Talk about quality over quantity. Tom Lehrer is known as a master of satire and practically wrote the book on rhyming lyrics. Pretty impressive for a guy that wrote only about 50 songs. Most of them were released four decades ago, but amazingly they've remained in print since that time, having been reissued several times on vinyl and later on CD. Now comes a new 3-CD set, The Remains of Tom Lehrer, which compiles all those songs in all the various forms that Tom released plus a few hitherto-unreleased works, including a couple of brand new recordings. Remains is a lot more than leftovers, it's a true anthology of Lehrer's work.

Lehrer was raised in a New York Jewish family that didn't stress religion very much, even going so far to have Christmas trees in their house while he was growing up in the 30's and 40's. Piano lessons were de rigeur for many kids and Tom was no exception; however, instead of practicing the classical selections, he became more interested in learning popular songs of the day. Also among Lehrer's earliest influences were Gilbert & Sullivan, having listened to them on 78's as a child. A later favorite was Danny Kaye, whose Stanislavsky became the foundation for Tom's homage to mathematician professors, Lobachevsky. He went on to master many styles of playing and the range is quite amazing, though Tom says only, "I got away with it. There are some things I couldn't do with my left hand and I always had to play with my head turned to the audience." He showcases his range in "Clementine", where he mutates the hill country standard into Cole Porter form, then Mozart, Be-bop, and landing back on the aforementioned G & S. Similarly he is unimpressed with his talent for crooning, confessing to drawing on a Maurice Chavalier-style inflection in several songs.

Academically, Tom proved to be exceptionally gifted, skipping grades at school and entering Harvard in 1943 at the tender age of 15. ""Fight Fiercely Harvard," a perfect sendup of the school's blue-blood sportsmanship, followed two years later. The song was the first in Tom's early productive period. After penning several more songs and becoming better known by playing in some local venues, Tom decided to press his own albums. These came out in 1953 in the original long-playing format, a ten-inch record that contained only six songs--22 minutes of music. "It only took about an hour to record," Tom remembers, having played the songs so many times. He personally peddled the first 400 copies to stores around the campus--much to his amazement, the record sold. Indeed, it continues to sell because all those original recordings are found on Remains.

However successful his music career, mathematics was to be his real vocation over the years and he accepted jobs teaching it (and sometimes political science and music) at Harvard, MIT and UC Santa Cruz, but he never became a professor. When asked if it's still his first love, Tom says, "It's not love--math is fun," adding that to students these days, "math seems like the one subject they all abhor because it demands them to think."

Early on though, the academic in Tom made him realize that the life of a performer was not really for him, though he had good success, including concert tours overseas and occasional television appearances. By 1967 he had stopped giving performances, and with rare contributions to educational shows like Sesame Street and the Electric Company, he had stopped writing new songs. "I stopped getting ideas; things got too serious in the late 60's," Tom explains. "Oh there were a lot of things that made me angry. You can't be angry and funny at the same time, though. Lenny Bruce is considered such a great comedian but when he was angry nobody laughed. Lenny Bruce wasn't funny when he was angry. You go for applause or a laugh...Richard Pryor can sometimes do both."

"The decline of literature in the world is appalling," he continues. "People can't appreciate lyrics, [much less write them] like Sondheim would do but it's rare." In the liner notes of Remains, Lehrer further states that today "irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness. For example, the freedom--hooray!--to say almost anything you want...about society's problems has been co-opted--alas!--by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc. etc. and to replace real comment with...so-called 'adult' language. Irreverence is easy--what's hard is wit."

Lehrer's brand of wit is still potent, as heard in the perennial Doctor Demento Funny Five winner, "The Masochism Tango," which takes the mock abuse of that dance to its logical extreme but does it so well that one might think Lehrer is actually into that sort of thing. Likewise the song "Smut" sounds heartfelt but when asked how he really feels about it, Tom says, "That song was really about freedom of speech and hypocrisy." As he says in the song's intro monologue, "Dirty books are fun!" yet the ACLU and others fight around that point instead of confronting it directly. There's "freedom to do and to say things explicitly now," says Tom. "People can say 'fuck' on TV, not that I mind, but innuendo is disappearing. 'What the Hell?' used to get a laugh on TV but now it wouldn't turn any heads at all."

Lehrer also loved skewering over-inflated pretension in other areas. A favorite target was the folk-singing movement of the day, which he saw as lauding poor musical taste for no good reason. "The Folk Song Army" overtly lampoons them while the earlier "The Irish Ballad" attacks more subtly. It tells a terribly macabre story of a daughter killing off her family by rhyming a couple dozen lines to the nonsense refrain "Rickety Tickety Tin." A bystander may wonder why Tom would relate such a tale, but the telling of it is really accusing the folkies of liking anything that's similarly overblown and distasteful just because it's supposedly from "the people."

In a similar way, "The Old Dope Peddler" takes its cue from then-popular songs like "The Old Lamplighter" and "The Umbrella Man," but was purposely written about someone society really abhors to point out those songs' sappy sentimentality. "At the time I didn't know anyone who used dope." Now, Lehrer concedes, "the song resonates quite differently."

"It takes a lot to make a 1 1/2 minute song," comments Tom, who says he composes lyrics "by saying things over and over in your mind until it clicks. Some things you have to reword the line until it fits the rhyme...Sometimes to get the song right you'd put in a dummy lyric, then you go over and polish it.... The song about Mexico and the bullfight were originally two different songs but I found a way to put the bullfight song into the Mexico song and it worked." Tom also admits that "a rhyming dictionary is a help.... I made a lot of connections that I wouldn't have otherwise like in the song Pollution, rhyming 'toothpaste' with 'industrial waste'.... Lyric writing, it's like a puzzle--not a crossword puzzle but a jigsaw puzzle--and you always have to have a joke at the end."

The unlikely pairing of a single word with a phrase that rhymes is a Lehrer trademark and nobody does it better. Famous Lehrerisms include the rhyming of "idiot" with "pity it", "Akron, Ohio" with "A F of L and C-IO", "Bauhaus" with "chow house", and the unforgettable triple set of "plagiarize" with "evade your eyes", "made your eyes" and "shade your eyes", in Lobachevsky. More stretched rhymes abound in The Vatican Rag, perhaps the best single example of his witty wordplay:

Do what ever steps you want if,
You have cleared them with the Pontiff,
Ev'rybody say his own,
Kyrie eleision,
Doin the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There the guy that's got religion'll,
Tell you if your sin's original

These days, of course, it wouldn't be politically correct for someone with a Jewish heritage to take a swipe at the Catholics. When asked if there's any return to his religious roots in his most recent song, "I'm Spending Hanukah in Santa Monica," Lehrer claims only that it was written to counterbalance "White Christmas," adding, "I used to think atheists were arrogant but now I am one and I like it."

Still politically aware too, Lehrer says, "I model myself after Truman, who could always be counted upon to say wonderful things.... These days they pounce on the slightest misstep by a politician... [like when] was it John McCain who said, 'Alzheimer patients could hide their own Easter eggs'?"

"We used to have heroes like Bobby Kennedy," Tom goes on. These days, "it's a choice between a whore and an asshole...Al Whore who will say anything to get elected versus Bush who I don't know if he even understands anything he's saying." Sounds like one of the songs released for the first time on Remains, "Selling Out," where he says:

If you really have integrity,
It means your price is very high,
So remember when you start to preach,
And moralize,
That we all are in the game,
And brother, its name,
Is compromise.

Interesting sentiments from a man who refuses to compromise the high quality of his repertoire for quantity.

(C) 2000 - Rusty Pipes