The Old Dope Peddler

"When the shades of night

are falling,

Comes a fellow everyone knows.

It's the old dope peddler,

Spreading joy wherever he goes."

Should you chance to hear this sugarcoated vitriol, rendered by a rather threadbare tenor voice with an equally threadbare piano accompaniment, you'll know that Tom Lehrer is loose again.

Be warned: this is a dangerous man, a shatterer of illusions, a mocker of traditions, a cruel deflater of our most jealously guarded shams and sentimentalities. This is, in short, that most feared of human fiends: a satirist.

Tom Lehrer writes songs. He writes the words and he writes the music. The music is conventional and undistinctive.

The words are distinctive and unconventional. They are also macabre, outrageous, irreverent and very funny.

Sample, for instance, his distorted view of the Boy Scouts' famous motto:

"If you're looking for adventure

of a new and different kind

And you come upon a Girl Scout

who is similarly inclined,

Don't be nervous, don't be flustered,

don't be scared:

Be prepared!"

Or the above-quoted ballad of The Old Dope Peddler, which Lehrer dedicated to "that member of the community who goes modestly and inconspicuously about his job of spreading happiness among his fellow citizens, but who has never been properly recognized in song."

Recognizing in song the more repellent aspects of our society is the one consuming passion of Lehrer's life. Biographical information about him is highly suspect. His own thumbnose sketch of himself is an inextricably woven tapestry of fact and fiction: according to that document, he was raised by a yak, has been deified by the natives of Madagascar, collects shrunken heads, rolls drunks (fact), is a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude M. A. from Harvard University and a research mathematician for industry and national defense (fiction).

Most of Lehrer's songs were written while he was serving time at Harvard as a student and later as a teacher. The university, in fact, provided the inspiration for one of his best numbers, Fight Fiercely, Harvard. "Most football fight songs," says Lehrer, "have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth and violent. This one is rather dainty." And so it is ("How we shall celebrate our victory, We shall invite the whole team up for tea. How jolly!").

Gradually, the insidious charm, of his songs began to spread, like a malignant fungus, from Harvard's cloistered halls to more profane environs such as television studios and night clubs. For the tender sensibilities of the TV audience, Lehrer confined himself to amusing but relatively innocent stuff, like his disgustingly gemütlich bit of pseudo-Strauss, The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz ("Your lips were like wine, if you'll pardon the simile; The music was lovely and quite Rudolf Frimly.").

But night clubs like The Blue Angel offered him wider scope. There he could pull all the stops and no punches, bayoneting pet hates with a Deep-South-type song titled I Wanna Go Back to Dixie ("Old times there are not forgotten, Whuppin' slaves and sellin' cotton.") and kicking the props out from under such sacrosanct institutions as the old home town (his is peopled by prostitutes, perverts and guys who monogram their wives with knives), Christmas ("Hark the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things.") and, in one fell swoop, security restrictions, nuclear tests and the perennial cowboy ballad ("Mid the yuccas and the thistles, I'll watch the guided missiles, While the old F.B.I. watches me.").

Before long an LP record of his songs was released, and soon after the words and music became available in the hardbound Tom Lehrer Song Book (Crown Publishers, $2.00). The advantage of Lehrer's book over his record, according to Al Capp in the book's introduction, "is that you are spared his voice." Capp is kidding (we think) but he has a point, for Lehrer the songwriter is admittedly a cut above Lehrer the singer. But this vocal deficiency is well balanced by the fact that Lehrer obviously has a hell of a good time singing his own songs.

The Lehrer voice appeals, for example, to Irving Kolodin, the perceptive music editor of The Saturday Review. Kolodin calls Lehrer's songs "something of a legend" and defines Lehrer himself as "a wandering minstrel with no place to wander." It also appeals to the aforementioned Al Capp, who labels Lehrer "a disillusioned spirit" and adds, "let us all be grateful for that."

The appalling (as well as appealing) thing about Lehrer's humor is that its basic ingredient is nothing more than honesty. Most of us are more or less aware of Freudian death-wishes, social injustice, murder, atomic peril and suchlike unpleasantries, and some of us even give them a little thought now and then. Few of us, however, want to hear about them in our songs. When the troubadour comes to cheer our leisure hour, we bid him sing of joy and youth and love that never dies. But Tom Lehrer is a troubadour of a different breed. He may sing "I hold your hand in mine, dear, I press it to my lips," but we soon discover to our horror that the hand is dismembered. And when he warbles a candid ditty of romance like When You Are Old And Gray, we are first revolted and then grudgingly forced to admit its bitter truth:

"Your teeth will start to go, dear,

Your waist will start to spread.

In twenty years or so, dear,

I'll wish that you were dead."

More important than Lehrer's gruesome honesty is the legerdemain by which he makes us laugh while he rubs our noses in life's more unsavory messes. For though the laughter may at times be slightly hollow, its very existence is a thing for both rejoicing and wonder.

However, there may be a simple explanation for the Lehrer magic. After. all, he was raised by a yak. Therein may lie the answer.