WACKY WEDNESDAY: Happy Birthday (in Advance) Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer, satirist, math professor and high-ranking "sicknik" (at least according to Time magazine) turns 87 tomorrow.

Known for his tinkling piano and a poisoned mind, Lehrer hasn't been active in the music world for decades, but during his brief heyday he was one of the musical heroes of the grim, gray '50s.

Behind his piano in  a jacket, tie and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked like the ultimate square. And yet he was singing subversive themes about nuclear bombs, lynching, pollution, the military .. and poisoning pigeons in the park. And unlike some of the people he lampooned in his song "Folk Song Army," he pulled it off without sounding self-righteous.

I've enjoyed Lehrer's music for years, but I like him even more since reading what Time magazine had written about him  -- as related in an excellent profile published last year in BuzzFeed by editor-in-chief Ben Smith.

In July 1959, Time featured Lehrer alongside Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl as the avatars of a new “sick” comedy, which it played as the symptom of a sick society. “What the sickniks dispense is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world,” the magazine wrote.

That's great company to be in, Lenny, Mort and Charles Addams too. Damn, I want to be a sicknik!

So go read Smith's article and enjoy this sampler of Leher tunes below. Happy birthday, Tom!

It's probably a good thing that PETA wasn't around when Leher recorded this one



And here's one about Los Alamos -- where Lehrer once worked for "the old AEC.".

This next one was written decades before 50 Shades of Grey,



As for the next one: WHAT KIND OF MESSAGE DOES THIS SEND TO THE CHILDREN?



Not many singers have covered Tom Lehrer songs. But one who did was Barbara Manning in the late 1990s. Backed by members of Calexico, she played with Leher's melody, bringing out all the latent creepiness and wisely omitted the first and last verse's of Leher's song, the ones that basically wink and tell listeners the whole thing is a joke. With her wide-eyed delivery, Manning creates something that is no longer a clever goof, but something that could be ripped from today's headlines..

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, April 5, 2015 
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THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, April 3, 2015 
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Let's Celebrate Lead Belly

Lead Belly in Life magazine, April 1937.

Just 78 years ago this month, Life magazine did a three-page spread on Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. who was well on his way to becoming one of the titans of 20th Century music.

There was a full-color picture, of the barefoot singer in overalls, sitting on grain sacks and playing guitar, his mouth wide open in song.

O.K., so the rustic image was pretty hokey. But what was really shocking about the Life article was the headline:

Lead Belly - Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.

And just so we're clear, this was Life magazine. the epitome of mainstream American publications, not some KKK hate pamphlet.

And part of the photo spread was a black and white close-up of Lead Belly's hands playing a guitar. The caption: "These hands once killed a man."

Again, this wasn't the Police Gazette, it was Life magazine!

To say the least, Lead Belly deserved better.

I'm not going to go into his whole life story here. If you're not familiar with the man and his music, Check out the documentary Legend of Lead Belly, which will be airing on the Smithsonian channel later this month. (Or watch it right now, free, HERE)

It's sad that Lead Belly never lived to see it --  he died in  1949 at the age of 61 -- but through the years he really has gained a tremendous degree of respectability.

Like so many true avatars of American music, Lead Belly never sold many records himself. His biggest "hits' -- like "Goodnight Irene," "Midnight Special," "Rock Island Line," "Gallis Pole" (redone by Led Zeppelin as "Gallows Pole" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (made famous by Nirvana) were all done by other singers. Musicians from Judy Garland to Nirvana have recorded Leadbelly songs.

With his 12-string guitar (and sometimes piano or even accordion) He sang sweet love songs; work songs; dirty blues; raw versions of pop songs; outlaw ballads; story songs retelling the news of the day; protest songs like "Bourgeois Blues"; cowboy famtasies and more.

Perhaps the cruelest irony was that "Goodnight Irene" became hugely popular -- the year after he died. The folk group called The Weavers was the best-known cover, but Frank Sinatra, Ernest Tubb and countless others covered it too.

Last month, Smithsonian Folkways released a five disc collection called Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection featuring five hours of music including 16 unreleased tracks. It's got most of his better-known tunes plus a bunch of obscurities. There's even a recording of a radio show in which Lead Belly starts singing along with a Bessie Smith song.

Leadbelly's most famous tunes are so much a part of our collective musical wiring, it's the less-famous ones I've been enjoying the most since the Smithsonian collection. So I'm going to embed a few of the great obscurities here.

Bob Dylan, as a horny teen, wrote a song for Brigitte Bardot. Lead Belly wrote this one for a movie sex symbol of his day.



Here's a more serious song, the story of nine Black teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Alabama. They were found guilty by (you guessed it) an all-white juries, The story of the Scottsboro Boys is widely considered an astonishing miscarriage of justice. Lead Belly thought so too. ("Stay woke," Lead Belly warned in the interview following the song)


 I think this song was on the first Lead Belly record I ever heard. My high school friend Paul Songer had it on some album and it made me an instant Lead Belly fan.



And here's one for the iddies-kay.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: A Twisted Rock 'n' Roll Prank

HeWhoCannotBeNamed

Here's a Wacky Wednesday April Fool's Day tribute to one of the craziest rock 'n' roll pranks of all time.

It involves a punk band called The Dwarves and their guitarist known as HeWhoCannotBeNamed.

In April of 1993 (I can't swear that the date was April 1, but the holiday was bound to have had something to do with this) The Dwarves announced that HeWho had been stabbed to death in a barroom fight in Philadelphia.

The horror! Dying in Philly!

But it turned out to be a little joke.

Their label at the time SubPop, was not amused.

Click to enlarge 

The label issued a press release on June 23, 1993, saying that Dwarves vocalist Blag Dahlia had provided the label "with detailed, repeated and convincing evidence that Hewho had been killed in what appeared to be  an anonymous `bar fight' in Philadelphia last April, a few months following their winter European tour.

I'm still not sure what an "anonymous" bar fight is, but let's continue:

"The information was even detailed enough to have included an address to send flowers and condolences, for which we received a thank-you card from Hewho's `family' in Wisconsin. ...

"When we discovered it was a hoax, we accepted Blag's defense that it was a 'punk rock thing to do,  in keeping with the spirit of the band, a simple experiment in media exploitation, and at very least a long-overdue spark of something remotely interesting in a supposedly `alternative' music scene that , as recently evidenced by Lollapalooza, has become as staid, corporate and boring as the institutions it originally sought to shatter.

"While all of the aforementioned may be true, it is also true that the whole ordeal unforgivably overstepped the bounds of media manipulation and self-promotion. ...[it's] an inexcusable exploitation and trivialization of death itself."

The release went on to mention two musicians who actually had recently died "whose deaths were most readily associated with the purported death of HeWhoCannotBeNamed. ... the obvious fact remains that everyone has been affected by death, and crass exploitation of these emotions in what essentially amounts to commercialism is inhuman."

But this public upbraiding wasn't the only consequence of the hoax. In the same press release, SubPop announced that the upcoming Dwaves album Sugarfix would be the last one on the label. And it was.

At that point it was too late to change the artwork in the CD booklet, which had a black-and-white photo of the masked guitarist with the inscription "He Who Cannot Be Named 1972-1993."

If that birthdate is more trustworthy than the death date. he would have been 20 or 21 when all this came down.

And the album ended with a song that would have looked prophetic had the beans not been spilled on the hoax. It was called "Wish That I Was Dead." The liner notes said that was for Del Shannon, whose suicide in 1990 was not a hoax.

Asked about the death prank in Eric Davidson's (New Bomb Turks) 2010 book We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 Blag said, "Well, HeWho transcended life and death, he is a great figure and he fucking dies for your sins. I told them that at SubPop. How was I supposed to know he would rematerialize? Meanwhile, they had no sense of humor about it ..."

So you decide: was this good rock 'n' roll fun or a sick example of bad taste? But, as Charlie the Tuna might say, do you want rock 'n' roll with good taste or rock 'n' roll that tastes good?

Whatever, everyone survived The Dwarves' little prank. Subpop's still around, The Dwarves are still around ...



Hewho's still in the band, though he's done some solo stuff as well ...



And you can still find this magic song:



(Thanks to FLICKR member warrenjabali for preserving the SubPop press release)