Side 1
1. National Brotherhood Week 2:36
2. MLF Lullaby 2:25
3. George Murphy 2:10
4. The Folk Song Army 2:13
5. Smut 3:15
6. Send The Marines 1:47
7. Pollution 2:16

Side 2
1. So Long, Mom (A Song For World War III) 2:24
2. Whatever Became Of Hubert? 2:13
3. New Math 4:31
4. Alma 5:28
5. Who’s Next? 2:00
6. Wernher Von Braun 1:48
7. The Vatican Rag 2:12

I learnt about rock music from my mum. She introduced me to Elvis, The Beatles and Bob Dylan at an early age. My dad, however, had no liking for such modern rubbish, although his contributions to the family record collection did include revolutionaries from an earlier generation, including Paul Robeson, whom he was lucky enough to meet when posted in the US while serving in the airforce. But the one musical lesson for which I owe my dad eternal thanks is Tom Lehrer, subject of this month’s Unsung Album Of The Month from Copey himself. I’ve been prompted to add the review of this LP because it’s missing from the discography listed at the bottom of said article. The songs on the mp3 stream all come from the albums ‘Songs By Tom Lehrer’ (1953) and ‘More Of Tom Lehrer’ (1959) both initially released in the US as private pressings and then released by Decca as ten inch LPs in the UK, where the songs had already started to earn a word-of-mouth reputation, not least due to a fair amount of exposure on the BBC. These were followed by ‘An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer’ (a live version of the second album and also initially released privately) in 1959 and ‘Tom Lehrer Revisited’ (a live version of the first album) in 1960. Anyone who is undecided about the studio recordings should seek out the live versions which are generally more spritely, with the added bonus of between song banter that is often as funny as the songs themselves (‘In Old Mexico’ begins with a hilarious monologue on ‘Doctor Samuel Gall, inventor of the gall-bladder’ whose ‘educational career began in agricultural school, where he majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day.’) There is also the additional buzz of hearing the live audience response, plus a stronger appreciation of the verbal and musical dexterity that, for example, makes it possible for Lehrer to sing a complete list of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General’. 

For the next few years Lehrer returned to teaching and academic study, but was brought out of early retirement by the satire boom, contributing songs to the American version of ‘That Was The Week That Was’ (1964–5) and coming to England to record some of the same songs (and a couple of exclusives) for ‘The Frost Report’ in 1966 (see my YouTube channel for some of these). The best of these were released on LP in 1965 under the title ‘That Was The Year That Was’, recorded live at the hungry i club in San Francisco. It was this LP that my dad misguidedly bought for my mum one year for her birthday. She hated it. The teenage me, on the other hand, with my schoolboyish taste for sick humour, was immediately hooked by the dialogue which introduced the opening song: ‘One week of every year is designated National Brotherhood Week. This is just one of many such weeks honouring various worthy causes. One of my favourites is National Make-fun-of-the-handicapped Week which Frank Fontaine and Jerry Lewis are in charge of as you know.’ Of course I was later to realise that the joke was at the expense of Fontaine and Lewis rather than the handicapped. But that first song went on to include the lyric:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews

Again what initially sounded to me like an attempt to be deliberately offensive was of course a biting satire on racism and religious intolerance. Like South Park today (which takes bad taste to hitherto undreamed of limits), beneath the twisted humour there is a genuine questioning of the hypocrisy at the heart of society (America being the particular target of both vehicles). ‘National Brotherhood Week’ is also honest enough to acknowledge the extreme effort involved in loving one’s neighbour, even for just one week (‘Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year’).

I should mention right now that although this LP was my entry point to the world of Tom Lehrer, I am mainly selecting it for Unsung because of the omission of any of its songs from Julian’s own compilation of Tom’s work. The problem with satire is that it dates very quickly, and about half of the songs here are too specific to their times to still rank amongst his classics. But the other half constitutes probably his most popular and enduring collection of songs, making this album an essential purchase.

Before I go on to the other songs which have virtually become standards, honourable mention should go to ‘The Folk Song Army’, which is notable in that it harks back to the song-style parodies of his first two albums, while sending up the recent trend of protest singers. It ends with the memorable three word pay-off: ‘Ready. Aim. Sing!’

But now for the highlights. ‘Smut’ is a reaction to the Lady Chatterly trial and other attempts at censorship, with some of the most cunning rhyming ever set to music: ‘I’ve never quibbled/If it was ribald/I would devour/ Where others merely nibbled.’ The song is sung from the point of view of someone whose appetite is limitless (‘More, more, I’m still not satisfied’) and is also clearly sick (‘Stories of tortures/Used by debauchers/Lurid, licentious, and vile… Make me smile’), but is also blessed with a strong imagination (‘When correctly viewed/Everything is lewd/I could tell you things about Peter Pan/And the Wizard of Oz, there’s a dirty old man’). ‘Pollution’ addresses environmental issues and as such is still pertinent today. Apparently Bing Crosby wanted to perform this in one of his TV specials but the producers objected to the line: ‘Pollution, pollution/They got smog and sewage and mud/Turn on your tap/And get hot and cold running crud.’
War nostalgia is the basis of ‘So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)’, which Lehrer has already prepared because, as he rightly says, ‘if any songs are going to come out of World War III we’d better start writing them now.’ It features probably the best punchline of all, so I won’t spoil it by repeating it here. ‘New Math’ draws on Lehrer’s academic know-how as well as his ability to make songs out of apparently intractable subject matter. He takes a sum and does it first in base 10 and then again in base 8 (‘the same as base 10, if you’re missing two fingers’). The audience becomes an unwitting classroom full of children, and in one pause in which Lehrer is waiting for an answer he draws on one of the more universal details of the teaching experience (‘Now, let’s not always see the same hands’). ‘Who’s Next?’ covers the subject of the nuclear bomb and the relationship between different countries, brilliantly satirising the self-righteousness of the USA and its allies, but delivering its killer verse when referring to the conflict between Egypt and Israel: (‘Egypt’s gonna get one too/Just to use on you know who/So Israel’s getting tense/Wants one in self defense /”The Lord’s our shepherd,” says the psalm/But just in case, we better get a bomb’). For ages I didn’t know who ‘Wernher Von Braun’ was, but it didn’t make the song about the Nazi sympathiser employed to assist the US in the space race any less funny (‘Don’t say that he’s hypocritical/Say rather that he’s apolitical/“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down/That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun’). ‘The Vatican Rag’ is a superb climax. The Roman Catholic church’s attempt to relaunch itself with ‘Vatican 2’ prompted Lehrer to suggest that they use popular vernacular to really connect with the people. This song brilliantly turns the rituals of the Catholic mass into dance moves:

First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect 

Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There, the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original
If it is, try playin’ it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate

The song is mildly sacraligious rather than out-and-out blasphemous, but you can hear the shocked delight in the audience response and the album fades out on rapturous applause and cheering.

This was Tom Lehrer’s last album. It is popularly believed that he retired when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an act that ‘rendered political satire obsolete’. But really the musical career was a sideline from his real job as a mathematician and teacher. He has said that he kept performing each song until he’d perfected it and then he’d grow bored of it. This hobby produced a relatively small but brilliant catalogue of work, and there is no excuse not to own at least some of it. The first two live albums are available together on a budget CD, the ten inches turn up all the time in charity shops and I’ve even picked up the private pressings for £2 a piece at the music and video exchange. But really, there are no duff releases, so you really can’t go wrong.