Tom Lehrer, who was still alive, is DEAD TO ME

I saw the Village Gate performance in 2001 mentioned in the story thanks to a Rockin’ Robin. One of Jonathan Richmond’s backup singers loved his songs and knew I did, too so she invited me. I didn’t know it was his last performance. Sadly, the room was nearly empty.

Uh-oh! He wrote the song “We will all go together when we go!”

A very well-written and funny obit, perfect for its subject. Thanks for posting it. His pitch black humor reminded me of Charles Addams, with politics often added to the mix.

I didn't know he wrote songs for "The Electric Company."

RIP

Loved that guy since my college days. Pollution was one of my faves.

Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!

So witty. Never married or had kids -- very handsome.

Was friends with Stephen Sondheim since they attended summer camp together as kids.

He was incredibly talented! If you don't know his material, go to YouTube today and check it out. Vatican Rag. Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. Alma. New Math. I Hold Your Hand In Mine. Pollution. So Long Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb. The Old Dope Peddler. The Periodic Table of the Elements. Classics all!

So glad he lived to see the obituary of Kissinger. If not somebody else...

I so wish he'd written a song about Trump!

You can raise welts/ like nobody else!/ As we dance to the masochism tango!

[quote]I so wish he'd written a song about Trump!

Sleepy old Tom, liked only by communists, never wrote one song half as good as 'YMCA'. Sad!

I wanna go back to Dixie

Take me back to dear ol' Dixie

That's the only li'l ol' place for li'l ol' me!

Ol' times there are not forgotten,

Whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton

And waitin' for the Robert E. Lee!

(It was never there on time...)

I had no idea he was still alive. A couple of weeks ago I dug out my Lehrer CDs and listened to them because one of his lyrics had come into my head. A genius and a great droll performer. 'He majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day'.

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean

But that couldn't happen again

We taught them a lesson in 1918

And they've hardly bothered us since then

If just send them up/ Who knows where they come down./ That's not my department, said Werner Von Braun

[quote]So witty. Never married or had kids -- very handsome.

He just spent his whole life waiting for the right girl.

Damn it! I really admired him. He had a good run though. 96. Born the same year as my grandmother who only made it to 88.

Oops, 97. Excellent run, sir. RIP

Oh, where to begin with the Tom Lehrer song i olve the most? Impossible to decide. But on this sad day, let's enjoy We Will All Go Together When We Go...

[quote] His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

[quote] He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.

[quote] Mr. Lehrer divided his time for many years between Cambridge, where he taught at both Harvard and M.I.T., and Santa Cruz, where he taught courses on mathematics and musical theater at the University of California from 1972 to 2001.

I think we know why he never married. Given his sardonic sense of humor, he would have (or did) fit right in on DL.

I amazed (or got pity from) kids in school when I memorized and sang his “The Elements” song. I can still sing it when I want amazement or pity.

Imagine my surprise years later when I started listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and found out the melody was “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.”

I once played in a pit orchestra for a series of performances of the operetta, and I got amazement and pity when I sang the Lehrer lyrics to the other musicians.

R20, it sounds as if the other musicians had no senses of humor (despite performing Gilbert & Sullivan).

[quote]I can still sing it when I want amazement or pity.

So, daily?

Three years ago he gave up the copyrights to all his songs, putting them in the public domain.

R21 Among the amazed, there was sometimes laughter, so I chalked that up to a sense of humor. Among those with pity, there was also sometimes laughter, but not because of a sense of humor.

R22 Luckily, these days I don’t need much amazement or pity, but I’m always ready to pull it out (so to speak) when necessary.

The (Jewish) owner of a bookstore I worked in when attending university played The Vatican Rag for me (Catholic school educated). I laughed hard and told my dad about it. I didn’t catch the name of the artist.

“Tom Lehrer”, he snorted. “God; that song ages her”.

RIP!

Ugh. This hits a bit hard for me. I have very warm feelings for Tom, and he was instrumental at pushing me toward a performing career at a very important part of my development. I think I’ve posted here about him before? I did a musical theater class with him at a UC school my freshman year of college. The school, as naturally beautiful as it was, ended up being a two year pit stop on my way to a conservatory before I decided to take performing classical music seriously. He taught some advanced math class at the school as well, and I understood him to be quite brilliant. I knew tangentially at the time that he had gone to Harvard at fifteen, was a polymath genius, and had become a recording and performing star.

I, of course, knew him from Poisoning Pigeons In the Park, and my mother told me she had learned the elements in high school from his song. The class was kind of legendary around campus and only took eight of us to do single acts from operettas and musical theatre. He planned a couple of things that were more vocal heavy because I was trained vocally and he hadn’t had a chance to do them because there weren’t a lot of singers at the school. The music department was low on the school’s priority list, and I hadn’t gone there for that purpose.

We had to do an audition in a common room, and hundreds of people came because it was a thing around the campus, and I remember him sitting in the center with this panel of judges with a huge gaping smile on his face as I sang. He accepted me into the class right there in front of the audience (a list was put out a week later to accept the others) which erupted into excited applause, and it was a moment of pure joy for me and a formative one. It was basically the moment I decided to leave that school and move to one where I’d concentrate on singing. Sorry this is all very me me me, I don’t know how to talk about him without it being in the context of my life and career because he really did matter to it.

(Cont’d from above sorry!)

The class ended up being quite fun. I have a couple of interesting and sweet stories to tell about it. Early on in the class Tom came in quite clearly upset, and explained that a very close friend of his had just died of a prolonged and painful cancer battle. A colleague of his he had worked with during his songwriting years. He sat down and played “It’s Not Easy Being Green” in his quavery voice through tears. We were all stunned and also realizing that we were witnessing a very special moment. Of course everyone in that room had grown up with that song and to have him play it was… well. He had been fairly stoic (if not funny and sharp most of the time,) so it was hard to see him so upset. It was clear that the class was a way for him to give some of his musical knowledge while also enjoying the performing bug which had mostly left him at that point. Around campus he was Professor Lehrer the polymath genius, but also of course a famous cabaret performer.

To contradict someone who mentioned him above, while he was friends with Sondheim, he actually HATED his music and thought it was dull and cerebral. He loved Rodgers and Hammerstein and the old composers who he took much more seriously. We did the first act of A Little Night Music, and I had to fight to get him to include Every Day A Little Death for the two girls playing Anne and the Countess. He absolutely LOATHED it. He got so angry talking about it. I did convince him in the end. The audience loved it during the performance and he told me later it was the right choice to include it. We had a party at the end of the quarter at his apartment that had a beautiful view of the ocean, and we all got drunk while he played songs for us to sing. Us, not him. He pointedly refused to perform his own songs and he hated talking about those years. I get that more now then I did then. Near the end of the party we got him to finally sing a few songs for us at like two in the morning. I got to hear “Poisoning Pigeons” with eight other people in a room. It was lovely.

I left to go to conservatory a year later, but I came back locally that summer to do a Sondheim production with a company I’d developed a relationship with and while I still was being tugged by the Broadway bug and hadn’t totally succumbed to classical yet. I asked him to come, and he said he would think about it because he hated Sondheim’s music so much. I left him a comp and he ended up coming and beaming through the entire thing. I saw him briefly afterward, and he said “I hated everything about this, but I loved everything you did and of course your voice.” It was very meaningful to me, and remains so to this day, decades later. We lost touch as I went deeper into the opera world, that wasn’t really his thing and I understood. His life was in Boston and California and he didn’t really come to NYC (I’d moved there for Juilliard by then) and wasn’t a big fan of classical. But I got a beautiful handwritten note from him following that performance where he encouraged me and really explained his love of my singing. It’s the most incredible fan mail I’ve ever gotten. I cherish the thought of it to this day.

(One more from above)

I realized later that he was gay. I was in my late teens when I met him, and if he had made a move I probably would have slept with him. While I didn’t find him that attractive, he was brilliant, nebbishy, and Jewish, a huge turn on for me, but our relationship remained untouched by that and I’m forever grateful for that. A lot of gay men were awful and predatory later in my career. He never talked about a significant other, but it was clear he’d been damaged in some way romantically. I’m sure he was in his early fifties when I met him, and of course he came up in a very different time to be gay.

Thanks Tom for everything. You and your class meant a lot to me during a very formative, albeit brief time in my life.

I’m a terrible writer, sorry for the mess above, but I don’t really have any place else to share this!

r31 don't worry about it. Thank you so much for sharing your memories of Professor Lehrer with us.

R31 Nothing to apologize for. Yours are the best reminiscences I’ve ever read on DL, and I’ve been here for years. Thank you for taking the time to write about them.

I suspect that when Tom was crying and singing “It’s Hard to be Green,” he may have just lost a partner, which he was signaling by his choice of song.

He was family?!

R28 thru R30... nothing to apologize for and thank you for the insight regarding Sondheim (that soun and I'm ds very Lehrer to me). Your recollections are unique! What a treat to read, thanks for sharing.

R31, thanks for sharing your memories, they're more meaningful than much of what's posted on DL. They show a side of Lehrer that I've never even considered, though it's not surprising when I think about it. Such a guy!

r31, et al., thank you so much for writing here. I was a young gayling at UCSC 1980-1983. To me, he was a kind man who allowed me to sit in on his math lectures, which were geared towards non-science majors. I was majoring in Biology. I'd heard some of his albums that my parents had, but didn't know how big he was. I went at the urging of a straight dorm mate, a math major, to whom I'd just come out. Lehrer was a scream. It was well-known that he way gay; otherwise, I wouldn't have known. Didn't really get what high camp was all about at age 19!

Glad you got out of Santa Cruz. I found it stifling and ended up transferring to SF State, where the world opened up to me.

Your stories of him are priceless! RIP, Tom.

He was so brilliant. I loved hearing these personal stories.

I'm a former teacher and I used Lehrer's lyrics which are actually excellent ways to teach reading:

Who can turn a can into a cane? Who can turn a pan into a pane? It's not too hard to see It's Silent E

Who can turn a cub into a cube? Who can turn a tub into a tube? It's elementary For Silent E

He took a pin and turned it into pine He took a twin and turned him into twine

Who can turn a cap into a cape? Who can turn a tap into a tape? A little glob becomes a globe instantly If you just add Silent E

He turned a dam - Alakazam! - into a dame But my friend Sam stayed just the same

Who can turn a man into a mane? Who can turn a van into a vane? A little hug becomes huge instantly Don't add W, don't add X, and don't add Y or Z, Just add Silent E

Sondheim introducing Lehrer at his first stage performance in over 25 years, a benefit concert honoring Cameron Mackintosh in 1998.

Thanks for your kind words everyone. I really appreciate it.

UCSC was gorgeous but weird R37. So earthy crunchy old hippies, but so closeted and conservative in the 80s! The dorm I was in had a gay dorm leader, but he was in his forties and NONE of the students were out. Huge campus with thousands of students and I couldn’t find any gays. Even the theater department was heavily closeted and it was run by an old queen who was an assistant director at the Met. I had to move to NY for the sky to finally open up, and it really did, hahaha. I came out the first day I got to conservatory. There were gay boys everywhere.

I have one more Tom thing to share. It’s a little sad. One of the things he played at the after party was a song that he explained as perfectly describing him. He said it’s the song he most related to as a person. He said it came from a really obscure musical that had been overwhelmed by A Chorus Line at the time, but should have won every Tony and been a huge hit. He loved Kander and Ebb, and of course sang “Mr. Cellophane” from Chicago. At the time, it WAS an obscure show. I went to the first preview of the revival (they kicked us out of the theater for about twenty minutes because they had to rehearse something) because of how he talked about it and I wanted to see Mr Cellophane performed by Joel Grey. I knew it was going to be a huge hit from Encores, but I was truly blown away by the production. One of my last happy moments watching a Broadway show. And I always wondered what his opinion would be of the show becoming a massive sensation that ran for decades and spawned a movie that won Best Picture! Anyway, we all laughed at him after the song and said it was ridiculous he felt that way because he’d been hugely famous and we all loved him. He could be a little self pitying, but it’s sad to me that he felt that way despite his huge successes. He was obviously very lonely. I don’t know if he ever met anyone.

Did you ever hear any rumors about him having a boyfriend or seeing anyone R37?

Sorry that was me R30 at R40. Why am I acting like a noob, I’ve been here since 2000. Sigh. Love that clip, R39. I knew that he had those connections, but it’s so strange to see him doing a Mackintosh benefit being introduced by Sondheim! He just didn’t ever talk about it it with us. And we asked all the time. He was very humble about it all. I think he really mostly loved math and the cabaret performing was just a silly thing for him which he loved.

r40, no, I heard no rumors about him having a partner, but then that wasn't discussed in general. I remember that coming out of the closet was as far as conversations went. I had a boyfriend for half of 1982. People knew that we were gay but didn't know we were seeing each other and we didn't dare show up at campus functions or parties together. That would have been "too gay" for the otherwise ultra (politically) liberal campus. Even meeting him for dinner at each others' dining hall (his at Merrill College, mine at College V) felt weird in that dorm mates strangely didn't join us. And yet in 1983, John Laird was elected as the first openly gay mayor (of Santa Cruz) in the US. I must have gone through the entire gay male dating pool of 5 guys until I realized it was time to move to SF.

Tom seemed totally in his element and passionate about teaching mathematics and connected with students unlike any other professor I had there (which were mostly TA's, anyway). Aside from his wit and intellect, I didn't get a sense of him as a person or his private life. Sad to learn that he was lonely, but not surprised. UCSC, despite its stunning beauty, seemed to be a depressing place, but that's perhaps my own bias. Sorry to go on about the campus, but when I was there, the college actually sponsored booze-fueled happy hours and keg parties to get us nerds to socialize.

Here's a long shot: By any chance was it you who sang "Over The Rainbow" at one of the GALA dances? That guy had an amazing voice!

I had no idea Tommy Lehrer was gay! I guess I’m late to the party.

By the way, this might be my all time favorite DL thread.

R42, I spent a couple of years at UCSC, right after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Like you, I found the campus strangely lonely and depressing, despite its unquestionable beauty. I always thought it was just me.

This is my favorite of his songs. It’s quite a rollicking melody.

Wow r31. I really loved your personal reminiscences! As a professional classical musician, I can relate to many of your memories - but how lovely that you can point to Tom Lehrer as your mentor!

r44, wow, add the aftermath of the quake to all of that! Downtown was devastated. Took years to recover. Ironically, in 1986, I ended up with a "townie" from Santa Cruz for many years and visited his family often, usually against my will. I don't remember that many students who were happy at UCSC. I can think of only a few who stayed and didn't transfer elsewhere. After breaking up with that guy, didn't visit SC or the campus for decades until I took my New England husband there a few years ago, which turned out to be sort of magical and sort of a source of closure.

My spouse is a little older than me, is a bit of a show tune queen, and was blown away to hear that Tom Lehrer taught there and that I went to some of his lectures, lol. I only learned tonight that somewhere in his boxes of records in the garage lives "ALL of Lehrer's albums". We do not have a record player. That might change.

Am curious if you knew about him? My guess is that he's more known to Boomers and our parents' generation.

"Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" is a work of lyrical genius.

I've always been into Lehrer's brand of wit and should have heard of him decades ago — around the time Heathers became my favorite movie in high school — but I only discovered him a year or so ago, via some random Instagram post.

He was a real cutie. I hope he was able to find some boyfriends.

I must have heard this verse from The Irish Ballad by Lehrer when I was in third grade or so when my parents played it on the stereo

trying to understand the adults who were all laughing at the black humor was such a mind fuck... I think I must have discovered satire at that moment.... one never looks at the world in the same way moving forward.

(and if that's why I ended up on DL, I don't hold it against Tom Lehrer)

"One day when she had nothing to do Sing rickety-tickety-tin One day when she had nothing to do She cut her baby brother in two And served him up as an irish stew And invited the neighbors in, -bors in Invited the neighbors in"

No R42, that’s wasn’t me, sadly. I was there in the late 80s. My second year was the earthquake - which destroyed my downtown apartment building. I had to move back up to campus and finished at the Porter dorms (the “arts” campus- haha) before heading to NY. I started at Stevenson but quickly bailed, it was so insanely straight and weird. College V, Merrill, wow, so many memories! So interesting that so many left the campus to go elsewhere, which I fully understand. The earthquake absolutely devastated the downtown. I went back about five years later to visit the theater I’d been at, and I couldn’t believe the lack of recovery. Of course, SC like all of CA is outrageously expensive now, despite the town area being a dump with a bunch of beach shacks even in the nice neighborhoods right on the water. Can’t get anything under 5 million. It was a lonely place, I’ll give it that.

So interesting to see all the Tom recollections today across the media. A lot of supposition about why he left performing at the peak of his career.

R28, thank you for sharing your stories. His death must be a real gut-punch for you, I hope talking to us about him makes you feel a bit better.

Yes, thank you R28

I rate him up there with Oscar Wilde & Mark Twain -- I hope history agrees with me.

Daniel Radcliffe doing "The Elements."

Radcliffe is pretty cool. Speaks volumes that Leher still spoke to younger generations.

R6 you forgot the Masochism Tango!

We used to sit around and laugh at his albums as a family in the 1960s.

My mom covered her ears at the line “sliding down the razor blade of life”.

Didn’t he have a partner he worked with for many years? McNeil I think his name was.

I read this as Tomi Lahren. You really fucked up OP.

I’m so tickled by the fact that he really really REALLY detested his friend Sondheim’s music : )

R62, if the story of Lehrer playing and singing Mr. Cellophane from the musical Chicago is true, I give Tom props on top of props. It's a GREAT character piece and should never be played for laughs (which I have seen done unfortunately). It's really the one time when the audience, who has been entertained by cheats and liars (and it is very entertaining) is confronted with an open and honest moment.

It’s absolutely true, R63. He loved Kander and Ebb.

There are 2 bylines on his NY Times obit: Richard Severo and Peter Keepnews. Severo died in June & Keepnews added the few final details to Lehrer's obit. Weird but somehow kind of cool to outlive the author of one's obit (albeit by only slightly less than 2 months).