He’s said he’s glad the Johnny Carson videos were lost, and he gave away the master recordings of his songs to an acquaintance.
He’s a hard - but not quite impossible - man to reach, and an even harder one to engage in conversation. Actually, if he were dead, or had gone insane, or had holed up in New Hampshire and burned his later work, his story might carry him more neatly into the canon.
Indeed, Tom Lehrer has done everything possible, short of dying, to vanish from the American cultural scene. And yet the work he did is of the highest quality of any great songwriter." “Of all famous songwriters, he's probably the only one that, in the great sense of the word, is an amateur in that he never wanted to be professional. “There's never been anyone like him,” said Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the legendary Broadway producer who created Tom Foolery, a musical revue of Lehrer’s songs, in the ’70s.
He kept the Sparks Street house but began spending most of his time in Santa Cruz, Calif., where he became a beloved instructor in math and musical theater for some 40 years. He bounced around Cambridge, never quite finishing his doctorate on the concept of the mode - the most common number in a set - in statistics. His entire body of work topped out at 37 songs. During his golden decade, he appeared on The Tonight Show twice, drew a denunciation in Time magazine, and by the early 1960s, seemed poised for a lasting place on an American cultural scene that itself was undergoing a radical upheaval. In the recent history of American music, there’s no figure parallel to Lehrer in his effortless ascent to fame, his trajectory into the heart of the culture - and then his quiet, amiable, inexplicable departure. "Rather than talk to me for very long, just make up anything you want and I won't deny it.” The retired performer listened patiently to his request. Morris apologetically explained his school assignment, worried that Lehrer wouldn’t want to speak to him and self-conscious for having interrupted his day. “The Tom Lehrer that did some records in the '50s and '60s?” “Yes,” replied a voice some 1,000 miles away. “Is this Tom Lehrer?” Morris asked over the phone, working to hide his nervousness. ("I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail," he told the Harvard Crimson in 1981.) But Morris found him where he had always been, in a modest brown house on Sparks Street in Cambridge, Mass., where a mirrored wall helps Lehrer stay fit with tap-dancing routines and custom-ordered Moxie sodas sit in the fridge. Many of Lehrer’s fans thought the artist might be dead, a belief Lehrer encourages. “I Got It from Agnes” is an extended joke about sexually transmitted disease. One famous ditty celebrates an afternoon spent “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” Another cheerful number, “So Long Mom,” dwells on the details of nuclear holocaust. His sound looked further back, to Broadway of the ‘20s and ‘30s - a man and a piano, crisp and clever - but his lyrics were funny and sharp to the point of drawing blood, and sometimes appalling.
Lehrer had been a sensation in the late 1950s, the era’s musical nerd god: a wryly confident Harvard-educated math prodigy who turned his bone-dry wit to satirical musical comedy. Morris had been assigned a first-person interview on the subject of censorship, and Lehrer seemed obvious. That’s where he first encountered Tom Lehrer, whose music was a staple and who was, in the reckoning of the show’s eponymous host, the greatest musical satirist ever recorded. Demento Show, a long-running collection of brilliant musical oddities, from Frank Zappa to "Weird Al" Yankovic. A skinny music nerd with an easy laugh, Morris was a devotee of the Dr. Nearly 25 years ago, Jeff Morris, a high school senior in Jeffersonville, Ind., placed a phone call to his new idol.