Tom Lehrer, musical satirist with a dark streak, dies at 97

Tom Lehrer, a Harvard University-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died July 26 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart, he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

As popular as his songs were, Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.

In “The Masochism Tango”, which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts / Like nobody else”. In “Be Prepared”, his “Boy Scout marching song”, he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice / Unless you get a good percentage of her price”.

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in the New York City borough of Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Alma (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but he baulked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasised the Broadway show tunes he loved.

He also developed a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan; one of his early songs, “The Elements,” was a list of the chemical elements set to the tune of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from “The Pirates of Penzance.” Years later, “The Elements” would be performed by the young scientist played by Jim Parsons on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”.

After graduating early from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Lehrer went to Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and received his bachelor’s degree in 1946, at 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the next year and then pursued doctoral studies there and at Columbia University. He continued his studies on and off for many years, but he never completed his doctoral thesis.

While at Harvard, Lehrer began to write songs for his own amusement and that of his fellow students. He told his friends that the songs simply came to him and that he wrote them down in just about the time it took him to brush his teeth, but they quickly found an audience on campus. One of his earliest efforts, written in 1945, was a parody of football songs called “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”.

In 1952, as he looked forward to becoming a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he wrote “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be”, whose lyrics suggested that he was not to have a fruitful career in atomic research: “’Mid the yuccas and the thistles / I’ll watch the guided missiles / While the old FBI watches me.”

By that time, Lehrer had begun performing his songs in Cambridge. He did not want to abandon research and teaching, but he saw the possibility of combining the contemplative life with an entertainment career.

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer”, cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

The cover contained a drawing of Lehrer seated at the piano, with horns coming out of his head and a devil’s tail emerging from his formal attire. (His follow-up album, “More of Tom Lehrer”, used the same image. The 11 songs lived up to that image, among them “My Home Town” - where the “just plain folks” included the pyromaniacal son of the mayor and the maths teacher who sells dirty pictures to children after school - and the necrophiliac ballad “I Hold Your Hand in Mine”.

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

When a fan once asked Lehrer if he had ever married or had children, he replied, “Not guilty on both counts.” He leaves no immediate survivors.

Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time”. NYTIMES