleges, including the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he was living at the time, and retired from this in 2001. As of September 11, 2022, he is still alive.
At some point, the videotape of the Copenhagen concert was found, and introduced Lehrer to a new generation. It is occasionally shown on PBS -- during pledge drives. Lehrer might have something to say about that.
UPDATE: Tom Lehrer died on July 26, 2025 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 97 years old.
*
September 11, 1967 was a Monday. Singer-actor Harry Connick Jr. was born. And The Carol Burnett Show premiered on CBS on this day. I have a separate entry for that event.
These baseball games were played:
* The Minnesota Twins beat the Washington Senators, 13-5 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.) Harmon Killebrew went 3-for-5 with a walk and 2 RBIs. Rookie Rod Carew went 2-for-5 with 2 RBIs.
* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Pete Rose singled Dick Simpson home with the winning run in the bottom of the 9th inning. Lehrer appears never to have written about baseball, but I'd like to see what he could have written about Rose.
Rookie Johnny Bench went 0-for-3. For the Pirates, Roberto Clemente went 0-for-4, but Willie Stargell went 2-for-4 with a home run and all of the Pirates' RBIs.
* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Frank Robinson went 2-for-4 with a home run and 3 RBIs. Brooks Robinson went 2-for-4 with an RBI.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-1 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.
* The Houston Astros beat the Chicago Cubs, 11-10 in a rare shootout at the normally pitcher-friendly Astrodome in Houston. The Astros got home runs from the 5-foot-8 Joe Morgan and the 5-foot-7 Jimmy Wynn, known as the Toy Cannon. The Cubs hit no homers. Ernie Banks went 1-for-4 with a walk and 2 RBIs.
* The San Francisco Giants beat their arch-rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Ron Herbel pitched an 8-hit shutout to beat Don Drysdale. Willie Mays went 3-for-4 with an RBI.
* And the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the California Angels, the Cleveland Indians, the Detroit Tigers, the Kansas City Athletics, the New York Mets, the Atlanta Braves were not scheduled to play.
.jpg)
