Robert Pinsky, in the 28 July New Yorker: "Astounding Stories"
Tom Lehrer: The Copenhagen Concert0:00 National Brotherhood Week
2:39 MLF Lullaby
5:05 George Murphy
7:15 The Folk Song Army
9:28 Smut
12:45 Send the Marines
14:32 Pollution
16:52 So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)
19:18 Whatever Became of Hubert?
21:32 New Math
26:04 Alma
30:29 Who's Next?
33:31 Wernher Von Braun
35:19 The Vatican Rag
Tom Lehrer: "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" (live, 1998)
An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1959)
TL: "I Got It from Agnes" (with Italian subtitles!)
Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings
TL: "The Subway Song" (on MIT's campus radio station 88.1 FM, then WTBS Cambridge, now WMBR)
Lehrer on BBC 4's Desert Island Discs (12 July 1980)--sadly, the entire program, with TL's chosen recordings included (at least in part), seems to have been removed from BBC's site--this below includes the interview segments:
Intro start, Song start – Title
00:00, 00:21 – Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
02:39, 03:20 – Bright College Days
05:42, 06:37 – A Christmas Carol
08:40, 09:05 – The Elements
10:52, 12:38 – Oedipus Rex
14:34, 16:44 – In Old Mexico
21:00, 21:34 – Clementine (he talks throughout this one)
25:40, 27:37 – It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier
30:31, 31:28 – She's My Girl
33:24, 33:50 – The Masochism Tango
36:55, 38:59 – We Will All Go Together When We Go
The image link includes only "Fight Fiercely, Harvard";
hit the text link for the whole album...
6 comments:
It's hard to pick a favorite Leher song, Todd, but whenever I come across a bluenose I mentally start reciting, "I can tell you things about Peter Pan..."
Also, "the microscopic descendants they designed" brings to mind Blish's "Surface Tension" -- which, alas, came from GALAXY and not ASTOUNDING.
Since there are a lot of non-rockers in the R&R HOF Lehrer should be in there too. He definitely wasn't rock, but he had more of a rock edge to him than quite a few of the people already inducted such as Nat King Cole - who I love - and Dionne Warwick.
His songs still resonate in these parlous times.
Indeed, as I suggested in a discussion on the FictionMags list, a certain amount of poetic license was on display in the poem, I suspect...ASTOUNDING stopped being ASTOUNDING STORIES and started being ASF not too long (as in less than a year) after John Campbell began editing it, and many of the potential inspirations appeared in those years...Blish's story, as you note, in the '50s in GALAXY, which for several years in the early '50s ran ahead of ASF, which became ANALOG by the end of that decade, and nearly everyone else, in several ways.
When you tell the truth, as Lehrer usually did with wit, one's songs, if well-written and performed, as his almost always were, will tend to stand the test of time...Charlie, I think you can see/hear his influence among others' on the Beatles, the Kinks, and Frank Zappa/the Mothers, among many other rock musicians...he was certainly widely heard on US and other Anglophone media in the '60s onward...one of his best set of songs was written for the US version of the UK series THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS, for obvious connections, and he had been a not-quite-"underground" influence in the '50s.
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