Paul Lehrman: There are some other transcripts of conversations with you on the Internet, but they look a little weird.
Tom Lehrer: They [Rhino] sent me the disk of the Internet chats I did, so I could edit them. But what they did, apparently, was put the disk right in. I had some comments on previous questions, so I thought they’d go back and change the question, but no, they just put my comment in there. The guy who did the chat room isn’t there any more. They call it “Rocky’s” because that isn’t his name. They can put a new Rocky in who’s somebody else. In LA, I talked to Mr. KABC, who wouldn’t say his name. Presumably that’s the same kind of thing; if he gets fired they can put somebody else in as Mr. KABC. But nobody cares. A guy leaves a soap opera, they put somebody else in.
I did a profile of you for the Boston Globe Magazine about 13 years ago. The article came out well, but I understand you didn’t like the picture that accompanied it.
I know that article was in the middle of winter because the photographer, whose name eludes me fortunately, wanted me to come to his studio so he could “get to know” me. He liked to “get to know” his subjects so he could really do justice to the photograph. I thought, “Oh God,” but I didn’t want to rock the boat. The Globe had put money in Tomfoolery, so I didn’t want to make a thing of it, so I said okay, I’ll go along with this. But fortunately my car broke down, and by the time I had it fixed, it was too late, so he came here and did all these weird pictures. So I learned my lesson then.
There was recently a piece on you in the Globe arts section, which had a picture.
That was fine, they just sent a staff photographer over. But the New York Times Magazine [writer] guy spent hours and hours and hours, starting in April, and finally in July they sent a photographer, and she was a real “photographer”, and she wanted to get me holding something and posing, but I put some constraints on that. Then what I saw what they did to Andrew Weil and others, I said I hope that nothing gets published. The photographer didn’t arrive till July, and this is September, and it hasn’t appeared, and I haven’t heard from the writer, Peter Tauber, a freelance. I hope he can sell it somewhere else, because he spent so much on it. He would call me about last-minute corrections and stuff.
It didn’t seem to be of any contemporary interest except when the record came out. That was the idea—he interviewed me in April so that in May it would be out, or even in June when there was some convention of That Was The Week That Was alumni in New York—I wasn’t there, but they could time it for that. Past that, there was no point.
The hook was, isn’t it amazing that after 40 years it’s still selling, but without that there’s nothing there. And now everybody else has covered it already. But I turned down the daily Times because of that. I said I’ll be glad to do it, but you should know the Magazine is doing it, so he said, well I guess we can’t. There goes New York. I got the Newark Star-Ledger, so that’s close. And Long Island Newsday. [The piece finally appeared in the Times in November.]
You were one of the first to make a self-produced record album.
Young folks come up to me and say “You made your own album. I want to do my own album. How do you do that?” And I have to explain to them that times have changed. I was doing stuff around Harvard, like dance intermissions, and it was basically the same people, and I really don’t consider myself a performer by temperament, and technology reared its head: the LP had come in. A lot of people were doing this, including Dr. Shep Ginandes here in town who had done a folk-song album, and Richard Dyer-Bennet, so I thought, let’s look into this. So I called Shep and he told me how he went about it, and I looked in the Boston Yellow Pages under recording studios, and there were only two—I looked the other day and there were four columns.
I was working at Baird Atomic and I asked the wife of a business associate do the cover. I told her what I wanted, with the flames. And I wrote the liner notes, and so it was all very cheap. She did it for nothing, but Rhino paid her a fee. She’s in an old folks home now. The jackets were printed at a local printer, and then sent down to RCA in New Jersey, for assembling and pasting. I had my home address on Kirkland Road in Cambridge on the back of the record.
[At this point, he goes upstairs to retrieve his ledgers from 1953, which takes only a minute.] So I made enough profit to press some more. There was never any risk. I invested the profits in another 300 records. Just a little fly-by-night operation, I was really keeping track of this stuff. When the second record came out, 10″ records had just disappeared, so I redid the first one as a 12″ cause it just seemed easier to. I didn’t change the price. There’s a nut out in Bloomington, Indiana, who collects all this trivia who keeps asking me, “When did you do this?” and “Why is this mono and this stereo?”, and it’s kind of interesting, and I go and look all this stuff up.
Because of the record, people heard of me outside of Cambridge, and I started performing, I got the Blue Angel in New York and Storyville here, nothing major, and then I went into the Army for two years, and that allowed the whole thing to spread by itself, without my having to do anything. When I got out of the Army in ’57, a lot of people knew about it. There had been a songbook, a little hardcover which is out of print. It had the kind of piano accompaniment I play, which I find out now is called stride piano, octave/chord, and it’s messy on the page, whereas now they just put one note in the bass and you do the chords with your right hand.
So I got some offers to do concerts as well as night clubs. At that time there was no such thing as the pop concert circuit. If I had hung on a little longer, the college concert circuit was just breaking with The Kingston Trio and people like that. In my day there was Anna Russell and Victor Borge and me, and that was about it for comedians. Later on, of course, I could have called William Morris and said “book me for six months,” but there wasn’t anything like that. I did some of that, and then I got tired after a couple of years. So I figured I’ll put out the rest of the material I had, and there was enough for the second record, and then I’d quit.
We recorded two nights at Sanders Theater [at Harvard], so I had a chance to make mistakes. The cover was taken at the Hanna Theater in Cleveland. It was taken from the back of the balcony, and it showed a lot of people there, and I was thinking maybe some guy was there with somebody other than his wife, and there he is on the cover, and I’d get sued, but nothing happened.
I wanted to do the record where there was a guaranteed friendly audience. We did it for the Harvard Liberal Union. In those days the only way you could get Sanders Theater was to be sponsored by an undergraduate organization. Nowadays, it’s big money. Steve Fassett recorded it. He liked the kind of stuff I did, and had a bunch of comic records he had taped off the air. I’m sure he’s dead. Everybody else I know is.
Would you ever want to re-record the old records?
I’m quite satisfied with the records. In 1960 I had done the concert version of the first set, “Tom Lehrer Revisited,” which was recorded at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The picture for that was taken at Royal Festival Hall. I’m at the piano and there are those two people sitting in the audience, alone. I like that idea. After the audience left I had a photographer come in, and we took that picture. That was recorded in ’59, but released in ’60, after I had quit performing.
The re-release of Songs of Tom Lehrer had an orange cover which was done by Eric Martin who did the TWTYTW cover. And it sold okay, and a whole generation of people think that’s how it was. The CD [on Reprise] didn’t come out until 1990, so for 25 years that was the only Songs by Tom Lehrer that was available.
So now we have three CDs out: Tom Lehrer Revisited, which is the complete MIT concert, plus two bonus tracks from The Electric Company which I got them to do, which I was quite pleased about, because I wanted them to be preserved somewhere; An Evening Wasted, which is mono, but of course now it doesn’t say on CDs whether they’re mono or stereo—if it’s digital then naturally it’s stereo; and TYTYTW. They were all put out on Reprise in 1990. So there was a 25-year interval between Reprise taking over the LPs and issuing the CDs. When Rhino called and asked if they could do the CDs, I said it’s okay with me, but you have to get permission from Warner Bros., so I had my agent—I had an agent at that time—call Warner Bros., and they said “Oh, what a great idea, we should have thought of that!”
They had done it just in the nick of time, because LPs were fading fast. They did it in their usual way—I have a feeling these companies have a policy of not employing anybody over the age of 16. ‘Cause it’s very had to get anything done efficiently. I was very pleased with the whole thing, they eventually got it done. So this revives the old stuff, along with the orchestral versions.
How did the orchestral versions come about?
What happened was in 1960 Unicorn Records, which was Jimmy Stagliano, who played with the Boston Symphony and was also some kind of manager, and Bob Sylvester who ran Unicorn Records as a sideline, decided they could get some kind of single out of this. So I went to a studio in New York and recorded with an orchestra for the first time. We ended up with four songs.
They put out a single of “Poisoning Pigeons” and “The Masochism Tango.” The other two were never released. I was going through my basement, as is my wont, and found the tape of the four of them, so I sent it to Dr. Demento and told him if he ever wanted to use them… The others are “The Hunting Song” and “We Will All Go Together When We Go”. Nothing much is added by the orchestra on those two, but the first two I thought were nice, especially the tango. So he played them and he put two of them on his LPs and The Hunting Song on his “basement tapes”, and when Rhino did this they asked if they could do all four, and I said sure. I own all the rights to everything. When Dr. Demento did it, Stagliano was still alive, so I paid him a flat fee to make sure, in case there was any legal thing. I had no idea who owned what, but I assumed he owned the rights to something. So I paid him a flat fee and we settled that.
The other song on the Rhino is “I Got It from Agnes”. I never did it in concerts, because it was a “party” song. If you remember Ruth Wallis and Rusty Warren and those people had their own little bin in the record store for party songs, and I didn’t want to be in that bin. The Crepitation Contest, that kind of stuff. So I never did it on record. But when Cameron Mackintosh was doing “Tomfoolery” in London in 1980, he asked if I had anything in the trunk he could use, and I dug that out and redid it and made it slightly more sophisticated. I’m quite pleased with it—it’s much better than the original version, I think, it has a better verse and is more tightly packed.
I sent Rhino the whole [multitrack] tape [with multiple takes on different tracks], and I said, okay, you edit it, you decide. We did a mix in Boston that I was happy with, but we sent them the master just in case they changed their mind. But I was very happy with what they did. It’s only 2-1/2 minutes, but it’s stereo and all that. And it worked out fine. I kind of liked the idea that people know that I’m not only alive, but I can stand up, or sit down at least, and am ambulatory to that extent.
“I Got it from Sally” [the original version of “Agnes”]—if I had recorded it [when he wrote it], I would be embarassed by it today, because it was so crude. I’ve made it very clear that “Sally” was written in 1952. “The Old Dope Peddler” obviously has a whole different resonance today. Nobody I knew took dope. Jazz musicians did dope. The reference in “Be Prepared” to reefers—reefers is kind of cute, kind of folksy, but on the Reprise release I changed it to grass, or pot, which was popular then, but it doesn’t resonate as well, and it doesn’t scan as well. I was delighted to find that “reefer” is on the live version. It was fun to hear the song in Tomfoolery, not here but in London, the audience would start to laugh when the guy would begin, and then the laugh would gradually die, cause it was a kind of chilly song. It was wonderful. He did it with absolutely no affect, not acting as though this is funny in any way, he’s just thinking about this lovely old guy who used to be around the neighborhood, but without any kind of feeling about it. We had to go right to the next song without any applause, because the applause would have been kind of embarassed. You’re supposed to applaud because the song is over, but it’s like the end of the first act of Cabaret—you don’t know what to do, are you supposed to applaud the Nazis?
In the Boston production, Rob Fisher, who was the music director [the job I auditioned for], sang it from the piano, and it was the only time he ever sang on stage, and then it would go immediately to the next song. It was something surprising, he wasn’t supposed to be an actor, and he did it marvellously, without affect at all, just straight, and as soon as he got through he went right into the intro for the “Vatican Rag”, so there was no chance for applause. It was very nice.
So it just keeps going. Who knew? When I think about that—it’s 44 years between the two recordings.
How come you shortened “We Will All Go Together When We Go” on the orchestral version?
The bridge of “We Will All Go Together” was taken out because the song is just too long. It’s like 3-1/2 minutes long, and no disc jockey would play that. They wanted to put it on the CD and I said, whatever, just as long as it’s at the end so people don’t have to listen to it if they don’t want to. The “Hunting Song” had the second verse repeated to make it a little longer, and added the gunshots, to try to get a Spike Jones thing out of it.
The songs have raunch by 1950s standards, perhaps, but nowadays everything is so explicit. I was trying to be a little subtle, not like Redd Foxx or Rusty Warren and all that. Just a little suggestive here and there. I wouldn’t have thought of it as raunch, but I guess by ’50s standards….Some people did say, ‘Oh, you can’t play those naughty songs, or those dirty songs.’ I remember playing Storyville on Cape Cod one summer, they had posters put in all the merchants’ windows for who was coming each week, and there was one store that wouldn’t put up the poster of me. They took all the others, but they thought my songs were dirty. I didn’t think they were dirty, compared to all those party songs like “The Postman Has the Longest Route in Town” or “She’s Got the Biggest Kanakas in Hawaii.” I wrote songs like that too, just for fun, but I would never record them or perform them. They were influences in the sense of what not to do. It was definitely just to be suggestive—there’s that line in “My Home Town”, about Parson Brown. [Lehrer doesn’t sing anything about the Parson after he mentions his name, he just says, “I think I’d better leave the next line out just to be on the safe side.”]There was nothing I could do there to be suggestive. I could come right out and say something, but that wouldn’t be funny to me, but I couldn’t find anything that was just suggestive enough, so I just left it out. And fortunately, since there were restrictions at that time, it made sense to say “I got to leave this out,” where today it wouldn’t make any sense: “What could it possibly be that he can’t say?” You have to know that it was 1953.
When I made the second record, I wanted to make sure that I would not be accused of raunchy songs. So there’s almost no reference to anything sexual on the second record, unless you count “Oedipus Rex.” “She’s My Girl” has a little, maybe, and there’s a couple of lines about the backseat of our roommate’s Chevrolet [in “Bright College Days”], but I didn’t want to have any songs about sex, so people couldn’t accuse me of writing dirty songs, the way they said I wrote those “sick” songs. On the first record I’d say there were two I could call sick, and there were little parts of others. That was the identification: Time magazine had a thing about the sick comics, Lenny Bruce, me. Whereas now, it’s really hard to be sick. You can be offensive, God knows.
Among the influences I hear in your music are the Marx Brothers.
I loved the Marx Brothers, still do, and certainly “Lydia The Tattoed Lady” was something I would admire as being a comparatively sophisticated song. Just slightly raunchy. I heard Groucho Marx talking about that…..and at the end he’s in command of the fleet, and he married Lydia, which made it all right. She can seduce him, but when the guy marries her it’s okay. That song particularly, but I wouldn’t think so…who knows, maybe an unconscious influence.
What do you hear today that you like?
I don’t keep up with things today. There are little bits of things. John Forster has several things, but there’s no whole record that I wholeheartedly embrace. Forster’s take on Paul Simon [“Fusion” on the album “Entering Marion”] is so wonderful: “Remember who’s the genius here.” He has a whole sense of music, with the orchestrations and the sound effects which I never aspired to. He has fun with music, too, which is very hard to do.
Every now and then I hear a song—Andy Breckman, Christine Lavin have a few good things. I try—any time I hear anybody say, “oh, you gotta hear so and so,” I rush out and get it. [Pulls out “Funny Folk Songs” CD] I saw this at Tower Records. It was some kind of concert with all these people doing one song, showing off. Some of them are quite funny. Lou and Peter Berryman have some funny songs. There are a lot of people who have some funny songs.
One of the distinctions, if I may toot my own horn, is that most of these songs are not interesting enough, in terms of craftsmanship, they’re not shored up with rhymes and musical hooks, things to make it interesting, that you’d want to hear it more than twice. That’s the problem with a lot of these things. Whereas Flanders and Swann, people like that, I would listen to over and over again. Or Sondheim, or Sheldon Harnick, who write sophisticated songs. Some of these have funny ideas, and you laugh uproariously the first time, and a little the second time, but then they’re not clever enough to quote the lines. You can see them in front of an audience who’ve never heard the songs, they think they’re very funny, as I did when I first heard them, but a lot of them don’t hold up. Sondheim does witty songs in his shows and so do several others, Kander and Ebb, and so on.
When I look back on the past 40 years and think of funny songwriters, I have a large collection of funny LPs of people who, right after me, were inspired to do the same thing, but all those people—Bob Peck, Ann Soulé, Paul Winter, Elliot Lee Hoffman, people nobody has ever heard of. There’s this guy Ronald Smith who writes these books, “Who’s Who in Comedy” and stuff, and he names all these people, and I wrote him saying I can’t believe that anybody else has these records except me. There were lots of them, but very few people I can think of, if any, with records of funny songs that got anywhere. There’s Weird Al Yankovic, but that’s parody. There are comedy records, God knows.
I mostly listen to show tunes, and that kind of stuff, stuff with sophistication. Unfortunately, I don’t really get the lyrics of most pop tunes. People tell me I should listen to, say, Steely Dan, so I really try, and then I have to read the lyrics, but then I say, “But I really don’t understand what that means.” So even the people that I like, like Paul Simon, I don’t understand a lot of the lyrics, and I can’t really get into it the way I can other things. I don’t appreciate poetry—I don’t mind admitting that now, I don’t understand poetry. We studied it in high school and college, but they never told us why it was good. I got A’s on all the exams—”Hail to thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert”—what the hell does that mean? I have no idea. So I don’t appreciate poetic lyrics. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I think that they may be great and they’re wonderful for those who can get it, but I don’t. I appreciate Randy Newman, and people like that who are more accessible.
Comedy Central just put out a book about comedy, and they say that they’re still making comedy records, but they’re not selling and not as influential as videos, and the proof of this is that the Grammy Awards for comedy music are dominated by Peter Schickele. They still have comedy records, but Andrew Dice Clay and Dennis Miller certainly don’t sell the way that Bob Newhart and Shelley Berman and people like that sold.
I love to talk. Barney Frank was quoted in the paper the other day, and someone asked him why he spoke so fast, and he said, I always find it more interesting when I’m speaking than when I’m listening. I don’t mind a chance to spout off. Since it’s professional, it’s not just for myself, tooting my own horn is part of the deal. As long as I can get away with it, I’d rather talk about me than Princess Diana.
You’re going to be 70 next year.
Isn’t that amazing? Nobody’s more surprised than I am. Can’t lie. Subtraction doesn’t lie. I’m kind of looking forward to that, cause 69, 68 is so boring. If you say, “I’m 70,” people say, “Wow”. It was like my mother would introduce me as her son, then she would wait for them to say, “I don’t believe that you have a son this old,” and if they didn’t say that she would be very disappointed. So if I say, “I’m 70,” and they say, “Oh, really? I would have thought you were 75,” then I’ll know it’s too late.
I’m cutting down [teaching] at [University of California] Santa Cruz over the years. This winter I’m just going to do a math course. I’m doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I’ve never done before. I’m planning to study like crazy. It’s for non-math majors. I’m trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra, probability, geometry, everything, so I’m trying to learn things like how perspective drawing uses infinity. So that’ll take me three months. They won’t appreciate it, but I will. I’ll have fun with it. I’ve been teaching a course for non-mathematicians for years, and a lot of the stuff has already been covered there.
I don’t do the musical theater course any more. The interest in that seems to have declined. It became extracurricular, non-credit. Nowadays there are so many course requirements, and people’s eyes are on their careers and they have jobs, so it’s, “I can’t come Saturday, or Thursday night.” In the old days, people went to college to have fun. Especially Santa Cruz. So they were glad to do it. But now you have to give them course credit.
But I was also trying to introduce the undergraduate audience to some of this stuff, even at this primitive level of just readings [of shows]. But it turned out as the years went by, the old folks from downtown would come up, by the busload, and take all the good seats. They were a wonderful audience, because they remembered all the shows, and laughed at all the dated jokes, but it wasn’t the audience that I had in mind, and the students didn’t come in great numbers. So it was a combination of these two and the fact that it was a lot of work. So if there were a great groundswell, I might consider reviving it, but so far there hasn’t been.
Thank God no one has gone from there to a Broadway career. I live in dread of that, although now actually it doesn’t matter, but I wouldn’t want someone to say they got their start with me, because they’d come out in droves. Actually, one of my students, Rona Figueroa, later became one of the Miss Saigons on Broadway for a couple of years. It had nothing to do with me. She was totally marvelous. One of the things I loved about it was when I asked her if she was a theater major, she said no, I wouldn’t go over there, I don’t believe in any of that stuff. I was so pleased because she was head and shoulders above all the theater majors in terms of natural talent. She sang in a rock band, and she was gorgeous, she could act and she could sing, just because she could do it. And the stuff over there where they’re doing these exercises, these really serious people—”now tell us your most embarassing experience,” “pretend you’re a tiger”—oh God.
What question has nobody asked you that you want to have asked?
The answer is, “What question…?” No, those are too easy. If there is something I want to talk about, I can usually work it in. I learned that from being on the talk shows. Don’t answer their questions, bring in your own.
I told Rhino [I would give interviews for] four months, until Labor Day, with an extension in your case. I figured that launches the record, and I don’t think it’s going to help to do any more. I wanted to support the record as much as possible. I did an hour on Chris Lydon [NPR’s “The Connection”] about popular song. The idea wasn’t just to plug the record—we plugged the record plenty, but the idea was to discuss comic lyrics and stuff like that. It went over so well that he asked me to do another hour sometime, but that won’t be specifically for the record.
I don’t do television. Absolutely. It’s an invasion of privacy, for one thing. If you get your picture in the paper it doesn’t matter—two days later nobody remembers—thank God. The other thing is, on television I’m not in control. On radio, I can have my notes in front of me, I don’t have to shave, I don’t have to worry if there’s spinach on my teeth or which camera’s on me, that kind of stuff, we can just talk. Also there isn’t the time restriction there is on television. There is time restriction, but usually it’s taped, and then they edit it down, whereas on television it’s there. I wouldn’t want to perform on television—I don’t really come across at all. I’ve seen myself enough times. A serendipitous thing is the two times I was on Johnny Carson, the tape was erased and re-used. In those days they didn’t keep it. This was confirmed when he had one of his anniversary shows, he said, “You notice there are no tapes, no examples from these years, and the reason is…” So I’m grateful. I was on Carson twice, I did all the talk shows: Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, all the television that they wanted. I was on once with Carson and once with Bob Newhart as guest host. They never asked me back.
I said something that in retrospect, I’m glad I said it, but it didn’t come out the way I meant it. It was during the Vietnam War—they asked me about the campus I was on, I was teaching at MIT at the time, and I said that the main difference from the old days was that for the male students, the thing uppermost in their minds was to dodge the draft. And I said, it wasn’t true during World War II, but in those days we were on the right side. What I meant to convey was that there was no right side this time, but I was told that the audience reaction was kind of cold. The host didn’t pick up on it. He didn’t say anything, we went right on with the conversation. I was very pleased in retrospect that I had said that, even though it didn’t quite come out the way I wanted. That may have been one of the reasons why they didn’t ask me back.
I remember when Richard Pryor said something about how in South Africa, all the black people should pick up guns and kill all the white people, and they went right on with the interview, and nobody stopped him on that. “Oh good old Richard, what a card.” As long as you’re billed as a comedian, I guess you can say anything.