In memory of social satirist Tom Lehrer’s recent passing, we have compiled four unreleased tracks for download — free for you when you join our email newsletter.
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Full Alto:Take 2 Recordings
Remembering Tom Lehrer
“Tom Lehrer, the sardonic singer-songwriter-pianist who rose to national fame after his dark, tartly funny topical songs were used on the comedic ‘60s TV news show “That Was the Week That Was,” has died at age 97.
Lehrer, who acquired an underground audience in the early ‘50s with a pair of self-released albums, was by trade a professor who taught mathematics, first at Harvard and later in his career at UC Santa Cruz. He told one concert audience, “I don’t like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn’t as though I had to do this. I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching.”
Nonetheless, his musical career took a back seat to academic work for most of his life.
A pioneer of musical black comedy during the optimistic Eisenhower years in America, Lehrer influenced the work that came later from such musical satirists as Randy Newman, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Harry Shearer.
The lean, bespectacled Lehrer essayed such then-taboo subjects as sexuality (“The Masochism Tango”), drug addiction (“The Old Dope Peddler”), homosexuality in the Boy Scouts (“Be Prepared”) and militarism (“It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier”) on his early, self-released albums. Lehrer was lofted to fame by the caustic material he wrote for “TW3,” NBC’s U.S. spinoff of a popular British show hosted by the young David Frost.…”
