Tom Lehrer seemed ubiquitous to me when I was a kid, but I later found out this was not exactly true. Seemed is the key word here. If you had a bunch of Tom Lehrer records (check), listened to the Dr. Demento radio show (check) and watched The Electric Company (check) then Tom Lehrer—and his voice and music—was a presence in your world. He sure was in mine and I loved, loved, loved him. What I later discovered is that Lehrer basically hated touring, hated singing the same songs over and over and was not always a welcome guest on television shows due to his controversial—albeit hilarious—topical lyrics. Lehrer ripped racism, gored Werner von Braun and sang the Periodic Chart of the Elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General’s Song (!) and he did it all in a quavering voice that drolly accented his wonderful comic timing.
 

 
But he didn’t do it for that long. There are actually not all that many Tom Lehrer songs, only 37 which is a pity because of how hilarious each and every one of them is. He did only 109 live performances. But still, if, as I say, your cultural diet consisted of the things I listed above, it seemed as if Lehrer was still active in show business long after he actually was.
 

 
By the late Sixties, Lehrer was tiring of show business and returned to his former life, that of a mathematician at MIT and later at UC Santa Cruz, where he still lives, retired. There was long a rumor that Lehrer dropped out from satire after Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, but he has denied this, saying he’d retired long before then anyway.
 
Probably Lehrer’s best known song (thanks to endless spins on the Dr. Demento show over the decades) is the darkly humorous Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:
 

This is a great round up of Tom Lehrer stuff. I have a buddy who’s Mom was obsessed with him, and we used to listen to his songs on vinyl as the sound track to our early pot smoking experiments.

My favorite song is ‘The Old Dope Peddler’, who brings his powdered happiness. ‘Be Prepared’ is a fantastically funny jab at the Boy Scouts.

Plus he invented the Jell-O shot! I’m not kidding!

Even arch-druid-stoner-dude Julian Cope did a long piece on Lehrer on Cope’s Head Heritage site. Which goes a long way to sorting out Cope.
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/albumofthemonth/2044

Just as a point of information, “The Elements” is set to Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Major-General Song” (from The Pirates of Penzance)or, as it’s commonly known, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

(And people called Lehrer pedantic. Geez.)

One thing that impressed me was that his first album was self-produced, recorded, and pressed, and sold by himself ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù and that he sold, IIRC, a couple hundred thousand of them while he was still at Harvard. Meaning that he was pretty much independently wealthy before he got out of school, thanks to his music.

@Bill,

Fixed, cheers. I plead guilty to writing whilst stoned…

Certainly not a bad way to write.

Too many people today have no idea who TL is, or know his songs. (I wish I had counted the number of blank stares I got last week as I mourned Soupy Sales.)

Metzger, it is *you* who are the model of modern major ubiquity.  Whenever I’m blog-dipping, there you are.  Fine commentary on Lehrer, whose songs were part of the required curriculum wherever I went in the early 70s.

There are rumors that for several years, he wrote the lyrics for the Ig Nobel’s yearly “mini-opera”.  In particular, he is likely responsible for rhyming “deoxyribnucleic” with “Passaic”.  But you didn’t hear that from me.

The very first week that the National Air and Space Museum opened up, my college chums and all all hied ourselves to it, gathered in a circle around the V2 rocket while joining hands, and sang “Werner Von Braun.” Then we departed post-haste, as we were sure they would throw us out and never let us return.

M