Tom Lehrer Goes Public (Domain)

October 20, 2020 10:08 AM

The complete lyrics and (most of the) music of Tom Lehrer is now available for official, public domain download... at least until December 31, 2024.
posted by SansPoint (49 comments total)

That Was The Year That Was was my favorite album when I was a kid... in the mid-90s. I would insist on it being played during dinner until my parents told me "listen we like it too but give it a rest." But I learned a lot of history from it, of the variety they don't teach in school. And I've been thinking a lot about So Long Mom over the past little bit, as it really really prefigured experiencing-disaster-via-social-media without realizing it. "No need for you to miss a minute/Of the agonizing holocaust!"
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:22 AM on October 20, 2020 [14 favorites]

I've long had the strong suspicion that Tom Lehrer is a good egg. The first songwriter I ever wanted to be and the one I was least capable of being.
posted by Grangousier at 10:26 AM on October 20, 2020 [9 favorites]

Maybe it's just my catastrophe-addled brain talking but I hope this isn't because he's ill or otherwise not expecting to be around past 2024...
posted by saturday_morning at 10:26 AM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Am I missing something, or is each page a click-through link to a PDF for everyone?
posted by scruss at 10:30 AM on October 20, 2020

saturday_morning: Granted, the man is 92 years old right now; Once you get past a certain age, pretty much every year afterwards has a question mark after it.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:33 AM on October 20, 2020 [16 favorites]

Yes, seems they are scanned-and-OCR'ed PDFs. But we've got like, four years to convert them to other formats!
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:35 AM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Man, those were fun to play on the piano as a kid. The Elements is a work of genius.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:44 AM on October 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Saw one of Tom Lehrer's plays, when he was teaching at UCSC. Given that I'd grown up on his music, it was an awesome experience (and fun theatre).
posted by emmet at 10:45 AM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

About that expiration date... the Internet Archive has got your back.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:45 AM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh boo. The archive did not pull a deep copy. I should have checked first.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:47 AM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Once you get past a certain age, pretty much every year afterwards has a question mark after it.

That's been true for all of us since about 1951. We will all go together when we go...
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:55 AM on October 20, 2020 [10 favorites]

As the inventor of the Jell-O shot, I'm sure royalties on that keep Tom pretty comfortable.

*wink*
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:02 AM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m just here to point out that the tempo indication for The Masochism Tango is “Painstakingly” while the marking for “L~Y” is “Rapid-LY.”

Now off to re-learn wget for the 50th time so I can have these forever.
posted by range at 11:09 AM on October 20, 2020 [11 favorites]

How horrible. Doesn't he know how many young budding artists are giving up on their dream of creating because they now fear that this example will lead to changes in copyright law that will cause them to lose royalties in 70 years?
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:10 AM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

There's a pretty interesting thread here: Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain | Hacker News.

Including a wget command for range. :)

Lehrer is someone I grew up listening to and one of the few box-sets of CDs that I bothered having. Seems he sorta always intended for the lyrics to be public domain as far as he cared about. Cool frood.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:13 AM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

I’m just here to point out that the tempo indication for The Masochism Tango is “Painstakingly” while the marking for “L~Y” is “Rapid-LY.”

And I came in to say that the one for "We Will All Go Together When We Go" is "Eschatologically"! Tom Lehrer is the best.
posted by Daily Alice at 11:21 AM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Over half a century on and we never learn what "kindly Parson Brown" and the Sunday school teacher were up to?!

Yes, I know it's a joke
posted by pxe2000 at 11:26 AM on October 20, 2020

How horrible. Doesn't he know how many young budding artists are giving up on their dream of creating because they now fear that this example will lead to changes in copyright law that will cause them to lose royalties in 70 years?

I think you mean their great-grandkids losing royalties 70 years after their death.
posted by tclark at 11:32 AM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

They'll be nobody present at the wake,
with complete participation,
in that grand incineration,
nearly 3 billion hunks of well done steak!
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:38 AM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m just here to point out that the tempo indication for The Masochism Tango is “Painstakingly” while the marking for “L~Y” is “Rapid-LY.”

And I came in to say that the one for "We Will All Go Together When We Go" is "Eschatologically"! Tom Lehrer is the best.

"I got it from Agnes" is "Infectiously"

I will have to go through all of this -- in my copious free time.
posted by judgement day at 11:45 AM on October 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

nearly 3 billion hunks of well done steak!

Well, THAT'S dated. I've been singing "6 billion" for 10 years; quick check looks like I should move it up to 8 billion.
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:56 AM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

I knew him, slightly, 30 years ago at Santa Cruz; I had friends who took tap-dancing with him. I'm comfortable in saying that he was a pretty good egg, and I assume he still is one.
posted by allthinky at 11:58 AM on October 20, 2020 [6 favorites]

The Irish Ballad is, of course, to be played "Authentically".
posted by Johnny Assay at 12:00 PM on October 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I've always been amazed at what Lehrer managed to slip into his lyrics considering how many of them were written in the late '50s/early '60s. In "I Got it from Agnes" (and there's a 2020-appropriate song) the venereal disease joke is the main point of the song, but it throws in jokes about infidelity, incest, homosexuality, multiple partners, and bestiality.
posted by Wretch729 at 12:02 PM on October 20, 2020 [6 favorites]

nearly 3 billion hunks of well done steak!

Well, THAT'S dated. I've been singing "6 billion" for 10 years; quick check looks like I should move it up to 8 billion.

Yes, I started singing it again in November 2016 (I learned it during the Reagan years and kind of put it on hiatus after 1989) and I say "more than 7 billion". Also the last verse has some words that are ethnic slurs now - I perform that line as "We will all go together when we go/You and me and everyone we know".
posted by Daily Alice at 12:07 PM on October 20, 2020 [10 favorites]

I'll always have special affection for Tom Lehrer as the middle school find that showed me people in the 50s were very capable of sarcasm and dark comedy. That should be obvious, but tween me probably thought of all that as coming into popularity with the Simpsons. It's funny that this is posted right after that Dorothy Parker interview, because she served a similar purpose for me (and because I've read a Lehrer interview with the same vibe of a starstruck interviewer tracking down a subject who professes to not know why people are still enthusiastic about art created decades ago that was not well-regarded by critics of the time).
posted by grandiloquiet at 12:25 PM on October 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Daniel Radcliffe told a story in a podcast once that when he was doing How To Succeed In Business on Broadway, it was shortly after he had gone viral for singing "The Elements" on Graham Norton and had professed to his fanboy status, so the director pulled some strings and invited Tom Lehrer to come to the show and visit Dan backstage after. Not only did Lehrer show up, he came bearing a gift - a single-page sheet of sheet music, upon which he had written a new song called "The Elements (As Per Aristotle)". The lyrics apparently went:

"Theeeeeeere's earth and air and fire and water."

And that's it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:27 PM on October 20, 2020 [45 favorites]

OH GOD HERE IS THE ARISTOTLE VERSION!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:29 PM on October 20, 2020 [19 favorites]

The "Aristotle" version goes back to at least 1967.
posted by SansPoint at 12:43 PM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

The note at the top of the sheet music for "Be Prepared" reads, "Trustworthily, loyally, helpfully, friendlily, etc."
posted by wenestvedt at 12:57 PM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

Also, this link may be useful: https://nonempty.org/stuff/lehrer-pubdomain.tar.gz

It contains PDFs of the lyrics plus PDFs of the sheet music for most of the songs, as well as a few pictures. get it while you can!
posted by wenestvedt at 1:00 PM on October 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

Tom Lehrer inspired me to write my own song parodies and very quickly showed me that it was harder than I thought. My only halfway decent one was a riff on his song "Silent E", making fun of Dan Quayle's misspelling of "potato" and consisted of my adding a silent E to words that don't have them. The only bit I remember is:

He can turn a bat, into a bate
And potato's now potatoe, ain't that great?!

Marginally clever and not particularly original. I would like that line in my obituary, please.

It is interesting that he quit. It reminds me a little of the fictionalized version of John Laroche in "Adaptation", who for years buys fish tanks and raises fish and is obsessed with fish and

John Laroche : Then one morning, I woke up and said, "Fuck fish." I renounce fish, I will never set foot in that ocean again. That's how much "fuck fish." That was 17 years ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean. And I love the ocean.

Susan Orlean : But why?

John Laroche : Done with fish.

Maybe there is more to it than that for Lehrer, but maybe he's just done with musical comedy.

I have a quibble with his lyrics to Aristotle's Elements, however. What about quintessence?
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 1:34 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

At least in terms of writing political satire, he's noted as saying political satire "died the moment Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize" and noting of George W. Bush, "I don’t want to satirize George W. Bush…I want to vaporize him, and that’s not funny."
posted by SansPoint at 1:51 PM on October 20, 2020 [10 favorites]

> I hope this isn't because he's ill or otherwise not expecting to be around past 2024...

I assume it's because that's when the domain name registration expires and/or web hosting contract expires. And, I'll assume further, it's because he doesn't feel like burdening his future self or his heirs with maintaining the site for the time beyond that. He's a canny guy, I'm sure he knows the site's contents have been copied far and wide and will continue circulating without him.
posted by ardgedee at 2:03 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: Marginally clever and not particularly original

I had to do it
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:12 PM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

I found it charming to discover that Fight Fiercely Harvard has been adopted by the Harvard Marching Band and is played by them at football games.

My family was extremely unreligious. Yet when I was growing up we had our sacred texts, including the songs of Tom Lehrer and the cartoons of Bernard Kliban.
posted by bertran at 2:57 PM on October 20, 2020 [6 favorites]

I assume it's because that's when the domain name registration expires and/or web hosting contract expires. And, I'll assume further, it's because he doesn't feel like burdening his future self or his heirs with maintaining the site for the time beyond that.

Surely this is exactly the sort of thing the Internet Archive is for.
posted by acb at 3:40 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

My high school English teacher would give us extra credit for bringing in examples of allusions to what we were studying. People had lazily tried to bring in the "Oedipus Rex" song so many times that she just went ahead and played it for us and gave us a scolding about how allusion is CLEVER and not just A Reference to a Thing, dammit.
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:45 PM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

A website with an expiration date? Not on Jason Scott's watch!
posted by BiggerJ at 4:03 PM on October 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

SPOILER ALERT: this is because the Earth ends on Dec 31, 2024.
posted by panglos at 5:54 PM on October 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

The moment has come, and tackily, Iʻve swallowed my gum.
posted by Droll Lord at 6:07 PM on October 20, 2020

Surely this is exactly the sort of thing the Internet Archive is for.

Quite so. I posted a link above then observed that it didn’t seem to work. BUT that was evidently a transient failure and it works after all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by sjswitzer at 9:59 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that there was a Previously about how Tom Lehrer was extremely happy to have his material copied, and how he gave his master tapes away to a fan.

(Contrast that with the estate of another favourite artist of mine: the family spent the couple of years after the poet passed away joining every fan site ostensibly to gauge interest in republication, but mostly to find out about and shut down community archives of spoken-word performances. The promised republication/reissues never happened, and yet the archives are irreparably gone. There are tiny fragments on the Internet Archive, and finding them makes me happy-sad.)
posted by scruss at 8:51 AM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

There was definitely a previously about his kind licensing of The Old Dope Peddler to 2 Chainz.
posted by wnissen at 1:16 PM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

The only bummer about these transcriptions is that they don't always include Lehrer's spoken intro. For example: on the TW3 album, he introduces "Send in the Marines" thusly:

What with President Johnson practicing “escalatio” on the Vietnamese and then the Dominican crisis on top of that it has been a nervous year and people have begun to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis. Fortunately in times of crisis just like this America always has this number one instrument of diplomacy to fall back on. Here's a song about it.

That's lost in the transcribed lyrics. Same with "New Math":

Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child's arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the New Math. So as a public service here tonight, I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the New Math. Tonight, we're gonna cover subtraction. This is the first room I've worked for a while that didn't have a blackboard, so we will have to make do with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the ed biz. Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here:
342 minus 173. (*)

etc.

Not the end of the world as one can currently find the recordings on line, but, still, for me, his intros were such an integral part/framing of each of the songs.

(*) Strangely enough, the transcription does include Lehrer's spoken bridge where he explains that the original problem was actually to be solved in base(8).
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:03 PM on October 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Nobody has yet mentioned Vatican Rag so I will. As a nice Catholic girl fed up with Catechism classes, I just loved it, and still know all the words.
posted by mermayd at 7:50 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

With one of the very best Tom Lehrer rhymes ever:
"There the guy who's got religion'll/Tell you if your sin's original"
I clicked through to see the tempo marking - it is "Ecumenically". (I was hoping it would be "Canonically".)
posted by Daily Alice at 9:00 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh I loved the Vatican Rag, even though as a vague Lutheran it was all foreign to me. But the rhymes are all incredible. That whole verse deserves reposting.

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!
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:21 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Tom Lehrer is a gem!
posted by samh at 6:25 PM on October 23, 2020 [1 favorite]